Religion Debates and Discussions

I don't know, I think mine would have to be more direct as I wouldn't interpret that as a sign from God myself.

As a side note, I'm glad to hear this has improved your life. I do remember you from a long time ago and you definetly acted different towards others then.

 

Maybe he didn't exist in the first place. ; this is the argument i'm using to refute that.
But whatever, believe what you believe if it makes you happy. I don't really know, but we might never find out whether God really exists.

 

As a metaphor it's extreme, but as a comparison it does it's job. The issue is that the actual implications of an eternal torture are, by the definition of eternal, the most horrible possible outcome. You are torturing someone... forever. Infinite pain, with no respite.

As a comparison to anything we have on the world, infinite torture has no equal, and sometimes, to get a point across, a point has to be extreme. Again, the comparison is put into the context of (God could stop it, God knows about it, God cares about the person it's happening to; yet God doesn't stop it simply because you don't love him. Therefore, God is willing to allow awful things to happen in order to be worshipped.)
All you have to do is replace 'it' with infinite torture and you have an infinitely evil God.

As for the second point, the whole point of God is that he can do anything.

• God is Omnipotent in Creation
  Isaiah 44:24 – “This is what the LORD says—your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb: I am the LORD, the Maker of all things, who stretches out the heavens, who spreads out the earth by myself.”
  
  
• God is Omnipotent in Salvation
  Jude 24-25– “To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy—to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.”
  
  
• God is Omnipotent in the Resurrection
  John 10:17-18 – “The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
  
  
• God is Omnipotent in Understanding
  Psalm 147:5 – “Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit.”

The issue is, a God who can do anything and does not do things that would avert suffering is willing to allow suffering to occur, and anyone willing to allow suffering (which again, on the scale of eternal and infinite torture). He's the maker of ALL THINGS (hell included in ALL or else he's not the maker of all things and not God) and he's able to keep you from stumbling (yet you can still 'stumble' headfirst into hell if you don't love him forever) He's able to resurrect people (but only if they're him, and only after he dies to appease himself) and his understanding has no limit (except for, you know, his understanding of anyone who doesn't love him evidently).

He's set up as the perfect creator of everything who loves us all; yet awful things exist and he only loves us if we love him back.

He's absolutely a psychopath.

 

No. They truly thought we were at the centre of the universe. Look up Galileo Galilei and Copernicus.

Rigorous scientific testing presents us with the standard particle model of physics shows that the higgs boson must exist for it to work. It's a bit like using deduction reasoning. From this (and other particle physics), they theorised that a massive reaction must have occurred from the beginning of the universe. It's still a theory to find out, though.

About evolution, scientists have tested that genes do have the potential to mutate into something that adapts to their environment (natural selection). If life works like this today, why not in the prehistoric eras?
Whilst on the other hand- God was theorised by the bible. I don't know about you, but i don't trust underdeveloped information from 2016+ years ago.
You might argue that 2000 years from now, they'll laugh at us and not believe evolution like the way people sees the bible. But we're about science here. It can be tested at any time, if future people used science to test evolution, they might reach the same results as us.

 

You mistake me, I don't disbelieve in Evolution. I was only using my sarcastic comment to emphasize that he himself did not have the type of visual data supporting himself that he was requesting from us.

 

In case you were unaware that humans have, in fact, directly observed and measured evolution, and have found physical evidence of the big bang, here's some links.
Evolution:
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/23/7899
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/100201_speciation
If you're interested, I'd recommend reading into the peppered moth as well.
All three of these are clear examples of changes in species over time, and have been directly observed and analyzed by humans.

Big Bang:
https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_tests_cmb.html
https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-powered-the-big-bang
A lot of this stuff is really interesting to me, and I'd thoroughly recommend reading more into it like I've been meaning to myself.

Science isn't a bunch of ideas some people came up with, it's all directly observable and inducted/deducted through measurements and reason. To say that we have "no observations" of such fundamental things as the Big Bang and evolution would need some serious backing up and proofs. More than just the statement.

 

You are right and wrong when you say that God could stop it, and God knows about it, however, you are completely wrong when you said: "God doesn't stop it simply because you don't love him." He is not a liar and He does not break His promises. I believe he gave everyone free will, which means he can't forcefully stop the person from shooting someone.

You seem to keep getting hung up on the point of pain and suffering in the world. Hell is the complete and absolute absence of God, which is why it is such a terrible place. It's because of the lack of God that makes Hell painful. When we say God created everything good then that means He created everything good. Pain and suffering exists, yes, but he does not abandon those who are stricken with grief. I can not speak for people who have some terrible disease, can you? If not then stop using them as a shield. You do not speak for them as a whole. You make it sound as if that when a child is diagnosed with cancer that God and God alone is at fault. He did not create diseases. You also got the idea of God completely wrong. He is the creator of all good things. He did not create Hell, and he did not create diseases.

Sin caused death and disease, not God. God gave man free will. which means by our choice we sinned. He can not remove the disease in the world without first removing all of mankind, and I think you can see the paradox with that. Instead of letting the pain be meaningless he gives it a use.

If you get anything out of reading this then please remember this. God, no matter how you feel about him, does care about you. You can disbelieve in him, but that won't stop him from watching over you. Not like a boss waiting for you to mess up, but as a companion or a friend ready to help. Here is a poem that helps to show who God is and not how you seem to think of him:

One night I dreamed a dream.
As I was walking along the beach with my Lord.
Across the dark sky flashed scenes from my life.
For each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand,
One belonging to me and one to my Lord.

After the last scene of my life flashed before me,
I looked back at the footprints in the sand.
I noticed that at many times along the path of my life,
especially at the very lowest and saddest times,
there was only one set of footprints.

This really troubled me, so I asked the Lord about it.
"Lord, you said once I decided to follow you,
You'd walk with me all the way.
But I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life,
there was only one set of footprints.
I don't understand why, when I needed You the most, You would leave me."

He whispered, "My precious child, I love you and will never leave you
Never, ever, during your trials and testings.
When you saw only one set of footprints,
It was then that I carried you."

Christianity isn't a bunch of superstitious people who have no proof to their claim . From what I could tell from the context of Globalist's post he was asking for video evidence and interviews, etc... I was merely pointing out that he did not have what he himself was asking for. Not that there isn't any charts, graphs, and other methods to prove its existence.

 

Can I have sources? If I see examples I'll do my best to try and explain them. Obviously I'm not going to be perfect, since there's only so much a high school student can guess at, but I'll try.

What I'm saying is that there is direct evidence of scientific ideas, and what he was saying is that there is no direct evidence of religious ideas. While there are interviews and video evidence for the big bang and evolution, there are no interviews or video tapes of the same sort for religions.

Asking for video as evidence is illogical, because lots of things happen unpredictably (as of yet) like supernovae. We have seen these, but it's incredibly hard to get real video of them, for lots of reasons. They're incredibly hard to predict with the technology and knowledge we currently have. Thus, we have to use wide-field telescopes if we want to see them. This has the advantage of making it far more likely that we see a supernova, but it has the disadvantage of making the images far worse pixel quality, and it often sacrifices other spectra of light. We can't just aim Hubble at a star and wait for it to explode; the chances of actually seeing its supernova are so small as to be entirely negligible. Similar problems exist for many things. There's no video of evolution in humans, because it happens very slowly (called "stasis," where a species has lessening need to adapt to its surroundings, and changes less over time). Much like how it'd be impossible (or very very hard) to get direct video recording of God Himself, regardless of your beliefs, it's impossible as of yet to get direct video of much of Science Itself.

That's why logical thinking is so powerful. Deduction and induction are incredible tools in the real world, because they let us know and predict things that we may not have seen directly. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity was able to predict the existence of gravitational waves long before they had directly been seen. Einstein wasn't shows the theory of relativity by the universe, he and people like him had to make conclusions based on evidence. To say that because something can't be explained by what we know now it is proof of God is an example of an either/or fallacy, where a person oversimplifies a choice to only two possibilities. There are, in reality, many possibilities that aren't God that explain why we don't know or can't explain things.
Here are four:

• We don't have the technology to understand it
• It is very hard to understand, and no one has yet
• We have the technology, but no one has chanced on the evidence in the right way to make certain connections
• It is true, but can't be proven (see Gödel's incompleteness theorem)
• We do know, but whoever is thinking about it doesn't or hasn't heard/read about it

 

1. It doesn't mention the word "God" in both of them.
2. There are many parts of cancer medical scientists do not understand yet. Wait for progression before we call it God's work.

Oh. Sorry, my bad.

 

1. The accident/not an accident debate is I think a very interesting one and while I think an accident is more likely, I'm open to the idea of us being here for a purpose.

2. No, it's not like the Church had all this scientific information and was suppressing it, it was just that they couldn't stand anyone expressing ideas that went against their ideology, even if they were provably true.

3. Yes we would have some very interesting skeletal remains. That would be evidence. Where is the evidence of these miracles? And I don't care if me telling you that the miracles are BS won't change anything, I will continue to tell it to any creationist or other moron until my fingers fall off and my voice box explodes, because it is the truth.

4. If you're going by pure numbers, then yes it's more likely that I'm the crazy one, not everyone else, but we both know that's not how it works. And America IS a democracy lol. Don't know where you got that from... In many instances, the religious have trample all over the non-religious, by virtue of being an overwhelming majority.

5. OH. MY. GOD. Are you really calling me superior and arrogant for asserting that people don't rise from the dead? You know we're not in a zombie movie, right? This is real life? Please let me know whether you're just playing devil's advocate or whether you actually think it happened...

Also here you've just committed a serious false equivalency when it comes to religion and atheism.

a) Atheists don't wage war over religion.
b) It's not a generalisation that most Christians and Muslims believe other people should follow their faith. Their actions based on this vary, but nearly all of them believe it.
c) I'm sorry if I'm being forceful but I'm sitting here trying to tell you that 2+2=4 and I've got Gehenna telling me it doesn't and people like you saying I'm being rude or whatever.
d) Atheists have a right to spread their viewpoint in a way that religious people don't, in my view because we promote free thinking, questioning, and we're not telling anyone to BELIEVE anything, just that they should question the religion that they've been taught. All children are born atheist, it's religion that is forced upon them. You can't FORCE anyone to be atheist without them first being exposed to religious influences.

6. What are these falsities? Which of the following are false?

a) God killed millions? How bout Noah's Ark and the flood.
b) God is jealous? How bout telling us not to love other people more than him,
c) Aslan has killed fewer than God? Yep, that's true.

I'm sorry if it's immature to call retarded behavior retarded, but I don't mince words.

7. NO. NO. Don't tell me what I would think in a certain situation. Believe me when I say this: I am not an atheist because I hate God or I'm biased against him. Can you get it into your head that if I or most other atheists saw a verifiable act of God, we would not be against converting. But religious people seem to think that perfectly ordinary things are "miracles"...

8. Big Bang is far more speculation than something like gravity or evolution. I'd say I'm a hesitant believer in it, because it's the best theory we have, but it's far from being widely accepted, and rightly so. It involves physics and maths I don't think we fully understand. I'm willing to admit that.

And do you want an interview with scientists who have seen evolution occur in bacteria? I'm sure I could find one. If you want to deny evolution, go right ahead, but next time you go to the doctor be sure to ask for antibiotics from the 1950s. Because today we use different antibiotics, because the bacteria have EVOLVED. And Y'know, there's like a billion pieces of other evidence we have of evolution, but whatever. I'm sure that's all fake. Carbon dating is a conspiracy, yada yada yada.

And by the way I'm not so much a denier of the existence of Jesus as the things he did. His signature is irrelevant. Prove to me how a person can make food magically appear, heal people with a touch, rise from the dead, then give me evidence that these things occurred at the time of Jesus. It doesn't have to be ROCK-SOLID evidence, but first prove to me that these things CAN happen and I'll be willing to accept it.

 

I'd like to begin by saying that Daily Mail is hardly a source for information, and should not be treated as such.
Regardless, I'll do my best to explain them, although the articles themselves do a pretty good job.
Link 1:

1. Dietary changes and chemotherapy. "Further research convinced me that it had to be diet-related, and so I adopted the kind of diet predominant in China — low in animal protein, with no dairy produce but lots of fruit, vegetables, nuts and pulses."
2. Successful surgery. "My oncologist said he would operate to remove my ovaries, but that he wasn’t hopeful for me." It's worth noting that in this case, the cancer did come back, many times, and responded to chemotherapy and other drugs used to treat cancers.
   
3. This is the only one that I can't explain. It could have been a misdiagnosis, or she could have been diagnosed with more than she really had (maybe it wasn't the type of cancer that the oncologist thought it was). There are plenty of possibilities out there, including spontaneous remission/regression, which is mentioned in the second link. I also address it there.
4. Also surgery and chemotherapy. "I had surgery to remove the bulk of the tumour, followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy. After the operation, I hired a personal trainer to help me get stronger and — together with my treatment — I slowly started to get better."
   
5. The last bit at the end also went through surgery to remove cancer. "Ten years later she had cancer in her gall bladder, and it was removed. She also underwent a hysterectomy after the cancer was found in her womb."

Link 2:
This article again solves itself. I looked up the first woman's name and found another unreliable source was the first result, but they both agreed that her immune system had dealt with it. The Daily Mail article even goes in-depth about how and why we can test this, and the dangers of doing so. I didn't read much of the article I linked.
The second half of this article seems to be hardly factual. I Googled the name given, and no results about the same case showed up - not even the Daily Mail. Regardless, I did some research. Spontaneous remission, the sudden retreat or improvement in cancer, is what the article said had happened. It's also a thing that happens. It is estimated that around 1 in 60,000 to 100,000 cases of cancer go into spontaneous remission/regression, and while it's very hard to gather data on it, the cases where we do have data suggest that hormonal and immune factors cause it, although because cancers are almost always treated in some way, it's hard to dismiss influence of treatments.
Here's a few more sources if you want to read into it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_remission (reliability is debatable)
http://www.noetic.org/research/projects/spontaneous-remission/faqs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312698/

Because that's not how science works. We can't say that only because we can't explain something, it is proof of God, like I've said. That's an either/or fallacy, and I've already addressed that earlier. Using that logic gets us nowhere. Historically, that's been what people have said. "I can't explain it, it's God." Later, we learn real, repeatable causes behind it, and they don't involve God. It's illogical and fallacious to assume that anything that can't be explain is the work of a divine force. That's not to say that believing in a divine force is terrible or anything, or that "that's what's wrong with society" or any of that. I respect people's beliefs, just so long as they don't try to repeal or reject things that we can observe and identify in the real world.

 

I don't have time right now to debate every point you have, but I thought this one was hilarious enough for me to answer now.
"The United States is a federal republic and a constitutional representative democracy. The "federal" part is one of three basic types of organization of power — unitary, confederal, and federal. Most nations are unitary in nature (local government with a powerful national government)"So no, it is not a full blown Democracy... Here ya go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_republic

No problem! I am glad that you were ready to debate me with strong points and facts.

 

Scientific studies. While they may have done the research for specific reasons, a good report simply states the facts and conclusions that can be drawn from them. Obviously, you shouldn't get all your information from them, but good scientific studies are unbiased.

I don't care about how a news source leans, but the Daily Mail is really clickbaity and prone to exaggeration. Regardless of their reputability, I've already explained the cases they presented, so this really shouldn't be an issue anymore.

I'm not sure what media you've been seeing, but as long as you fact-check and keep your sources straight and viable, the media is only as unreliable as the reader. As with anything, you can't take one article and use it as fact; you need to make sure they're being truthful. See if anyone else has reported on it, and if they have, what they had to say. When I read articles in general, I always try to get some from both sides to get as objective a viewpoint as possible.

It's true that a lot of media coverage is aimed at emotions as opposed to facts, but like I said, looking into more than one article is a great way to get more objective fact than emotion and opinion.

If measurements or observations will never direct us to a God, why should we hold it as a belief so firmly that we're willing to ignore the direct measurements and observations of other things?
In science, once there's a hypothesis, research continues. It's not like people stop trying to get information on something once it's explained. People are still doing research on evolution and gravity, things that are really fundamental to our understanding of the world. I'm sure there are very real scientists doing research on ways to detect a higher power, in the same way that scientists would do research on anything else.
If God has no detectable effect on the world, why should we believe in one? If he does have an effect, we'll be able to detect it and measure it with finite observations, like we have with everything else.
I want to make it clear that, as an atheist, I do not outright reject the idea of higher power. It's bad to have absolute confidence in anything, especially something so fundamental.

If he's made out of energy, he's hardly what the Bible cracks him up to be.

This is a really legitimate question. To me, it seems like much the same question as asking "how did the universe come into existence," so I tend to try to avoid it, because every argument can be used for both sides. That doesn't mean it's not a legitimate question, though, and it shouldn't be totally ignored. I just can't answer it for either side.

Unlike how people rejected the idea of gravity before we understood it so well? Unlike how people rejected and still do reject the idea of global warming because we don't entirely understand it fully? Obviously we want to know everything. That's entirely human, and it's a perfect secular reason for why religion would exist. Religion explains things that we don't know, and it lets us be at ease believing that we understand the world, as opposed to not understanding it.

I don't think that's is silly at all. Haven't you ever wondered about things? When a person with a certain mindset is interested in something, it's really hard for them to get themselves out of it. I know I've experienced this. When I was little, I was incredibly interested by biology. I wanted to understand all the little tiny parts that come together to make everything that's alive. It's still fascinating to be, but I understand that we'll never know absolutely everything. Knowledge is infinite, but humans aren't, like you said. There's too much information even now to be entirely understood by one person, which is why specialized jobs exist. Knowing everything about something is impossible, but at some point one has to accept the information given to them. Advancing knowledge is also imperative, even if we can't know everything, because it can help humanity as a whole. Understanding physics is useful because it allows us to develop more efficient ways of transportation, engineering, etc. Astronomy lets us study the stars for information about the universe we live in, and it can help us find other worlds that we might one day have to visit. Every field has a use in its growth, even if no field can ever truly be entirely complete.

It's not a democracy in the sense that every vote is directly counted, and it's not a direct democracy, but it's a representative democracy. E.G. we elect representatives and they vote for a larger region. There are certainly flaws in the system, but it's not like it's an autocracy or anything. Democracy I feel has shifted in meaning since the creation of the word, because with larger populations comes more problems with true democracy. We can't directly vote on every law and decision, because there are so many people in the U.S. that it would take a very long time for anything to get done. That's why the system of representatives is in place. It speeds up the process. It comes with the downside that we need to have lots of trust in our representatives, because they can vote in a way we don't like, and we end up not getting a say.

Tl;dr the U.S is a democracy in the sense that we have votes and votes are cast, but not in the sense that everyone gets equal and immediate say in all decisions.

 

Just to streamline debate on some key issues, I'd like to give a series of statements and hopefully some of them we can all agree on, and others we can debate. If we all start from the same axioms of logic and reason then I think that'll help.

1. Claims (i.e. God is real) require evidence.

2. Level or amount of evidence required is proportionate to the claim, within reason. If I were to tell you that I am 5 ft 9, that is a perfectly reasonable claim and no evidence to the contrary so you can probably take it at face value and a photo would probably be enough to prove it. But if I were to say I'm a centaur in real life, then even a photo wouldn't convince most people and rightly so. That is an extraordinary claim.

3. All humans are born atheist. Religion is taught. Atheism can only be "taught" if religion has been taught first.

4. Scientific theories/facts that have been rigorously tested thousands of times and are accepted by virtually all scientists and experts should be taken as fact (evolution, old earth, etc.)

5. All scientists are not part of some conspiracy to cover up creationism.

6.

... what

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/democracy

you're not very bright are you

 

bump so I get alerts

 

Agreed. Good idea to keep us all on the same page to eliminate confusion.