Religion Debates and Discussions

I don't know. It's just my interpretation of those words.

 

but he will still burn cities down to the ground for sinning even though, as you say,

stuff you saying aint adding up buddy.

 

Why is the idea that our existence is one in a million such a turn off for you?

If you'll allow me to wax philosophic for a moment:

Personally I think it's amazing that an 'accident' of biology (a term I hate) has lead to a species that can overcome the very boundries of the rock it began on, overcome such adversity that our lifespans have increased exponentially, and created such technologies that allow more and more of our kind to turn to artistic expression and creativity.

The idea that we were put on this rock to serve the man who created us or else we burn forever cheapens and demeans the short existence that we have down to a constant grovelling and recognition that we are not worthy. It makes humanity nothing more than a vassal who must constantly watch what he does and says so as not to offend the almighty dude in the sky or else we are tortured forever for not being absolutely repentant and sorry.

Humanity is free to create, to experience, to explore, to destroy, to fail, to learn. We do it despite not ostensibly having any reason to do so. We create our own reasons for existence, and it gives us purpose. And it's beautiful.


@Gehenna_Beam
We covered this already but atheism is not a religion.

Saying atheism is a religion is like saying 'Not collecting stamps' is a hobby. Even an absolute belief that there is no god is not a religion. A religion is a belief in a superhuman power or a system of belief. Holding the belief that there is no god is not a system of belief as there is no system to it.

And once again, atheism is a lack of a belief in a god or gods. You yourself are atheistic towards Zeus or Odin because you lack a belief in those gods. The difference between yourself and us is that we just go one god further.

Actually to be fair, if the Christian god DID exist, it would suck.

Think about it, if this guy DOES exist then it means there really IS some omnipotent dude watching me jack it and being like 'well he didn't read my afwul book and believe it; better start up the everlasting torture!" That's pretty damn sucky I'd say.

You... uh... realize the Bible was written by humans... right?

'cause the sciences that conflict with the bible are the same sciences that let you use your internet... unless you think that God's creating the Wi-Fi and the satellites orbiting the Earth that's round.

At any rate, you've gone full Ken Ham. Unless anyone else wants to put up some points, you're pretty clearly going full brick wall, and I'm not gonna smash my head any more.

Nah, lusting over another man's wife is a sin.
P. sure that means at the very least poppin' one, if you even need to go far. Hell, 'lusting' is so terribly vague that it could mean that you think that she's pretty and BAM! eternal torture. Sorry, nothing God could do.

 

By this logic you also despise Gehenna. Not important I suppose.

Oh goodness just calm down. You are getting worked up as if Gehenna was attacking you or something.

You might want to consider taking a break from this thread, clearly, it is affecting your rational side.

 

If he did that, he would have to admit to being wrong /shrug

But how could "god's help" fix a "liberal snowflake" *cringe*?

And you were questioning the existence of atoms?

"As of 2010, Christianity was by far the world's largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, nearly a third (31 percent) of all 6.9 billion people on Earth," the Pew report says. "Islam was second, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23 percent of the global population." Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...will-surpass-christians-this-century-pew-says @Gehenna_Beam, that's what a credible source looks like.

 

I prefer "the army of logic"

 

@ObamaTheReptile has already covered this with numerous verifiable sources.

 

I have?
I mean, I could, but I don't think I did

 

Well, let's start with your first question "How do you know God exists?" There are many many many different ways to approach this but I understand you don't believe in the Bible's infallibility so I won't take that approach.

Do you know what a fundamental constant is (also known as a physical constant)? Simply put, it is a value that is never changing and can never change according to the laws of physics. Some examples are the speed of light in a vacuum, gravitational constant, elementary charge, etc...Why are these values constant? Well for starters they are the only values that can work. Scientists, mostly physicists mind you, have changed the values just slightly to see what would happen, and do you know what happened? Life could not happen. An example being gravity. “Gravity is roughly 10 39th (power) times weaker than electromagnetism. If gravity had been 10 33rd (power) times weaker than electromagnetism, stars would be a billion times less massive and would and would burn a million times faster.”

Another example.
“A stronger nuclear strong force (by as little as 2 percent) would have prevented the formation of protons –yielding a universe without atoms. Decreasing it by 5 percent would have given us a universe without stars.”

The laws of physics do not change, and I would be inclined to say that these laws were created by the "big bang" or whatever. What am I trying to prove with this? That there is order to the universe. These constants are perfect. If they were altered in any way then life would not be possible. Life was not some random happening, but a pre-planned design. I am not going to push the point of God yet, but to try and show that we are not some random happening like some have stated in this thread.

Here is some optional read for you

“All that we see in the universe of observation and fact, as opposed to the mental state of a scenario and supposition remains unexplained. And even in its supposedly first second the universe itself is acausal. That is to say, the universe has to know in advance what it is going to be before it knows how to start itself. For in accordance with the Big Bang Theory, for instance, at a time of 10 to the -43rd (power) seconds the universe has to know how many types of neutrino there are going to be at a time of 1 second. This is so in order that it starts off expanding at the right rate to fit the eventual number of neutrino.”

-Fred Hoyle

 

I like the use of the "word" "antitheist" because it's a pretty good description of what a lot of people see all of atheism as. Antitheism would be denial of gods or some higher power, and atheism would be simply not believing in it. I think I mentioned the definition of atheism earlier, and you did too. It's just having no religious beliefs. "A-" meaning "not" and "-theism" meaning "religion." No religion. Antitheism, on the other hand would be "anti-" meaning "against," and "-theism" meaning "religion," making the whole word mean "against religion."
Hopefully I've cleared up some confusion.

I think you mean "the speed of light in a vacuum." It's important to distinguish that, because light moves at different speeds through different mediums, like sound. Light moves slower through things like diamond (where it moves at 40% the speed of light in a vacuum).

 

Woops hold on

Sorry! I fixed the error

 

Here's a fun question: How would we know if the values were different?
We wouldn't, because life wouldn't exist. To say that the existence of life is proof of a higher power is completely fallacious, because it's not proof of anything. Let's say that, for the sake of argument, gravity were weaker than it is in this universe. If that were the case, and stars were much smaller than they are now, and so many things were different, so much so that life couldn't exist, how could we tell? If there's one way life could exist, it is inevitable that the life that observes it is in those conditions, because if it weren't it wouldn't be alive. This kind of circular reasoning goes nowhere and should not be considered evidence for either side.
Plus, there is certainly more than one set of universal constants that could support life, albeit not life we might recognize as alive.

This is something that, for me, is very hard to express through words, so if I'm coming across like a blabbering idiot, I can try again.

 

Okay, so I have a question for you. If so many people in the world believe that there is some form of a higher being then what makes you think that they are wrong while Atheists are right? Are all the religious blind followers then?

The gravity example was a smaller example that I thought was easier to understand, however, there are other equations that when changed would completely remove the possibility of life. I'm finding it a little difficult to grasp what you mean by circular reasoning because from what I can tell your arguments are going a circular route. We know we are alive, and the second equation that was altered showed that stars could not exist because of an increase in nuclear force.

To say that we as humans do not know if these equations have been altered already is a very vague way to debate this point. I took real analytical evidence that showed how things would be drastically different if these constants were changed. You took the route by saying how the laws of physics could already be broken. They are called constants for a reason.

 

Centuries of scientific progress that directly contradicts and disproves many aspects of religion. Humanity is constantly discovering or describing new things that contradict the Bible directly, like evolution, carbon dating (Earth's age), etc.
A question just as logical is this: If so many people accept the evidence provided against religion/for atheism, what makes you think that they are wrong? Are all atheists blind followers?

I figured I wouldn't get my point across.

All I was trying to say was that you can't call the universe's constants evidence for higher power, because the only scenario in which we'd exist to think about this stuff is one where the universe was balanced in such a way that life can exist.
It's like using the fact that you survived in the womb evidence for higher power. You'd only know you survived if you survived, and so you can't use it as evidence. There are plenty of theories about other universes with different laws of physics, and we were only a possibility in one of them. We'd never know that we weren't a possibility in some of them if we weren't a possibility in one of them.