Science vs Religion

[Figment]

Atheists don't question the right of someone to believe what they want. They question the logic behind it and on a debate forum, they will debate.

[Effective]

Originally Posted by Malorn

Religion gets into trouble when it is taken too literally and tries to refute proper science and observation. Science gets into trouble when Athiests try to use science as a weapon against the religious in their own modern crusade.

The only reason atheists do that, is because religion has been taking their texts literally for a very long time, and then persecuting those who don't believe the same way. Hatred against atheists is still strong in the US. And with people like Rick Santorum having so much power, it's scary to be an atheist in heavily conservative christian areas.

[Warborn]

The bigger point is that atheism has nothing to do with science. Being an atheist doesn't mean you're an advocate of science. It just means you don't believe there's a god or gods. Why someone believes that, or what they believe instead, is not a part of the term.

[Traak]

Originally Posted by Figment

Atheists don't question the right of someone to believe what they want. They question the logic behind it and on a debate forum, they will debate.

Actually, that is patently false. These vaunted open-minded atheists that you claim to believe exist attack others with character assaults, gossip, and libel, slinging around words like "bigot" at anyone who doesn't bow down to their beliefs, especially when it comes to homosexuality.

[Traak]

Originally Posted by MadPenguin

I refuse to even have a shred of respect for, let alone obey, any parent who punishes with spanking or stern words those who refuse to accept his or her parental authority, this is the ultimate in dictatorship. What can i say, im a man of principles.

If police went round arresting and imprisoning, and subjecting some to the death penalty people who wouldn't obey laws, even someone like me can see police are evil. But when religion enters the equation, so many people such as myself are blinded and cant see the wrong doing there.

I altered that quote to demonstrate how irrational it is to be mad at God because you choose to go to hell.

[Baneblade]

Originally Posted by Traak

I altered that quote to demonstrate how irrational it is to be mad at God because you choose to go to hell.

It's your hell, you go to it.

[Traak]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

Which would all be perfectly fine if people from group B didn't try to push their beliefs onto group A with legislation.

You mean the way group B is trying and succeeding in pushing their beliefs on group A with legislation? Just as it is legal in some states to have gay marriage, which is an oxymoron, in some states it is legal to have sex with animals.

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

Everyone thinks murder is bad and should be against the law. But what groups are against gay marriage? I think we all know that.

I don't know an exact tally of the beliefs of everyone who is against homosexual pseudo-marriage, but it has been constitutionally rejected in a growing number of states, and Christians are a part of it.

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

Why can't I buy beer on sunday in some states? Why is prostitution illegal, gambling illegal, drugs illegal? In some parts of the world women can't show their faces or heads. Here they just can't show their chest. Different body part, same religious nonsense.

Funny. So anything that smacks of any kind of morality you think should be banned? If that kind of system of power is of interest, live in a penitentiary. You will find, in addition, to people of like mind to yourself, plenty of audience to hear your beliefs in a society that has too much morality thrown at it, who will probably agree with you.

[Traak]

Originally Posted by Sobekeus

It's your hell, you go to it.

It isn't my hell. I don't have one. There is one that exists, but I have no plans on being there.

[Baneblade]

Well, according to the good book, all hell actually is is eternity without god.

So to an atheist, its eternal life the way they already exist.

[Traak]

Originally Posted by Figment

What he said

The issue that I have been dealing with, primarily, is that everyone believes stuff that is written by others that, for the most part he has never met, and are long since dead.

Christians largely believe God as laid out in the Bible. Non-Christians believe other stuff. But almost every single bit of it was written by others.

Calling the writings of YOUR favorite group or person more valid because they are supposedly more "scientific?" Is not necessarily valid. You say there is evidence that God does not exist. I have experiences that prove he does. I don't care whether you believe he exists. It isn't really the issue on which I've been focusing.

The main thing I have emphasized lately is that we all believe what others have told us. Most people, especially non-Christians, don't realize that that is how they are living their life, on belief. They believe a chair will support them if they have never been in the same country as that chair before arriving and sitting on it.

You believe in the people that espouse evolution and whatever, and I believe in God to whom such issues aren't even primary. The main issue with God is "Believe that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead and call him your Lord." That we don't obsess over science is not really important, because our moral system doesn't justify stuff like racism with evolution, etc. I don't murder because it is wrong, morally, not because there is some scientific justification for it.

I don't believe any race is "more evolved" (thus blacks are inferior) like your precious Charles Darwin because God doesn't believe it. Whether evolution is real or not is not the central issue. Life is far more concrete when your morals aren't based on your own convenience and what is more monetarily profitable. I don't have to labor, as some of you do, over questions like "Should I flirt with that married woman? Should I have sex with that girl who has a boyfriend? Should I steal this small thing from this major corporation?" I don't need to. Adultery, fornication, and theft are morally wrong. My decisions are made long before I am in a situation.

But as a non-Christian, the choices must be much harder to justify to yourself, since you don't really subscribe to any universal or concrete system of good and evil. I would hope you would disagree with child sex. But what if they are both 15? Then it's okay in your fluid and unreliable worlds? How about 14? 12? 6? I know, you have your right to pursue whatever you want to in life, because in your worlds, there is no really reliable right and wrong.

But your world is largely defined by the sayings and writings of others. You just subscribe to different "others" than we, the Christians, do.

[Warborn]

Oh, well, you must be writing that from prison then, Traak, because the Bible makes moral assertions which if you followed through on these days, you would be imprisoned for life or possibly executed for.

Christians do not have a concrete "good vs. evil" moral compass. There isn't a Christian around who actually derives his or her morals from the Bible, because the stories from the Bible were written by many men who lived over a very long period of time during the more dark, bloody and brutal of humanity's existence. Our moral sense has long-since outgrown the Bible, such that while mere hundreds of years ago Christians were burning witches, torturing heretics and taking from the poor to build palaces for themselves, we 21st century types look back on those things and know that they were evil deeds performed by wicked men.

And while it isn't apparent as much in the US as elsewhere, soon even the socially retarded stuff about gays and women will become a thing of the past, too. Much of the rest of the civilized world has already moved beyond those topics for the most part, but one day you'll get to see what it's like when acting as if gays don't deserve equal rights is viewed like how people view the KKK. Ignorant, bigoted, hateful. The Bible in a nutshell, I guess.

[Effective]

[Figment]

Originally Posted by Traak

Actually, that is patently false. These vaunted open-minded atheists that you claim to believe exist attack others with character assaults, gossip, and libel, slinging around words like "bigot" at anyone who doesn't bow down to their beliefs, especially when it comes to homosexuality.

Traak, you simply are a bigot because you fit the definition. You may not consider yourself a bigot, but every other person here, including most the other christians that responded to you, does. And yes, your stance of homosexuality is bigoted.

Think about it. That has nothing to do with being an atheist, it's everything to do with you having prejudices and being judgmental about a group of people based on them being "sinful" by a definition you got out of a stone age book. Don't judge lest you be judged yourself, remember? We're judging you as you are others and you simply don't like the outcome, like we don't like your judgment.

You've consistently used character assaults yourself in every debate I've seen you in. In fact, this post again is a character assault on - as usual - a large generalised group, this time atheists. When we "attack" though, it's because we provide an argumentation to why something is silly.


Frankly, that's perfectly fine if you have a solid reason to back up why something is silly and frankly, it's simply this easy to argue against "faith" based religion with no actual experiments or other solid evidence to back up any claims, while these claims are of epic proportions and typically should have left a lot of evidence in the ground and space. Yet it does not, not even remotely.

Hence you should just prepare to lose every fact based debate and feel like you're being attacked. If you are unprepared or unwilling to put your faith to scrutiny, don't post. You can put my assertions to scrutiny as much as you'd like, problem is, you have no fact based argumentation, but are 100% reliable on hearsay (Bible) from a single source, which contains lots and lots of blatant errors, plot holes, omissions, inconsistencies and worst of all, is completely based on assumptions from a stone age - iron age people with a severe lack of understanding of even basic natural phenomena.

If we're just thinking in untested assertions, you can win any debate you want, but it won't ever convince anyone who has not already chosen to be religious so the circle argumentation "makes sense".


In the same sense that I do not believe Hercules to have placed the rock of Gibraltar because of geology and simply because humans cannot have that much strength, I don't believe Jesus walked on water or turned water into wine. Since I can show that no man can walk on water and that wine consists of completely different molecular make up and you claim someone can the burden of proof lies with you, it's you who has to prove your claim. If you can't and even refuse to, who are you to deny us the right to call you silly or self-delusional, much like you would call the stories about Hercules a fairy tale?

[Figment]

Originally Posted by Traak

You mean the way group B is trying and succeeding in pushing their beliefs on group A with legislation? Just as it is legal in some states to have gay marriage, which is an oxymoron, in some states it is legal to have sex with animals.

How is allowing gay marriage for others impeding on your personal freedoms, compared to NOT allowing gay marriage being an impediment on the freedom of these individuals?

What fundamental right of yours is being stripped from you? The right to deny others the freedom of living together in the way they want to?

And did you really just compare homosexuality (voluntary sex between two adults of same sex) with beastiality (sex with an animal which cannot protest)? And I recall you making an earlier comparison to pedophilia, where you argued that that would be allowed as well because of some "inner child", while not at all listening to the type of argumentation being used.

Can't you really imagine that there are sensible reasons for not condoning the latter two types? Like it's sensible to not condone pedophilia, because the child (one of the two parties involved) could not protect itself, can often not even expres itself, is easily abused and too trusting and all in all is absolutely not ready for sex? In that sense, pedophilia can be compared to beastiality, because the animal cannot speak for itself or do much about it, next to incredible hygienic issues.

Your biases and statements such as the above is what makes you bigoted. You judge people and actually hate them for it, it is quite clear you hate atheists or at the very least have an unhealthy dislike of them, like you have with some other things that "don't suit you".

You reason that if someone else gets more freedoms to live their lives in their own way and make their own choices, this is somehow bad. Yet whenever it suits you, you demand any rights to be in place or laws to be removed. How very convenient of you.


How is for instance teaching evolution in class properly - without it being done in the Intelligent Design variant - an infringement of fundamental rights? Creationism is a fundamental part of a religion, meaning due to seperation of state and church, the state should not obligate people to learn about any particular faith based religion as truth. That is a logical argument to protect people from the state having a bias for any religion.

Creationism can be informed about in sunday school, mosques or any religion class. Hell, as long as other religions are represented as well, in history class. For instance, teaching about the pantheon gods in Latin and Greek class is fundamentally needed to understand the history of these people. Saying the pantheon gods would be real would however impinge on personal freedom. In that sense, it's fine to teach about christianity, islam and judism in general in relation to society or history classes, but none of these should ever be taught as a fundamental truth, because then the government would support indoctrination by a specific religion.

Evolution however, is an incredibly important scientific concept and should be taught in biology classes, as biology is a science class. If you look at those argueing against evolution for instance, the ignorance is of epic proportions. How can you argue against something you don't know anything about? For us atheists it's easy: we just have to read your book and point out the inconsistencies.

Even easier is the skeptic's annotated bible, which points out flaws and the people of the religions under scrutiny get a chance to discuss and explain flaws.

Similarly, I would suggest visiting http://www.talkorigins.org for any question you may have on evolution, where every claim and statement made by evolution is backed up by physical evidence and real world examples.

I've heard you go on about faith and hearsay continuously, but this is not hearsay. I check the evidence provided as much as I can and in contrast to faith based religions, where 0% is consistent, with the sciences so far the fast majority has been proven consistent.

As a BSc in Aerospace Engineering, I've worked with countless physics and their applications and was able to verify or derive everything personally. With derivation, I mean that when I calculate something based on my own observations, I get the exact - EXACT - same result as someone else and the model fits completely with observations in the real world.

That is something I cannot say for faith.

I don't know an exact tally of the beliefs of everyone who is against homosexual pseudo-marriage, but it has been constitutionally rejected in a growing number of states, and Christians are a part of it.

If it's a majority vote and the majority is baptist conservative christian, well yeah. Then you're pushing your beliefs on others.

Funny. So anything that smacks of any kind of morality you think should be banned? If that kind of system of power is of interest, live in a penitentiary. You will find, in addition, to people of like mind to yourself, plenty of audience to hear your beliefs in a society that has too much morality thrown at it, who will probably agree with you.

Monopolising morality again, are we?

[Malorn]

Meh.