May 21, 2011. The date of the Rapture.

Wait... um, yeah.

 

I read page 1, 2 and 45, but skipped the other 42 pages. Looks like it's resting, so I'll not disturb it.

...but I can quote all "10" of them.

 

Thbjr: We're going in circles now. I've already said that science doesn't know everything. Followers of religions seem to think that if science doesn't know everything, then a magical man in the sky must have done it. And then they go on to tell us what that man in the sky wants us to believe and how he wants us to act and what he's going to do with us after we die. And then they kill each other in quarrels over what the man in the sky wants us to believe and do.

I once watched as a Pentecostalist and a Catholic came to blows over the question of works vs faith.

Scientists know that they don't know everything, so they study the world and are constantly learning more and more about it. Followers of religion think they know everything, and are constantly having to retreat as science proves that one after another of their beliefs are rubbish. They believed that thunder was the gods expressing anger, but now we know its the sound made by the electrical discharge from the Van De Graff generator of the clouds; they thought the world stood still and the sun revolved around it; now we know the opposite; they thought the world was six thousand years old; now we know it's four and a half billion, and only a few nut jobs still cling to the six thousand number. One after another their cherished beliefs crumble, but they still insist they know what the man in the sky wants.

Science works: it gives us machines that prove it works, from steam engines to computers. What does religion give us? It gives us excuses to hate each other. Science does not know everything. But it is the only tool we have to learn real stuff, while religion still clings to fairy tales.

 

A prerequisite to learning.

Lacking an important prerequisite to learning

 

And will for some time to come.

Here is my belief: What we believe is how we define ourselves, and challenges to deep down bedrock beliefs amount to a denial of personal existence. If what I believe isn't so, then part of who I am is meaningless. If the belief is core to my being, having it proved wrong is as wrenching as losing an arm. Or a heart.

Education is a relentless fusillade of challenges to beliefs, and at some point the constant tearing down and rebuilding of identity causes a quantum shift in the nature of how we incorporate belief into our identity: we stop identifying with WHAT we believe and reconstitute it as HOW WE COME to believe.

Then having some particular WHAT of belief upset or reshaped or refuted no longer threatens our identity because WHAT is believed is no longer how we define ourselves; the sheer ability to modify or change belief is what forms a lynchpin of identity.

I believe reaching that point is only possible through education (and by education I don't mean just formal school I mean persistent curiosity and intellectual exploration however it is undertaken that never ceases) because the most intuitive thing is to of course build our own identity as a pastiche of WHATs, not HOWs, and it takes a stretch of painful experience to grasp the distinction.

Some get it before the age of 5, others reach 98 and never get it.

Until reaching that point, any and all new knowledge is a potential threat, and, as we see every day in these boards and elsewhere, vigorously resisted.

 

Many exceptions can be found.

Sort of on that note, everyone has faith of some kind....the postulate in geometry that the shortest path between two points is a straight line is an article of faith. Thiests and athiests place their faith in different things.

 

I still don't get the definition of atheism as a form of religion. It's a lack of faith, not another kind of faith.

 

Euclidian geometry is a religion? I've never heard that before. How about the non-Euclidian geometry of spheres, where the shortest distance is a great circle route, and the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180 degrees?

 

Boy, now there is a massive generalization. You should go on a mission trip to Sudan or Uganda to install water purification systems sometime. It might help to open your eyes. Just saying.

 

Oh you mean in a country rich with oil and natural resources but wracked by civil and religious wars?
Do you realise that Southern Sudan was once the food bowl of that region? That was until the government used religion to rule that part of the country. God and religion aren't the problem, it's the manipulative bastards who use it as a tool and the rest of the world's religious leaders do nothing about it because that would be admitting religion is a mind control enterprise.

 

This is sort of like is black, white, or grey a color or not? If you prefer to substitute belief instead of faith, that will work.

To restate, theists and atheists can't prove everything, but lean on some "givens", just like in geometry on that postulate the shortest point between two points is a straight line....call it faith, a given, but it's not proven.

 

Daniel, please put away you broad paint brush. Just because I believe there is ample evidence for a young earth is no reason to classify me or those who agree with me as "nut jobs still cling(ing) to the six thousand number." We creationist, have also been referred to as ignorant, believing in fairy tales and our God as a magic(al) man in this thread. If that is what you believe, fair enough. Posting it as what appears to be all inclusive facts about Christians or Creationist is simply uncalled for. I've read every post in this thread and have yet to see anyone with a viewpoint that differs from yours refer to you or your beliefs, or the founder of those beliefs, with such condescending name calling. So calling all young earther's nut jobs or classifying any group of people as inferior is, IMHO, along the same lines as Hitler's belief and propagation that "... Jews held an inferior status to Aryan Christians (source). And dare I even mention that there are some, possibly even non nut jobs, who believe that Darwin himself wrote his book "On The Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection, on the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" (yes, that's the books full title) as proof of a superior race in a time when slavery, in order to be continued, needed to be justified (source of full title).
Are there nut jobs that call themselves Christian? Certainly and in large numbers. James Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite and many others. If these people were a true representation of Christianity, I would no more to want have anything do with it (Christianity) than you would want to have to do with Atheism if Jared Loughner were true representative of it. ("Classmates noted that Loughner identified as an atheist and was critical of religion". [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Lee_Loughner"]Source[/ame]) If we are absolutely honest, the same misrepresentation of a group, might be said about any group of people when we lump people into groups. So please, tone down the group name calling.
Your experience watching a Catholic and Pentecostal come to blows over ideology, IMHO simply shows that neither were what they claimed to be.
As for you and I going in circles, I agree. But it seems with each circle I find something else we agree upon.

 

Faith, according to Huckleberry Finn, is believing what you know ain't so. Faith, according to most Christians, is belief not based on evidence. Not everybody structures their thinking this way.

Your understanding of geometry is flawed. Geometry is a system of logic that builds on assumptions. Those assumptions are not statements of what is (which would be faith) but rather they are "IF" statements. "If this, then that." And there are many geometries. Theoretically there is an infinite number of geometries since there is no limit to the variety of "IF" statements that can begin the process.

As for the straight line statement in your post, that is characteristic of one particular geometry known as "plane geometry" or "Euclidian geometry." The geometries of curved surfaces get much more complicated. Relativity tells us that the real world we live in is a non-Euclidian geometry, and therefore no physicist would make the statement you cited about a straight line, unless he was teaching plane geometry to grade-school kids, and even then he'd qualify it as I've done above.

Evidence-based science is not faith: It is the opposite of faith, since nothing is accepted without close examination. Followers of religion not only refuse to examine the bases for their beliefs, but they actively reject all evidence in favor of the "authority" of a book written between two thousand and four thousand years ago by people who thought the stars were holes in the sky.

 

Thjbjr: We cross-posted. I will disagree with you that there is any evidence whatsoever for a young Earth. Only by a complete misrepresentation of all the evidence can one come to that conclusion.

You don't need to answer this, but are you by any means a Jehovah's Witness? I know they cling to the young Earth notion. I am embarrassed to admit to my ignorance, after having eaten lunch with them on several Saturdays, but I don't remember for sure if the Adventists are young-Earthers or not. I think they are, but I'm not sure. I think some Pentecostalists are also, but my only direct personal contact with them was one homeless guy and the chaplain at Sandstone who told me I would go to hell for believing in evolution. (He specifically said that god might forgive me for being an atheist, but never for believing in evolution!) You lack the anger of the Pentecostalists, and no Adventist ever told me we had anything in common, so I'm guessing Jehovah's Witness.

 

Most of what you said I agree with. That doesn't change the fact that people are dying just from the simple fact that they do not have clean drinking water (for whatever reason). For the last three years our church has sent a group to Uganda to install many water purification systems, administer medical aid and to spread the Light in a very dark place. The point is: you can't use the condemning paintbrush like D is.

 

Daniel, I really thought you already had my denominational affiliation pegged with the disclosure in this thread of the lecturer I want you to watch, Dr./Professor/Pastor Walter Veith. But no problem, I'm one of those Seventh Day Adventist that cook up such good vegetarian pot lucks you enjoyed, (reference to another thread Daniel posted in) and one of our 28 fundamental beliefs is in a literal 6 day creation, which of course includes a young earth belief. that's how I qualify as a one of the previously mentioned nut jobs.

 

Woah. I hope you never think about buying a Prius, 'cause it was invented by those godless scientists, don'tcha know?

 

LOL, then you better not look at the 2 gen3's in my avitar.
I have no problem with who builds them, only concerned with how they are built,... and so far they remain at the top of my list of mass produced autos.

 

How is the world would you know they were godless? All wisdom (knowledge) comes from God.

 

You do some good, but while you're doing it you tell the people they are ignorant and superstitious and that they'll go to hell unless they change their religion.

A historical parallel is enlightening:

During the Irish potato famine Protestants brought oatmeal to Ireland. They used the oatmeal to convert people from Catholicism to Protestantism. Convert and you can eat. Refuse to convert and you can go hungry. The result was that they converted PART of the population, leaving a country divided by religion, with the two halves hating each other for being the "wrong" religion, and the result has been a century and a half of bloodshed.

I'm sure your church is not so crass as to insist that people convert in order to get the water systems, but you go in with a dual agenda: Provide water systems, but also sew the seeds of discord by converting SOME of the people (you can never convert everyone) so that future generations will be plagued by religious hatred, intolerance, and wars over their religious differences.

Missionaries are evil.

Thanks for the clarification. Since I never opened the link to the video, I was unaware of the religious affiliation of the preacher.

If that is true, then why do some people refuse to believe the truths of the world revealed by god through the evidence he created in the rocks, and choose instead to believe a thousands of years old book of dubious authorship?