Religion IS crazy!

[lindsayf]

There is such a convenient blind leap of logic and rationality to go from

...things exist...I wonder how it all works....to god created everything..to I know the 'truth' ..Jesus rose from the dead....and I have a relationship with god and my morality is very superior to yours because things are written in ancient manuscripts.

The way the avid religious dismiss counter arguments really leaves no room for further discussion. Not because they have proven their points beyond refutation but because they make a series of assumptions within closed paradigms that serve to support each other..and because there is a deeply held ( and probably coached (by parents, church, conservative elements in society etc)) desire to believe in the ultimate universal force that will look after them in life and death ....and at a different level to be able to fit in with general community bents along these lines...ie access to community support and for reasons of political expedience.

Seems to me there are few completely honest, untainted stances on such things..but one is..I dont know so lets get on with living this life well.

 

[Gringotts Bank]

Well I'm a little different to PAV

I don't need to know anything.

Letting go of the need to know this and know that is [imo] a very good way to free the mind. In other words, it can be used to get into the zone (a spiritual practice). The ego-mind loves to know everything, it loves logic and order and rationality and linearity and predictability. But only the relative can be known, not the absolute. The ego-mind is the event horizon. Pavillion's insistence that he wants answers to all the big questions is exactly what will stop him (or me, or anyone else) gaining access.

Meanwhile, although he keeps pushing the line that something can't come from nothing (which I happen to agree with), he apparently thinks that the god he believes in came from nothing.
Either that, or like many people who can't explain how this god was created, he'll tell us that god 'always was'.

This is the philosophical problem of "infinite regress". If "something can't come from nothing" is made a rule, then it must apply to everything. So who made God? It's turtles all the way down, as they say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

 

[Gringotts Bank]

GB – For once I’ve actually read one of your long posts in its entirety.

These wild beliefs are nonsense, and just like the power of prayer, if you asked for a demonstration to support them, you’d get nothing.

I acknowledge that you’re not presenting these views as fact, but rather have posted them for the interest of the forum.

The Buddhists have some pretty far out beliefs – a relative whose converted to Buddhism once showed me a booklet they put out about the nine (or is it ten) different hells that await sinners after we depart this life.
It was so crazy that I formed the view that you’d just about have to be off your head to believe it. Do a Google search on it if you’re interested.

They're not presented as beliefs, but facts. Whether they are facts or not, I have no idea, but I tend to agree you might wait a long time trying to find someone who can perform such feats. By presenting them I was hoping to demonstrate that history has recorded such feats in non-Christians just as history has recorded resurrection and other miracles performed by Jesus.

 

[bunyip]

There is such a convenient blind leap of logic and rationality to go from

...things exist...I wonder how it all works....to god created everything..to I know the 'truth' ..Jesus rose from the dead....and I have a relationship with god and my morality is very superior to yours because things are written in ancient manuscripts.

The way the avid religious dismiss counter arguments really leaves no room for further discussion. Not because they have proven their points beyond refutation but because they make a series of assumptions within closed paradigms that serve to support each other..and because there is a deeply held ( and probably coached (by parents, church, conservative elements in society etc)) desire to believe in the ultimate universal force that will look after them in life and death ....and at a different level to be able to fit in with general community bents along these lines...ie access to community support and for reasons of political expedience.

Seems to me there are few completely honest, untainted stances on such things..but one is..I dont know so lets get on with living this life well.

That’s pretty much how I see things. I don’t know for sure, I don’t need to know and it doesn’t rally matter anyway, so let’s just get on with living this life in the best way we can.

One thing I do know for certain though is that evolution is happening and has been for thousands of years, and the proof (not evidence, PROOF) is all around us to see every day.
The creationist theory, as it was taught to me during my Christian upbringing at least, is that God created us and the world that we see around us in six days.
Clearly though, both the world and the human race are not the same as they were thousands or even hundreds of years ago – they’ve changed considerably and they’re still changing (evolving) even now.

I remember seeing footage of Jack Dempsey being mobbed by hundreds of fans a few weeks after he became the world heavyweight boxing champion in 1919. Jack stood 6 feet 1 inch tall, and he towered over just about all of his fans. Today a man of that height doesn’t even stand out from the crowd.

In a museum in the northern NSW town of Coonabarabran there’s a skeleton of a prehistoric wombat that was found in the local area. The skeleton is the size of a Shetland pony, compared to today’s wombats that are about the size of a large dog.
Same story with kangaroos – prehistoric skeletons show that roos were commonly ten feet tall. Compare that to the roos of today that average maybe four feet.

Animals, insects, plants, humans, are all changing and evolving - the evidence is indisputable.

Evolution refers specifically to changes in biological populations over time. But non-biological changes also occur in our world.

After the floods of 2011 the creek in my area changed course in a number of places.

An undersea earthquake a few months ago caused a brand new island to rise out of the sea.
Mountains get smaller each year due to erosion, and in some cases new hills and mountains are formed by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

Clearly then, the evidence shows us that the world and the plant and animal species as we know them today were not created in six days of hard work by some supreme being, but have evolved over many millions of years.

As for how everything started in the first place - I don’t know, Pav doesn’t know, Christians don’t know, scientists don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
Science can tell us, for example, that life on earth stemmed from some cell or some organism, but they can’t tell us how that cell or organism was created.
Christianity tells us that God created everything as we know it, but it can’t tell us how God was created.

I doubt if we’ll ever know, but who cares anyway? Not me. As I said earlier, our best move it just to live this life in the best way we can, and not get too tied up in trying to discover the origin or the meaning of it all.

 

[bunyip]

They're not presented as beliefs, but facts. Whether they are facts or not, I have no idea, but I tend to agree you might wait a long time trying to find someone who can perform such feats.

I have to say I’m amused by things that are presented and/or recorded as ‘facts’, but nobody seems to be able to demonstrate them.
The Buddhists, for example believing that a man can sit in a fire and not be harmed, or can live for years without eating or drinking, or can sit out in freezing conditions but not die from hypothermia.

Given that the more fanatical Buddhists spend pretty much all day every day in prayer, one would assume that they'd be able to reach that superhuman state whereby they’d be able to perform these amazing feats, if indeed it was possible to do so.

And yet not one Buddhist today, not a single one, would be able to give a practical demonstration of sitting in fire and being unaffected, or living for years without food and water.
Therefore, the only reasonable assumptions we can make is that like a lot of things that are written in ancient texts, it’s a load of bulldust.
The only place we can find these amazing feats is in writings, and people can write whatever they want.

 

[keithj]

Science can tell us, for example, that life on earth stemmed from some cell or some organism, but they can’t tell us how that cell or organism was created.

Scientists are getting closer to creating the building blocks of life from just smashing rocks together.

The ingredients for life are spread all across our Solar System and indeed the Universe. They include mundane and ordinary chemicals, like ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide.

Now new research has shown that all you need to turn these boring chemicals into amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, is a shockwave. Specifically, the kind of shockwaves you get when a comet crashes into a planet.

Understanding how life began is a tricky business, to say the least. Researchers across the world are using various approaches to figure out the different ways in which the complex molecules we find in living organisms are formed from more simple molecules found throughout the Universe. This team in Denmark, for example, is using computer modelling to understand the myriad chemical pathways involved with hydrogen cyanide.

In 2010, Nir Goldman of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California hypothesised that comet impacts could be one way for pre-life compounds, known as prebiotic compounds, to be synthesised. The mechanism was considered by some to be "unlikely", he noted in the paper's abstract, due to "the high heat from impact", among other things.

His computer model has now been supported by experimental research, in which samples of ice mimicking the composition of comets were shot with a projectile travelling 7.1 kilometres a second. By recreating a cometary impact, the researchers, including Goldman, were able to produce amino acids like those found in bacterial cell walls.

"We know that when a [cometary] impact occurs, it happens at an extremely high speed," says Zita Martins of Imperial College London, lead author of the study published in Nature Geoscience. "The temperature and pressure is huge [so] molecular bonds break and you generate more complex molecules."

An icy mixture containing dissolved ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide was placed in a gas gun at the University of Kent. Projectiles were then fired at the mixture, with amino acids only being produced when an impact occurred and when all three of the components were present.

"It's basically the compounds that you find at the beginning of the Solar System," notes Martins. In the early Solar System, comets would have been impacting the Earth and other planets like giant cataclysmic balls of hail.

 

[Ves]

I remember seeing footage of Jack Dempsey being mobbed by hundreds of fans a few weeks after he became the world heavyweight boxing champion in 1919. Jack stood 6 feet 1 inch tall, and he towered over just about all of his fans. Today a man of that height doesn’t even stand out from the crowd.

I'm not in any way weighing into the discussion on evolution, but I've read differently regarding human height over the centuries.

My understanding is that human height in certain areas of the world is in a constant state of flux that is influenced by all sorts of factors. Racial miscegenation, cultural practices of the time, economic factors of the time etc. Nutritional factors of the time are especially important. Have a look at some of the studies done on those countries that have experienced sustained famines and see how this effects the average height of the population there.

Compare the average height of the populations of the West in the mid-1800s when Industrialisation was starting to peak and the conditions prevalent in this rapid growth period vs those of today.

There's plenty of stuff around the web on this subject if you're interested.

Not sure if this helps:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-are-we-getting-taller

Have you read anything to the contrary on this subject?

 

[bunyip]

Scientists are getting closer to creating the building blocks of life from just smashing rocks together.

If crashing comets helped create the building blocks of life, where did the comets come from? Who or what created them?
And who or what created this god that some people believe in?
As Pav has told us, and on this point I agree with him, something can't come from nothing.

And while we ponder the beginnings of life on earth, and indeed the origins of Earth itself, how about all the other planets. Scientist believe there are hundreds more planets, maybe even thousands, that haven't been discovered yet. Who/what created them?
And the sun, said to be 100 thousand times the size of the earth - who or what created that?

Maybe I sound like I’m mighty interested in all this stuff, but I’m not really. I pose these questions simply to illustrate that both science and religion are a long way from having all the answers.
Science is at least searching for the answers, learning all the time as they discover new information.
Religion is learning nothing and never will learn anything as long as it remains rigid and inflexible in its belief that God created the world and the human race as we know them, and that’s all there is to it.

 

[bunyip]

I'm not in any way weighing into the discussion on evolution, but I've read differently regarding human height over the centuries.

My understanding is that human height in certain areas of the world is in a constant state of flux that is influenced by all sorts of factors. Racial miscegenation, cultural practices of the time, economic factors of the time etc. Nutritional factors of the time are especially important. Have a look at some of the studies done on those countries that have experienced sustained famines and see how this effects the average height of the population there.

Compare the average height of the populations of the West in the mid-1800s when Industrialisation was starting to peak and the conditions prevalent in this rapid growth period vs those of today.

There's plenty of stuff around the web on this subject if you're interested.

Not sure if this helps:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-are-we-getting-taller

Have you read anything to the contrary on this subject?

No, I haven’t read anything to the contrary.
Increasing height in humans in developed countries may well be related to better nutrition. Poorer nutrition may well have the opposite effect in some countries.

What I was doing however is disputing the Christian belief that what we see in the world today was created by God. Look at a mountain range, and a Christian will tell you God created it. Look at a billabong, and Christians will tell you God created it.
Clearly though, the world and the creatures in it have changed dramatically over millions of years, irrespective of what caused the changes.
If we could go back a million years and see the world and its creatures as it all was back then, I doubt if we’d even recognize it.

 

[noco]

The French people are starting to rebel about the Islamic movement. The Muslim population in France is now 10% and growing.

Can this happen here in Australia.....you bet it can.



http://downloads.cbn.com/cbnnewsplayer/cbnplayer.swf?aid=17933

 

[Ruby]

Just as a brief outline. They were written in the lifetime of eye witnesses and two accounts by eye witnesses. Also the empty tomb. Also this was not a myth that developed over time, it has no time to. It was written in the lifetime of eye witnesses who would dispute any lies.

Pav, there is not one biblical scholar, who has studied the ancient texts and who claims the gospels were eye-witness accounts. In fact, they don't know who wrote them. And as I think I can safely assume you are NOT a scholar of ancient texts, I don't think you can claim knowledge than contradicts accepted wisdom.

As for people dying for what they believe in.......... belief is not fact my friend. History is littered with myths and legends that grew up because an uneducated and gullible population believed stories they were told, which were then passed on orally as fact........... It happens all the time. Even you must be aware of how a story can originate with one person, be passed to ten others and come back to the originator with the details vastly changed or embellished. It's human nature, and what happens with any oral tradition.

Regarding evolution....... you are similarly unqualified to make the sweeping statements you do. Read some books with an open mind.

 

[burglar]

When God created the butterfly, did he create the egg? Or did he create the butterfly?

 

[Chris45]

The reincarnated children: New book tells the extraordinary story of the children who believe they are a WWII pilot, star golfer and a Hollywood agent from a past life – and have this scientist utterly convinced.

'The world just doesn't work as we think or assume it does. The cases I have examined don't come under a normal explanation of how we perceive the world,' said Dr Tucker, the Bonner-Lowry associate Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia.

What he has found is that each child reveals their past life at an extremely young age - at usually two or three - and the memories manifest themselves as unusual episodes of streams of consciousness, recollections and sometimes as intense, thrashing nightmares.

From The Daily Mail, admittedly not the most credible news source in the world, but let's not shoot the messenger.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2509769/New-book-reveals-children-believe-reincarnated.html

Jim B. Tucker is the medical director of the Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

He sounds quite legitimate to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_B._Tucker
http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/cl...ychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/staff/jimbio-page

Assuming he's genuine, and this is not part of some elaborate hoax, then when added to all of the other stuff that has been emerging recently, including theories about multiverses etc ... this is definitely food for thought IMO! If he's correct, then again it begs the questions:
(1) Is there an undetected "spirit universe" interwoven with our material universe?
(2) If so, is there structure, law and order in the population of souls that inhabit this "spirit universe"?
(3) If so, is there a supreme leader / president / whatever of this population, and if there is, what is he called?

Perhaps Tech/a could ask Kris to explain Dr. Tucker's quantum mechanical explanation of reincarnation. I reckon that if you mention quantum mechanics in an explanation of something inexplicable, that will probably shut most of the skeptics up, especially the non-scientific armchair philosophers.

All parents, especially those of young children with birth marks, should take a keen interest in and record what their kids say about past lives and experiences during their first couple of years of life before their memories are overwritten and lost, instead of just dismissing it as childish nonsense as we usually do.

It's also in the Bible ... we're told that Jesus Christ is going to be reincarnated sometime in the future. Maybe that's not so inconceivable after all. I wonder if he'll have birthmarks on his body in interesting places?

 

[trainspotter]

When God created the butterfly, did he create the egg? Or did he create the butterfly?

When the butterfly created God, she forgot to put in the egg? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to witness it, did the tree really fall?

Existentialism I think it is called.

 

[bunyip]

The Korean girl who was bashed to death in the Brisbane CBD earlier this week was an only daughter and was big sister to twin brothers. She was just 22 years old and a devout Christian. Her family called her ‘Princess’.
I have a 22 year old daughter myself – I can’t begin to imagine the anguish and heartache her family are going through.

Christianity taught me in early childhood that the Christian god is a god of compassion and love and infinite goodness and power. I learnt that he’ll protect and support you and stand by you in times of trouble if only you’ll believe in him and devote your life to him.
Unfortunately though, the reality is quite different, as the Korean girl and her family found out.
I daresay there are some Christian folk who are throwing out the usual line about how God must have wanted her to be with him in heaven. I wonder if they can explain why he wanted her so badly that he allowed some mongrel to bash her head in at 4am on a deserted Brisbane street.
I wonder if they can explain how this God of theirs showed compassion and love by allowing an innocent young girl to die a horrible death, and her family to suffer for the rest of their lives.

If this Christian god exists - and it’s very doubtful that he does – then he certainly doesn’t possess the glowing qualities that Christianity credits him with.

 

[Tink]

Bunyip, thats how it was before the "ten commandments", maybe you want to go back to that lifestyle.

If this monster lived by the 10 commandments, which is now written in every Court, of 'Thou shalt not kill', this girl would still be alive.
This question has been answered a few times in here, if we all lived by those principles, what a perfect place it would be.

Christianity has shaped the world to what it is today.

 

[sails]

Bunyip, I know she was going to work in the CBD but taking a short cut through a park at 4am which would have been dark and deserted of decent people seems a dangerous thing to do, IMO. Would you be concerned if your daughter did the same?

God gave us brains and my belief is that he expects us to use them to make sensible decisions. If I stood in front of a speeding train would you also blame God when I was knocked down? Being a Christian doesn't mean we can put ourselves into potentially dangerous situations and then blame God for not protecting us.

Don't get me wrong in that I am sickened at this girl's brutal death and in a perfect world she should be able to walk safely through a deserted park before dawn.

 

[bunyip]

Bunyip, I know she was going to work in the CBD but taking a short cut through a park at 4am which would have been dark and deserted of decent people seems a dangerous thing to do, IMO. Would you be concerned if your daughter did the same?

Of course – my wife and I have implored our daughters to avoid taking unnecessary risks like that. And they don’t.

God gave us brains and my belief is that he expects us to use them to make sensible decisions. If I stood in front of a speeding train would you also blame God when I was knocked down? Being a Christian doesn't mean we can put ourselves into potentially dangerous situations and then blame God for not protecting us.

I blame the vermin who bashed her to death, and the girl herself bears some responsibility for her fate by taking such a silly risk.
If I believed in God, which I no longer do, I wouldn’t blame him for her death, but I’d certainly blame him for not caring enough about her to at least tap her on the shoulder (so to speak) and let her know that walking through a park at 4am isn’t such a good idea.

I just don’t go along with this idea that God gave us all brains to think with, and if we don’t use them then we shouldn’t expect any help from him.
If we all adopted that attitude, then there would have been a lot more people drowned in my area in the floods three years ago, because those who helped save people would have said ‘Bugger them – if they’re stupid enough to build on a flood plain near a creek then they shouldn’t expect us to come running to their rescue.’

My Christian upbringing taught that God is always there to help us and take care of us if we believe in him. I know now that he’s not, but that’s what I was taught and it’s what I believed before my experience of life taught me otherwise.
My beef with Christianity is that it makes so many false promises that just don’t stack up. One of these is the myth about the caring and compassionate God. A compassionate person doesn’t stand by and do nothing while innocent people are bashed to death, or while little kids are horribly abused in their hundreds or thousands by Catholic priests and others in positions of trust, or while innocent people are murdered in their millions because some deranged fascist dictator doesn’t like them or their religion.

Don't get me wrong in that I am sickened at this girl's brutal death and in a perfect world she should be able to walk safely through a deserted park before dawn.

Of course, but we don’t live in a perfect world, which is why decent compassionate people like you and I would have warned her, if we’d had the opportunity, of the dangers of walking through that park. I’d expect no less from God - if he exists and if he’s as caring and compassionate as his reputation suggests.

 

[Gringotts Bank]

My Christian upbringing taught that God is always there to help us and take care of us if we believe in him. I know now that he’s not, but that’s what I was taught and it’s what I believed before my experience of life taught me otherwise.
My beef with Christianity is that it makes so many false promises that just don’t stack up. One of these is the myth about the caring and compassionate God.

Yes, the church lied to you, but not in order to deceive you, they just don't know any better. Obviously things don't work that way. Out of great fear comes a desire for a "father figure" God who will protect you if you believe in him. This is the Christian God. It's not real.

The more pressing questions are: Is God real? Is God entirely different to the one you learnt about in church? Does God require belief? Is God a person? Does God have form? What is the nature of God? How do I access God (if it's even possible)? Is God just love? Is God a super duper form of love? Is God truth? Is God inside/outside me? Where is God right now? Can God provide for me and protect me? There are decent answers to all these questions if you are willing to go looking. Even though Jesus knew what he was on about, none of his followers did, and so the Christian churches have it totally ar$e up. They are so far off the money it's ridiculous.

 

[Chris45]

Hmmm, not one reaction to my post #1653 about reincarnation. I guess everyone's got me on "Ignore" .