parents + religion

Originally posted by gimped
**Big air Smite:, what does this mean:

"But do u guys really think that i would l give up the eternal life (I believe i will recieve) just because a few people mock me?"

What is an eternal life? Do you actually believe there will be something waiting for you after you die? How do you know this? Is there anything credible which documents (besides the bible) that this magical land exists? This afterlife you speak of is purely folklore and nothing else. What makes you crave this notion instead of accepting the fact that you are here for X-amount of years? Where is the proof that there is an afterlife? There is none. There are only stories and fables of such that have been passed down for millenia - that's not any form of certifiable evidence to there being an afterlife. Do you also believe in ghosts? Do you believe in the healing power of crystals? You should.

Religion is a comfort zone for people who want an excuse to improve their lives. It usually comes out of confusion and desparation and fear of the unknowing. If you can not accept that god is an invention of man's large brain, then you deserve to be mocked. The reason people get offended about what I am saying is because it flys in the face of everything you hold true. Just like the world was once flat. Say it's round-you get burned at the stake. Since science has become more and more the norm, religion has taken a back seat because there are NO theories to back it up whatsoever. Religion will thus be evolved out of our conciousness. So then how can you justify this belief?

"I also think it's funny how Christianity permeates so many aspects of modern secular life: if you talk to most people about Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus turning a loaf of bread and a fish into a huge feast you're usually taken fairly seriously, whereas if you talk about a pantheon of gods such as Native American tribes, Norse and Tutonic cultures and many other Pagan civilizations believed in (and still do), you're usually laughed at."

- Yes exactly. Why is one form of religion or deity looked down upon amongst people who practice religion?

With religion: hell. Without: No hell. Hmmm, what makes sense there?
Ahh…you guys better pray for me! **

Thats the beuty of Faith my friend, I don't need solid proof (although the bible is a good place to look as you already seem to have noticed). I honestly believe there is something after life for me. And I Will pray for you if you want? No joke, and when it comes 2 prayer, i dont know what i would do without it. I know you guys may believe that prayers are never answered but often they are. For example my mum had ME (the disease, not 'Big_Air_Smite' ;)) for 8 years and was healed at a healing service. Seriously, one minute she was really ill, the next she came back healed and has started running 10Ks. If i couldnt pray i dont know what i would do. And i like i said before… say what you want, im used to it.

Well what about families who have dying children who will not seek solid medical treatment? Instead they will pray for them, then they succomb to their illness. That's the most ignorant and irresponsible thing a person could do. Your mother was not cured by prayer, it was just a matter of chance. Why is it when something happens like this, people call it a miracle? It is not a miracle. Things like this happen whether you are a good person, a bad person, whether you pray, or if you find religion to be a joke - there is no solid evidence (nor any) that praying helps "cure" illness. That my friend is a fact.

The same is true for the medical profession when it comes to the belief system. The placebo (sugar pill) effect can alter a range of 30 to 40% of people who take it versus pharmacuticals. That's the same effect that mind has when you think that prayer is working. Your mind is fooling you into believing it. No matter what scientific evidence is put forth, people belive in the magical formula.

"We can pray for the cholera victim, or, we can give him 500 milligrams of tetracycline every 12 hours. We can try nearly futile psychoanalitic talk therapy on the schizophrenic patient, or, we can give her 300 to 500 milligrams a day of clozapine. The scientific treatments are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than the alternatives. (And when the alternatives work , we don't actually know if they played a role: Spontanious remissions, even of cholera and schizophrenia, can occur without prayer and psychoanalysis.) "
- Carl Sagan.

Are you going to solve desease and the world's problems by prayer? Or are you going to put your faith into science. Think of human life expectancy, how it used to be 20-30 years. Now it's approaching 80. Is it because our faith has gotten stronger? NO. It's because of hard scientific advancment. Faith in pseudoscience and the magical is waining with every generation.

Can you still justify a belief in the magical? If you did not pray, then you could live your life to the fullest without having to worry about the demons of your religion getting you.

You don't need proof because the proof is made up in your mind. That is the only place where it exists.

All i know is my mum was dying, went to a healing service and then she stopped dying. To me that seems pretty conclusive dood. And i also dont think that Science and Christianity are mutualy exclusive. IMO Evolution is Creation. I have faith because i believe God is doing stuff in my life and in other people's lives aswell. And think of it this way… I am 100% sure that there is no proof ANYWHERE that God Doesnt exist?

Well proof is based on reasonable evidence, not on the a person's feelings that something does. Your "100%" is based on emotions and nothing else. You want to believe, so it's there and infallable - it's your 100%. I could say that I am 100% sure an elephant fly, but I know I am basing that belief on what I want to be true, without any incling of proof, just emotion. The fact that there is not a single shred of evidence of there being gods in all recorded human history (other than events that can be explained as circumstance, or stories in the bible), puts up the best evidence that it does not exist.

Your 100% conclusive claim of proof is 100% based on feelings. It's not your fault for thinking that way, in fact, in most of mankind's history, to what we could not explain had to be devine intervention. As history progressed, so did man's thinking. Then came the understanding of science and the understanding of how our world operates. The easiest way for our ancestors to explain daily events was through a belief in what they could not explain, ie: god. The hardest form of explaination for daily events is to break it down into scientific eveidence, statistics and circumstantial occurrance. The real bread and butter.

Saying "I have faith because I BELIEVE god is doing stuff in my life and in other people's lives' as well", is my proof of what I am explaining. Saying the 'believe' word is not based on anything but pure emotion. I believe in the tooth fairly, so it has to exist. I could say I believe in evolution because there is the most evidence to back scientific theories, which is not based on emotion and "feeling".

Pseudoscience is embraced in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood. At the heart of it is the idea that wishing it makes it so. How seductive is the notion that wishing it could make it real? Trying on belief systems until you find something that works? I think so. It caters to our fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for. Absalute certainty will always elude us. That's how the world works. Science carries us towards an understanding of how the world is, not how we wish it could be.

Which church leaders acknowledge that their beliefs can be questioned and picked apart? None. Science, on the other hand, is about dissapproving it's own theories. What sermons even-handidly examines the god hypothosis? None. Science tries to make theories fallible until they become closer to solid evidence and proof.

There isn't any proof, nor the smallest amount of a credible clue to the existance of god, other than in people's minds and feelings. You will put your family's well-being into faith, a feeling, and a belief up against things that have been proven? Well that's very scary. Do you know how many people die as a result of their family's wish not to apply medical science, instead relying on their faith in god to fix the problem? That is one of the most irresponsible and egotistical things one can do.

Its a totally personal thing and if a member of someone's familly refuses treatment and they die then i believe that that was part of God's plan for them, that sounds totally stupid to all you people that dont have a faith but it makes perfect sence to me. And thats the thing with Religion, its FAITH, if we had proof we would all believe in God. I have never said i have proof, i know i will never have any, until i die. Rememeber this is all my own Personal Belief (I hope no1 is offended).

I would like to say right now though, Science has never disproved God. And I didn't say that i had 100% proof of God i sed i was 100% sure that no1 has proved that there is no God.

Originally posted by Big_Air_Smite
And thats the thing with Religion, its FAITH, if we had proof we would all believe in God.

exactly, you don't need proof, or anything written down to prove that it is real. it's all personal. it's things that happen along your life that make you believe in what you do. for me, i have faith, and that faith has gotten me through a lot of problems in my life. you can say that it just happened by chance, and there's no reason that a God could do it, but personally i know that that is totally wrong. belive me, i have looked for other reasons for things that happened in my life, but they all just lead to the faith that i had, and that faith makes my belief in God even stronger. things that happen in my life, either bad or good, i can find comfort in knowing there was a reason behind them.

i just find that church is good sometimes, but other times i find it works better to just be personal and figure out things in my mind, and it makes me feel a lot better in the end. the music i listen to, and my friends are not all perfect, no one can be perfect, and i have no problem with people that have opposed views from me. faith has given me the most open mind i could ever have to whatever someone wants to say or do, and it just has made life a lot happier, knowing there is someone taking care of me until the end :) sorry to kinda rant, but i guess just to put it all into one sentence.. it's faith in God that all will go well, and for some it may seem fake, or stupid, but to me it has been tried and true in my life and i know it's real :)

leigh

some people here have to open their mind!

religion is not about proof, it is aboiut beleif, and faith!

If were to throw a rock off a cliff, before it hits the ground…. how can U prove that it will hit the ground? U can't! not until it happens…. sure it is likely, but something strange could happen, like maybe a bird flies by and the rock hits it, or anything.

It's about Faith, and I beleive it's wrong to claim with such certainty, that people with religious faiths are wrong, you can't say such things with certainty!

just open your mind, and accept other peoples oppinions, and never ever claim to know with certainty, anything about religion!

Originally posted by gimped
I could say that I am 100% sure an elephant fly

based on the odds that humans evolved from prokaryotic bacteria years and years ago which evolved from who knows what and just happened to be created out of nothing, i would be 100% sure that elephants will one day fly as well. its only the natural course of evolution, is it not?

gimped, you too subject yourself to emotion and faith as well, only in the area of science as opposed to religion. you say that relying on faith instead of medicine is egotistical. how about man thinking that we can cure any and everything? if we cure even the weakest, then the whole 'survival of the fittest notion' which the theory of evolution is thrown entirely out of whack. if you see things on such a scientific point of view, how can you accept this? what kind of a life is it when somebody is alive, but lives on only as a vegetable? what kind of a life is it if a person maintains a heartbeat and brain activity, but suffers through immense amounts of pain suffering through an experimental surgical procedure? as you said yourself, absolute certainty will always ellude us. so there always has to be a certain measure of belief and faith in what one believes makes the most sense to oneself.

Whoa there! I am very open to people's having their own belief systems, I'm sorry for you that you can not understand that. As you may see I find your beliefs interesting and intriguing. I also used to sound just like you guys in my early 20's, until I stepped outside of my way of thinking and questioned "why do I believe in god?" I had the same answers that you guys do and nothing else. That's as far as I could explain it. With all the points that were made against religion, I nor anyone, had any credible answers other than "I know it's real because I believe it is." The more and more I questioned it, the more I couldn't justify it. I was searching for something that I thought wasn't there. Then I gave up on it and my life got way easier, happier, and more fullfilling. I do not claim to be a scientist, but my understanding of it has improved tenfold since then. I did not have an understanding of it when I believed in god, so I had to look to these "demons" and witchcraft to find answers to my questions.

UFO: Thinking that man can cure anything has nothing to do with the conversation here. I totally agree with you about the keeping of a life when it's a futile existance, but it has nothing to do with god vs. medical treatment in the context to which we speak. Evolution may be way out of whack with our inventions. Yes the strongest no longer has to survive, and tampering with genetics may place us on a path to which we have control (which is not nessicarily a good thing) over our future. Yes that is possible and very scary.

Builttoride: The rock theory is a funny one! Thanks for helping me prove my point. For one, the rock is concrete - it exists, you can hold it your hand. You can not hold a belief or god in your hand, similar to the way you can with a rock. To what will happen to it once it's flung off the cliff is unknown until it hits. But the best theories that we have to muster as humans is that this rock will most likely hit the ground, or it could be intercepted by, like you said, a bird. Now this is what science is made of, theories on similar occurances that has happened before, and, the best drawn conclusions of what will happen to the rock, based on physics, mathematics, etc, etc. Yes, Science! Thank you for the help, alter boy!

Since we are side barring:
You can call out to god and ask him for a million dollars. There is one of two things that will happen: You could have bet at the right time and at the right place and in X number of millions of a chance (and averages) you could win. Or, you will play everyday for the rest of your faithful life and win nothing. If this god exists, why not ask for the luck to win the fortune. You could rely on chance and have just as good "luck" in winning.

"you don't need proof, or anything written down to prove that it is real."
-Actually you do need proof or the best drawn conclusions to proving something is real. Faith is not an indication of realism. I'll turn it around: I have faith that Santa Claus is real - so that's all I need to make it real? I don't think you know the definition of the word "real".

Shoebiker, research medical science a little to grasp the understanding of the placebo effect. Until then your arguements are burying yourself. Such as this comment: "i have looked for other reasons for things that happened in my life, but they all just lead to the faith that i had, and that faith makes my belief in God even stronger." If you believe in something it could happen. Not because of an old man sitting on a thrown in a mythical land that nobody has ever seen. No, it's a combination of many things like chemicals in your brain that stimulates the adrenal gland , the production of white blood cells to fight infection, and again - chance. What makes more sense?

If you are good you go to the mythical land where your family and friends await. If you are a sinner, you go to a mythical land that's on fire. Hmmm…sounds like the invention of man don't you think? If you can say that your belief only exists in your mind then that's okay.

Oh and I would bet that elephants won't fly at any time in the future, given their size and weight and the way they survive upon the land.

No need to go name-calling now Gimped :rolleyes: Leigh said exactly how I feel. As for studying the word real… I personally BELIEVE God is REAL! Why? Personal experience. Can i publish this in a 60 page scientific journal… i think we all know the answer to that one… nope. You suggested u studied the word real… i suggest you study your bible. I think its more than a coincidence that Isaiah is quoted over 50 times in the new testament and is refered to over 150 times. That means that there must have been some truth in his phrophecys. Which incidently were written down in SOLID form before any of them came true.

You are searching for something that you want to be true, not what is true. That's the blinding fact of religion. Trying to put up scientific thought amongst magical thinkers is futile.

Bicycle Boy: I agree that Jesus existed. But I think he was probably a very charasmatic man who was very persuasive, as are cult leaders today. What's the difference? Hard to say other than his views were not too extreme. Thus he was able to fool the weaker minded people by pure volume which lead to his influence. You have not had prayers answered. Give me an example and I will prove that it was chance, or something that wasn't out of your control. I used to have prayers come true until I looked outside of it and realized that it was either chance, inevitable or within some sort of my own control. Without understanding of science, statistics and chance, you will look to devine intervention as a way of understanding it. Otherwise, you have no ammunition to explain things that happen randomly. How can you not grasp this understanding?

My suggestion is to look outside yourself and your situation to explain what's in your control, or in random occurance.

Religion never tries to disprove itself. Science does. It doesn't exist but in your mind, that's a fact. Isaiah and his references? Similarities in events can be made of almost anything. There is just as much credibility that the tooth fairy exists as does gods and prophets. I have read portions of the bible. It just does not make any sense becasue it's just people's interpretations of the truth.

The bible was written over a period of approximately 5000+ years right? How credible was scientific knowledge over that period of time? How many accepted it? How many people understood basic science, let alone explainations of why we are here? Very, very little, next to none. When was the last encounter with a supreme being, as they claim? 2000 years ago? Within the 1500+ years, our grasp of science has greatly improved. So is it coincidence that nobody has talked to god, seen god, witnessed any holy miracles since the birth of scientific understanding? No.

Just imagine you are a man living between 2000 and 5000 years ago. You see a burning bush or a flash in the sky, or even a man who wakes from the dead. What conclusions are you going to draw from that? I would say it's our lord's own miracles if I was living then. You would have no explainations for it. You would write it down, you would draw some likeness to that of god to these events. These events can quite easily be explained nowadays through science. But some are still clinging to that archaic view on everyday events.

Give me your personal experiences so I can disprove it with real answers and not simply saying "I know it because I believe it".

but belief is all you need. to believe that there is a reason behind living, and to just believe in there being a God. you're too caught up in trying to prove it with science, when science has nothing to do with it. you have to have faith, to be able to see that there is no reason for it to be proven. you just have to believe and have faith, and some people don't, but people that believe there is a God don't need science to help prove it to be right, because they have witnessed things along their life, and things in other people's lives that far outlast what science can say

"because they have witnessed things along their life, and things in other people's lives that far outlast what science can say"

- Like what? I asked last time for you guys to tell me what these occurances are. Somebody was "cured" by prayer does not constitute something science can not explain. I have already told you how it is possible several times in several different ways. And still you come back with this devine intervention nonsense without anything to back it up.

I am caught up with trying to prove it because people are saying that there is a heaven, a god, creation, etc, etc as if it were concrete. So if there is, give me something - anything - to make it credible. There isn't.

I have tons of spirituality, but only in things I know are real and credible (ie: family, friends, nature, and myself - to name a few). But I nor you should need a god to tell you that.

Science has something to do with anything and everything. Whether you like it or not. Faith in religion and deities can be explained through science and rational deductions as I am speaking of. It lives in your mind chemicaly. The act of "believing" provides stimulus to your brain. This has been proven. Question religion and see what happens. Honestly, question your god and religion.

You are poving my points with every statement you make.

I'm just wondering if Zaskar is still reading these posts. Did you tell your parents to go to hell? Ha!

I would also like to get some refreshing ideas thrown in here other than the few of us who are continuing this thread. Let's have some in favor and some who are not. Sweet.