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Comments
Thank you for this very well written piece of information.
While I myself are by no means a believer in any religion, the do fascinate me in the sense how they played such a large and important part of our history. And I do like to read up on the historical aspect simply because they do show the morals of mankind through the centuries.
The scary bit is how people in this thread do blame the RC church for some of the stances made in the current US by religious groups. And they are really sometimes hatefull and totaly crazy and hatefull against people that oppose their religious convictions. Hence the current mess and religious hatred towards our western nations.
And indeed the past of child abuse which was somehow and sometimes allowed to continue within the power of the church cannot be condoned. But with power comes corruption a case in point is the current US senate that is working for the 1% rich in that they want them to pay even less tax and have the majority of citizen have nothing at all. It shows that what some people blame the church/religion for also applies to politics in that the common man not always choses for his own best interest but lets him chose something else against his own interest due to reasonings that are as odd as any made sometimes by the church.
Having read the writings of Dawkins & Hitchens they have far better critisms on the Church and religious belives as the majority of rants in this thread. As an atheist these gentleme should be required reading before telling anybody that you are in fact an atheist.
I do believe there is something more in this universe, albeit God or mother nature I cannot say.
@SaintMark, you are me & we are God.
The sooner we all know this, the sooner we will stop hurting ourself.
TheShaolinChrisisall ;)
I'll get my skates!!
We are God? How did you come up with that one? Any evidence? And last time I checked, you and I are not related, or connected, unless you mean that we are both homo sapiens.
All jokes aside, that's my gripe against faith and members of the clergy: they make very wide claims, very specific claims about the universe, life, what have you, yet show zilch evidence. Why is homosexuality and same sex marriage wrong? Why is/was eating pork? Is transubstantiation ever supported by any kind of evidence? Faith is no knowledge, it is in fact the very opposite of knowledge.
^:)^
You are NOT of the body!!!
I'm appointing myself pope of this new church. Now everybody rise for John Barry's TLD soundtrack.
In the beginning there was little actual knowledge and as we develop and understand the world around us more we run into a whole different set of questions, for which many answers are given but yet none are proven. Faith in something has never been a bad thing and the clergy are meant to offer guidance. I have met many of them that did so in a far more progressive way than many folks that are not clergy have done so.
Homosexuality and same sex marriage are not wrong but people are threatened by something they do not understand. And for some people it is the current change in their society that can be blamed for anything really. It is like racism easy to do when you are not directly involved with people that you discriminate.
Eating pork or rather the not eating of pork is a surviving dietary choice from the old times before food could be frozen and kept wel. It had more to do with hygiene in the desert world and as such was added to sensible rules of how to life.
transubstantiation has various explanations by the different religious streams from within the christian church, some are more controversial than others as well as the critisms or teaching within the various religious christian streams. I think some people take it too far in taken in what is written in the bible to be as true as it is stated within that scripture.
Faith is believing in something that is more than you are as an individual, and that is perhaps more factual than some scientific reasoning. Somehow there are shedloads of scientist that seem to believe in their faith just as easily as they believe in the knowledge of science.
Even the strongest attacks on faith is not about the faith but the institutions running said faith. And even then they recognise that they have done a lot of good over the almost two decennia of the RC church. The whole western society thanks its creation of universities, cannonical law which is a foundation of most western law, etc.
They should start anew with a fresh direction being led by this new pope, enetering the 21st century. But even within this church are large pockets of extreme conservatism that prefer the old times. It is almost a reflection of our current societies.
OMG, biggest LOL of the week! :)) ^:)^
Key word 'perhaps' ie you havent a clue and its just a wild stab in the dark.
Mind you this was a close runner up on the chortle front:
Seriously though and without particularly wishing to atangonise:- Any 'believers' out there can you please just tell me why it is you have 'faith'?
Thats all I'm asking. Nothing contentious this time, just explain why it is you believe in whatever you believe. The reasons you use to justify thinking what you do.
Surely if its something you consider is so important in life you must have thoroughly thought it through so it shouldnt be too much to ask?
If someone can give a logical and coherent response I promise I'll leave them to it and not jump down their throat. Honest.
And may Tim strike me down with great vengeance and furious anger if I dont!
Why don't you tell your reasoning for not believing perhaps you have a point.
Do I need a reason not to believe there's an elephant in my fridge? Can't you accept my lack of belief in fridge-elephants without explanation?
But if I told you I do believe there's an elephant in my fridge, I think you'd be justified in asking for my reasoning.
Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week.
I'll listen to your reasoning. But if you don't want your reasoning to be challenged then probably best not to bother. If, on the other hand, your faith is unshakeable then any flaws in your reasoning we might point out will have no effect on your faith so you might as well enlighten us.
I'm all ears.
Not really - I'm quite happy to put a foot in the believers' camp for a moment.
Why would you worship a god who asked one of his followers to murder his own son as a test of his faith. That's sick.
This god of yours got annoyed with some of his humans because they weren't worshiping him enough and decided to commit genocide by drowning very nearly every person on the planet. New-born babies, children, men and women alike - all dead. That's insane.
So you'd have to agree, god's a pretty nasty character.
You worship him out of fear? He might smite you if you don't go to church every week? Maybe its like a wife finding it hard to leave her husband even though he's abusive. I just don't understand why anyone would believe in a god - and I certainly don't understand how they can say the particular god of the bible (there are many others of course) is anything other than a vain, self-obsessed, vicious arse-hole.
Also, a quick note as to the flooding of the Earth. First of all, it's likely that the story was allegorical. But even if it weren't, or even on the allegorical level, from a theistic perspective, God has the right to end life, and he does quite frequently. If it's not morally problematic for him to end life at different times, what changes when it's all at once? He can end our life, again, from a theistic perspective, whenever he wants.
On to the existence of God. Ultimately, I find the arguments for the existence of God, principally Aquinas's 5 ways, but also a few others, like the ontological argument and the argument from universal belief to be convincing, and I don't find atheist arguments like the problem of evil or the argument from inconsistent revelations to be that convincing. I heard the first set and found them well-reasoned and consistent. I heard the second set and remained unconvinced. I suggest that something similar happened, except in reverse, to the atheists here.
On to moral questions. Belief in the sinfulness of homosexual behavior is not tantamount to hatred. I believe a great many things to be sinful, and I'm sure all of us do a great number of them, to one degree or another. That doesn't mean I hate you. In fact, most of you seem like quite decent people. Ultimately, though, the reason for its sinfulness lies in the dual purposes of sex, that it be ordered towars procreation (often reduced to procreative or opened to life, which leas to lots of messy attempts to clarify terms and frequently talking about nothing) or unity. Ultimately, gay sex cannot be procreative for...obvious reasons. The same goes for a whole bunch of different sex acts, but that's a separate debate, and it should be stressed again that I don't hate anybody who does any of these things.
Obviously, Christianity doesn't hold that pork is sinful, you'll have to ask a Jew or Muslim or Jew for Jesus about that.
I confess to not truly understanding transubstantiation. I know that it has to do with Aristotelian ideas like the form and accidents of a substance, but I'm not particularly versed in those matters, and like I said I don't really understand it. But I don't understand plenty of other things, like quantum mechanics or even economics, and I don't doubt their existence. I've believed the Catholic Church on everything else thus far, and I find rather silly to say, "So the Church has been right on every other moral matter over 2000 years, but on this one, I, soundofthesinners, a man with a partial college education and an internet connection, am right, and 2000 years of teaching is wrong." Just sounds like something odd to say.
And last but not least, somebody mentioned proof, and it's kind of hard to discuss proof in philosophical matters, since there's no sort of empirical experiment that can be done as with scientific hypotheses. This doesn't mean they're less valuable, only different. After all, we're still arguing about what Socrates and Plato thought and they're essentially the inventors of philosophy as we know it.
Faith by definition is believing in something without proper evidence. It is not wrong per se, except when, as it often happens, faith blinds the believer when evidence contradicts his or her belief, when because of faith they refuse to recognise truth. Faith has hindered or outright opposed scientific progress, the development of medicine and human rights. Yes Catholicism is part of Western culture, yes the institution had some use in the past, but that does not mean 1)that other institution could not have done the same thing and 2)it is relevant now. And that the beliefs at the core of its existence are justified. I am glad that you are a liberal Christian, I do hope that the new pope's positions are closer to yours, but when conservative Christians oppose contraceptives, same-sex marriage, what have you, they back it up by the same faith, which they erect as above truth.
Evidence that the flood happened and it was divinely triggered?