Well, we both do I should think.

I just happen to investigate them all with the same amount of skepticism and critical thought and come to the only reasonable conclusion.

You do this for all but one.

Heh.

You're starting point is that "all are completely untrue unless God himself comes into my living room and explains to me what is true... and even then I might not believe His bullshit!"

I don't believe that that a valid starting point.

He almost certainly was not a theist, although it really doesn't matter. Several biographers have dealt with the issue and it seems pretty clear that he was annoyed by this misconception (and by the public's obsession with it).

You don't? Your tongue in cheek commentary about what evidence would be sufficient to justify belief in existence notwithstanding, don't you think it is best to refrain from assuming the existence of invisible beings as a default position? Don't you think it makes more sense to assume nothing and to require evidence of existence to believe otherwise?

What is your starting point with regard to Xenu? Maybe that Xenu and his teachings "all are completely untrue unless [He] himself comes into my living room and explains to me what is true... and even then I might not believe His bullshit!"?

Brvheart - I have always been confused by Jesus is the son of God and Jesus is God. Can you please explain the logic or reasoning here.




Spademan - are you enlisted or an officer? I am very curious.

I know! Get this, the scholars of Mithras believe that he was the result to a virgin birth. And ancient greek and egyptian religion believed in resurrection. And most of those that believed this crazy shit did so only because they read about it somewhere or because someone told them about it!

I'm totally fine with a starting point in regard to Xenu being that their claims are real. How do they back them up? Did the guy that told everyone about them say 10 years earlier that the best way to make money is start a religion? Was that religion supposed to make him immortal? Did he die? There are many questions that must be answered... but I'm ok with the starting point of... 'It's possible'.

Sure.

According to the Bible, God is one entity with three unique personalities, made up of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. God is described like a tree with three branches. The branches are unique, but are still just one tree.

lolomon @ you saying that expecting it to make sense to El G.

Yea, the Trinity is probably not the easist place to start.

But brvhrt answered it well

Never heard this one.

Here's the google answer

However, two inscriptions, now in the British Museum in London, set the record straight. One records that Nabonidus spent the later years of his reign at Tema, an Arabian oasis. The second relates a prayer of Nabonidus for his son Belshazzar. So Belshazzar was in fact the acting monarch, reigning in place of his absent father. It also explains why Daniel was offered the third highest place in the kingdom (Daniel 5:7,29) - Belshazzar himself was only the second


Fairly common also to list lineage in the OT with sons and fathers when there are generational differences, ie father Abraham to a 5th generation grandson etc.

First two are what was in the ark of the covenant after it was built.

Third one was what was in the ark when it was lost. Hebrews is NT, so it would have had a multi centuries later view on the contents, whereas Kings and Chronicles were written during the building of the ark, so they could both be correct without it being a big deal, hardly enough to want to make a stand on it.

I have heard the Holy Trinity thing before, but I guess I don't really understand how he can be himself and his son. If I really start to think about this, it is probably going to give me a headache. So I will refrain until I get more detailed explanation from you or Rob. If Lois respond, I won't read it, because that will for sure give me a migrane.

It's better to just see the Trinity in the verses that elude to the Trinity.

Like John 1:1-14

...the Word was with God...the Word was God...the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

When Jesus said "I and the Father are one."

Also when Jesus said "Before Abraham was, I AM" I AM was the name God gave Himself in the OT when Moses asked God who should he say sent him. The Jews understood that that was what he was saying, which is why they tried to stone Him.

So three disticnt indivduals; God the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, but only One God.

Not really a true comparison you can make because it is unique in the Universe...kind of like God..the Only One

Personally, I find it more difficult to understand how an entity could have no beginning, than to be 3 in 1.

Indeed,

whether it's God

or the universe, the idea of infinity is mind bottling

If the universe is finite, and God is infinite, then what the heck was he doing all that time before the universe existed.

For that matter where was he all that time? And what took him so long to come up with the idea of creation?

God doesn't live in the universe, so it was irrelevant. Also, the universe has been around a long long time, so maybe it didn't take him that long, especially since he lives outside of time.

If the universe is infinite, and evolution is the answer, where did all the matter come from?

How did the Big Bang start?

What was here before the Big Bang?

Before that?


Who pays the electricty bills?

evolution is only the answer to how speciation occurs on earth. it has little or nothing to do with the
size or origin of the universe (for the 40 bazillionth time ).



the answer is nobody knows, and the only ones who claim to know are pretentious theists.

It was Jesus... for the bazillionth time.

Yes, I am.

Why do you ask?

You didn't answer the question, probably on purpose.

Let's just say I have not met very many enlisted men that can articulate point in the fashion you are able.

Just exploring the ideas of infinity, not making a treatise on evolution.

Especially since it leaves you guys in the faith side of things and we know how you hate to be in that camp....

I haven't met many officers who can articulate much either

unlike you i'm not claiming to be certain of the answers to any of those questions. no faith involved.

jesus created the universe? what, is god just a lazy parent that makes his kid do everything?

OMG! crow made a funny (and a good one at that!)

Except there is no spoon. The spoon being god, of course.

Yeah, I just blowed your mind.

If we start with the presumption of truth, the burden is on us to disprove the claims of Scientology. What proof do we have that there aren't space aliens behind our planet's history?

I am reluctant to post this but what the hey… I’ve been in a very strange mood the past few days.

Did it ever occur to you all that you all could be wrong or that you all could be right? What I mean is that both sides of this argument of Yes there is a God and No there is not a God has validity.

For those of you who are in the No God camp… every culture in recorded history has had some belief in some sort of higher power or force. From a cultural standpoint, there is this human nature to believe in something outside or beyond ourselves. I know you can argue that each culture believed in other things that turned out not to be true but it is pretty amazing that throughout recorded history, every culture has had some sort of spiritual beliefs.

For those of you in the Yes God camp… don’t you find it contradictory that every culture has a different story in regards to this higher power? Cultures have believed in multiple gods, single God, different prophets, different after-life’s, etc. If every culture developed their own spiritual stories, then how can you ascertain that your story is 100% correct? How can you be so convinced that your story is a true story and that all of the other current and past cultures have it incorrect?

Anyway, I would like to propose a third perspective. That perspective is that there is something beyond the physical. As of yet, no one has been able to scientifically determine exactly what that is, maybe it lies in quantum physics or some other intelligence that could be either external or internal (or both) but that there is something. I would also like to propose that this something is way beyond comprehension and that it is human nature to try to define things that we intuitively know has presence; hence culturally we have created stories of this indefinable, intangible something. And maybe, just maybe each one of these stories is true because it has personal resonance, creates a sense of purpose and well being, gives ease to that uncertainty, thus it is valid not in the actual facts but because the belief serves a purposes to keep us civilized, moral, just and sane. At the same time, those who dismiss this uncertainty as nonsense is also equally valid because the dismissal creates the same calm, giving that person the confidence that they are not dictated by uncertainty and having the same faith in the physical world and what can be proven through scientific method. This calmness gives a sense of self which then dictates someone to be civilized, moral, just and sane.
OK… I know this all sounds like nonsense but what I am trying to say is that couldn’t the Yes God and the No God people be both right and wrong at the same time? Either side of the argument could be that one person’s perception that creates a balance within society as well as our own internal mental balance.

Thoughts? (And yes, I am cool with all of you calling me a nut case. )

really everyone here has been arguing the non issue. say what you want about the religion specifically, but that gets no where and is not the point. the point is that the idea of accepting things on faith is evil. and religious people readily admit that this is what they do.

On another forum, I think what I called that sort of view was "abstract Hippy nonsense" because it's very similar to the spirituality arguments i used to hear from hippies when I lived in Olympia washington. They were very passionately against Xianity, but would get very hostile with confronted with the idea that their beliefs have no better logical footing. I think your Idea, theresa is no more or less plausible than all sorts of other views of religion and spirituality. I think all these things are different manifestations of wish thinking as I've seen no evidence for any of them.

thats only the second time ive seen him do that (and i think the first was by accident)

reality is objective. you can't have your cake and eat it too, the cat inside the box is either dead or alive, and god either exists or he doesn't.

Well for starters, I would be very skeptical of the validity, due to the following reasons: (..and would need a good explanation from Tom Cruise)

-Ron Hubbard said that if you want to get rich you should start a religion. He formed Scientology within 10 years.

-Hubbard was said to possess eternal earthly life through Dianetics

-Hubbard died

Have you read the Old Testament? God is an asshole. right?

this thread isn't about whether a generic god exists or not. it's about religious fundamentalism, which is intrinsically divisive. no middle ground to be had.



pretty easy to come up with a potential explaination for that without invoking metaphysics.



that's a nice theory, but alternate explanations for human tendency towards theism that don't require metaphysics are simpler. in fact you give one below. there would be no reason to think the "purpose and well being" etc. you describe isn't simply a matter of natural selection or other form of selected social fitness and it wouldn't necessarily have to come from anywhere but ourselves.

When we are talking about a specific set of beliefs like christianity, I don't see how the factual claims of the religion (e.g. jesus was resurrected) can be both true and false, unless you mean something like it is true metaphorically but didn't actually happen -- which I think is totally reasonable. The resurrection story is really a cultural archetype that appears in various versions around the world, and as a story it has meaning -- it's a story about spiritual rebirth. There is good evidence that the whole cross symbology predated jesus in that part of the world as well.



We can look beyond ourselves without the superstition involved in religious belief. Looking beyond ourselves to the natural world of which we are a part is certainly an important part of the human experience. But it doesn't require that we abandon reason at all.



I have a somewhat different way of looking at it. There are limitations to the human mind, most notably we tend to think about the world using language. Linguistic concepts divide the world up and draw lines, which we can with practice come to trust as real. For example, where are the actual borders of the sun? Is it that brightest yellow ring that we see clearest? Or is the border of the sun the extent of where its heat radiates to, in which case we are within it? Where we draw the line is ultimately arbitary.

Anything that points to the basic reality that transcends those lines and concepts is putting us in touch with the reality of nature - beyond up/down, in/out, me/you, etc. IMO, that's really the original purpose of the "cross" to symbolize that transcendence.




Giving us comfort does not make something true. It may make a certain concept useful, but I don't think we need to believe false things to give us comfort. I think we can achieve purpose and well-being even better if we are in tune with the natural world, instead of holding ideas in our heads that are false.

I don't think of of myself as hippy, but I can see where you could draw that conclusion.

I also am not against Christianity. I think there are lots of good fundamental teachings in that faith.

And what I stated is not necessarily my beliefs. To be honest, I love the variety of opinions out there. The only things that sometimes is unnerving is when anyone on any side
of a debate can not concede that maybe they do not know it all. But this is only sometimes. Most of the time I like the certainty because that is where the entertainment of the debate lies. The passion behind the ideas, thoughts, perspectives is energizing.

Oh, I wasn't calling you one or saying that you were ( hostile, that is), that's just the label I put on those sort of new-agey spirituality sort of beliefs, and I was explaining where that label came from.

I disagree with you on this. In my opinion, reality is subjective. If it were objective there would be no debates on anything.

My mom use to always say there were three sides to each argument: his side, her side and the truth. There is always a perspective and that perspective is subjective to the participant. Even if you are an observer, you are still bringing in your own preconceived ideas to your observation. But just like you all debate the No God, Yes God and can not make either side waiver, I am in the No Objective camp and I know I could never convince any of you that there is no such thing as objectivity just like you could not convince me that there is such a thing as objectivity.

And I am cool with that.

I find it funny that those who are in one camp will take my lines on the other camp and debate that but not debate my statements made in favor of your camp.

Well your very life disproves your statement.

If you truly believed there were no such thing as objectivity, you would not function as a member of society. You would not string words together that you assumed would make any sense to us. You would be in a loony bin.

There is a discord between a great many peoples actions and behaviors and what they claim to believe.

This holds true for most religious types (except for marginalized fundamentalists) and for your "no objectivity-three sides to every coin-maybe everyone is right and wrong" construct.

Unfortunately for people who have any construct that speaks of things outside of logic, reason, critical thought, empirical process, testability and the like... unfortunately for them they defeat their own argument by attempting to formulate it and express it.

It also leads to absurdity. These are your only tools. That's it. There is nothing else. When you talk about some other faculty... spirit, feeling, "sensing" things... when you talk about these things you are talking nonsense.



Invisible dragons are made of spirit. I feel it and I sense it. They exist.

Ok, you can't disprove that. You can't say it's impossible. You are both right and wrong to say it isn't true.

Great. Now what? What does that mean? Who cares that I claim that nonsense?

If you actually lived your life in the way you claim to "believe", you'd be in an asylum.


There is no sense in claiming to believe in or attempting to purport that whimsical tripe, since is has no bearing on anything and amounts to absolutely nothing.

Is there what we call objectivity in society when we have a shared experience? Of course there is. This is why we have the same conclusions when we do scientific experiments, why we type and think in the same language, how we communicate, articulate and create.

However, the case of pure objectivity I have always had an issue with.

Let's just say you are in an 11th grade chemistry class with your peers. You mix whatever solutions you are given, follow the experiment, and everyone in the class draws the same conclusion. For this group of people, the experiment is objective, a theory has been proven, a lesson was learned. However, if you through an African Bush man into that class room, his perspective of that same experiment is that some magic just occurred, he does not draw that same conclusions because this is outside of his own experience.

Granted, I may just have an issue letting certain things go... after all it was an anthropology class I took in college 20 something years ago that got me to thinking that nothing is truly objective. I disagreed with many of the conclusions made by the professor, hence it was convenient for me to believe that nothing is completely objective.

For me, I enjoy looking at each situation as possibilities, with multiple dimensions and varied perspectives. Do I do this all day long? Of course not, I would never get anything done. Also if I lived my life this way I would definitely be battier than I already am.

I also refrain from much debate in these forums because there are many people who are much smarter than I am. My guess is that Spademan has an IQ above 160 and crow is a robot. I know I am not the best at articulating some of my thoughts, especially when I am not 100% convinced that I am right in my thought or that I believe in my thought. And I do contend that some of my "hippy-dippy land of all possibilities" prospective could just be a result of my heavily pot smoking years during high school and college.

But I must say, I do read the forum much more than I ever post. And I see the same argument in the religion forum over and over again, and I can't help but wonder if there is some middle ground, where mind, body and spirit can be defined from a scientific standpoint that fits into a religious belief and where a religious belief can have scientific validity. For me, this is an exciting possibility. But I should realize with the passion that you all post on each side of the argument, that this thought would not hold any interest to you but would be dismissed as either metaphysical or pure nonsense.

But at least it is kind of cool that the No God and Yes God Camp can agree on something.

Irony FTL

The facts of the chemical reaction that happened are the same regardless of those two people's access to knowledge about it. In other words, just because the bush man does not know that carbon has 6 atoms does mean it doesn't.



There is no conflict between science and the impulse to live a better life. The conflict comes when religious people believe things about the world without the requirements of evidence. Again, it's not necessary to give up reason in order to be compassionate, kind, or generous. You don't have to believe in men coming back to life in order to act selflessly. You don't need an ancient herding culture's myth-book to be connected with the larger universe.

again, you seem to misunderstand the nature of the debate that goes on here. nobody is debating the validity or virtues of generic spirituality. they are debating the truth of religious claims, which are definitionally objective and have nothing to do with internal perspective. the bible either happened or it didn't. any attempt to link its validitiy to perspective necessarily invalidates it entirely. there is no middle ground to be had.



you want a nonsensical foo-foo feel good world where 1+1 can = 3 if you want. wouldn't be a very productive world

Isn't that the world that Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Maximillian I?