Who says we didn't?
Posted on 01/26/2006 1:47:10 PM PST by jennyp
//If I were an atheist, I would still be dubious BECAUSE of my scientific training, not in spite of any lack of knowledge of science. It has nothing to do with God. Call us skeptics, not scared.//
I hear you bump.
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head.
Also brought up something I forgot; Creationists are the all time, never-will-be-challenged, give them the trophy permanently, CHAMPIONS of out-of-context quotations.
I believe there's an entire page devoted to the subject, let me look around and find it.
jennyp, who endows you with your inalienable rights?
???
It's always there isn't it? Beware of the time when they can present one of these arguments and can actually hide their anger and agenda.
Muleteam1
"Liberals and advocates of Bill Clinton come to their beliefs in part through honest errors and in part from evasions of facts and close-minded dogmatism."
"If there really is a God, then there are all kinds of uncomfortable moral implications which follow."
Along with eternal implications...
There is a view of the Bible that holds it is an "inspired" book and that not every word in it is literally true. If you hold to the inspired viewpoint, then the bible is not perfect, and you have to judgment calls and interpret various passages. This is intellectually more challenging, so the fundies opt for the lazier viewpoint.
For example, thou shalt not commit adultery. Forty two year old Bob is married to Betty. Betty is a 40 year old shrew who denies him much of everything fun. Bob can truly say that he is not in love with Betty, yet they have two teenage sons in the house.
Buffy is 25 and was run off the set of "Cancun Girls Run Amok" for too much sex.
Bob decides that he is in love with Buffy who fills his nights with love and pleasure, while he in turn fills a certain void in her life.
Does Bob commit adultery with Buffy, and thus pass the lonely hours married and providing a home to his sons and Betty or does Bob adhere to the Commandment and eschew Buffy?
You are Bob's pastor and he cometh to you for advice. If he stays away from Buffy, he's going to have to divorce Betty or he will die from a buildup of certain natural energies that must be periodically released.
However, upon divorce, Betty suffers. She no longer has her own special victim to torure. The two sons suffer. They will spend the majority of their time with Shrewwife, who will not provide them with nurturing either. Shrewwife will holler at them, attempt to discipline them with tales of how their own screwups cause her distress (as opposed to the typical expediant male solution of simply clobbering them!) Betty, meanwhile, being 40, a shrew, and with two pieces of baggage, will begin sleeping with Mike, the local meth distributor.
As a unit, Bob, Betty, and Sons will have fewer financial resources and Sons may not make college. Betty will be as happy as a pig in slop being mistreated by Mike, but he will abandon her quickly for a younger dupe. Buffy will no doubt required certain bodily enhancements of the siliconic variety and much new clothing, or she will degenerate into Betty.
In short, divorce makes the family suffer. Adultery, however, permits the natural order of things to continue. Everybody is happier.
Now if you believe Noah took two elephants aboard the yacht, you advise suffering. If however, you believe that dinosaurs bones are really, really old, you advise Bob to simply have his affair.
Does it make sense now?
parsy, the sage.
Randomness and uncertainty is built into the very fabric of the entire Universe at a basic level; quantum mechanics. And it can even be experimentally demonstrated.
I'm actually considering writing some sort of an article or book on the subject, but I've noticed how many people have this unbelievably deep seated terror and horror of the very idea of "randomness" or "chaos"....I'd suspect for a lot of people words like that would set off a more negative psychological reaction than words like "evil" or "Satan."
Who says we didn't?
On the topic of the 'basis for ethics' depending on your beliefs; yes, we all have a conscience whether or not you believe in God, but without the belief in a higher deity you are merely dealing with earthly cause-and-effect consequenses for your actions and your own feelings. Looking back on history, you cannont deny that this has a bad effect on behavior.
I believe God set up a universe, where chaos, time, and chance allowed complexity to occur. I suspect there are some ID-generated nudges in evolution, here and there, by God or some other intelligence, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's in the creation of the universe as a place capable of generating and supporting intelligence that I see God's hand, more than in the evolution of specifically human intelligence.
That's the interpretation of some, not all. I'm still waiting for them to find the famous "ape-like creature".
No, it's not. It also isn't all that God requires of us. What if God will reward or punish you according to your humility and submission to His will? What if he requires that you learn of Him, confess His divine supremacy and commit to following Him forever? What if He expects you to follow all of His commandments to the very best of your ability?
What if the reward for that commitment, faith and devotion is far, far beyond the ability of human kind to even comprehend?
That is the God which a very large portion of the human population declares. It doesn't sit well with some.
Perhaps you would care to debunk some of those wild claims, using your scientific training.
The article uses an arguement from economics for a leap of faith into the arenas of chemistry and physics. How about starting with the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
a God? Which God? They apparently don't believe in the God of the bible.
More like, what are evolutionists afraid of? Creationists are afraid that atheists want to outlaw religion, as they have been doing for years.
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