you guys shouldn't be so hard on Rob. he's just working out issues with his father.

and by father, I mean, his dad (not Gawd -- Gawd is a she).

ha!

me and dad worked out our differences when i was 13!

that is not a religion. that is a personal belief.

religion is a codified belief system. Yrs is just a personal faith. diff-rent strokes.

the existence of people we would call evil in no way validates a belief in a supernatural being.

stephen Gould is not the be all and end all of this topic man.

MOST people in the USA are creationists.

if I were to gather together 2-3 like-minded individuals, would you bump me up to cult status?

:)



that's easy for you to say. you didn't have to spend the night with her.

but I did have to hear you guys through the thin walls.

twas just a personal view of the matter man. just answering the question.
we are all entitled to our views. this is a question of religion, of codified, dogmatic beliefs, not of any personal spirituality.

i know a family of missionaries.

they work in costa rica and often find tribes/indigenous who have had little to zero contact with the outside world.

what i find fascinating is that when an unconnected tribe is found... one of the few things they share in common with other humans is a deity/ies . they usually have a concept of family/communitay and a 'religion'. its a basic human quality to them. they eat, they have family, they have god/gods.

my question to those like rob, is: because its so natural for us to believe in a supernatural creator, doesn't it make sense that one would exist?

of things/traditions that have lasted throughout centuries without losing too much popularity, religion is one of them. and it has remained largely unchanged. things that constantly change are our own human "scientific" ideas about the universe and how it started, and medical knowledge/communications/transportations.

aside from the biological needs, humans need community/family/relationships and a "god". those are the most common traits.

you say that it is unnatural for a man to deprive his self a basic human desire like sex, and i say the same for religion/spirituality. it makes sense to people who only know how to make sense of very few concepts. granted, a lot of them do it wrong [witch doctors, etc], but they do other basic things wrong as well [hygiene].

there is no god.

good day.

Sorry, but 'just a personal view' doesn't negate what you said. If I said 'you're a useless cunt' and said 'but that's just my opinion', you're still well within your rights to take offence at the fact I just called you a cunt (hypothetically - obviously, I'd never use such knavish language).

Personal spirituality and 'codified, dogmatic beliefs' (Newtonian physics, anyone?) are often one and the same. I think this word 'dogma' is thrown about with scant regard for its actual purpose.

Maybe it wasn't a serpent but a vagina that led Adam astray.

its funny, cuz yr username

Philosophy precedes science and theology. To hold either as truth is to be satisfied with particular answers from which they derive. As it is, I am never ideologically satisfied.

This show asks philosophical questions to those who are largely unpracticed in, and in some instances resentful of, philosophy.

trust me there is no good. good is a product of human phantasy.
religion makes people dumm and to a tool of bad forces.
believe on kims pantys or thurstons dick or noise feedbacks

thats exactly my problem with this show, it is rather pretentious. It asks big questions to people with small answers. I was hoping for much more but as let down as I was with the God Delusion by Dawkins. Most atheist arguments are as ignorant, baseless and unsophisticated as most common people's defense of theism, and further many scientists and scientifically minded people are as duped, deceived and ignorantly brainwashed to accept the status quo's of science theories and not even delve into theology for a second, where as theologians and philosophers who are wise use science as a tool to expand their own understanding of theology or philosophy. Scientists today are blindly following beliefs without testing them for themselves, which is not science, where as many people in fact find religion the way scientists should be actually searching for the answers instead of dismissing the question.


many scientists are just as ignorant and lacking of understanding of theology, where as quite a few theologians have a rather deep understanding of science and many religious people are practicing scientists, engineers, chemists, doctors etc etc (in other words, theoritical scientists who blindly dismiss theism are ignorant and misunderstand, when there are plenty of religious people who so deeply understand science that they practice its principles for their living. Religion can be for everyone, but some scientists act like its only for priests and ignorant masses, but many religious people are practicing scientists and see no such dichotomy)


In regards to this thread, I do not believe that I posted the questions correctly. I need to watch some clips and discuss some specifics, I was hoping for a more specific kind of discussion based on more specific questions. Those ones I posted are just the titles of the episodes, but in the shows themselves they ask dozens of questions related, and these kinds of questions are the ones I wanted to discuss, such as the Cosmological Argument as I posted above.

I do not see enough science coming from scientific arguments against theism, and I enjoy detailed science, so I am often disappointed. Science is a valuable tool for theology, it asks theology very sophisiticated questions which require heart-felt and intelligent consideration.

truth : )


Thats often my point, but I rarely accept the concreteness of reality to begin with. Most people dogmatically accept science as doctrine, its the new gospel, where as in reality, there is no such proof of anything, science, religious or otherwise. Proof itself is illusory, all of life is subjective, there is no possibility for an objective reality, so how could science truly have discovered such objective evidence? Their evidence is no more proof than an aparation of the Virgin Mary or a miraculous vision.. they only prove things to the individual, but they are hardly proof in the real sense.


well, taking into consideration the above response, no body has ever spotted anything right? but, on the other hand, billions of people, myself included, are convinced of our own deeply personal, individual and very real experiences of divine perception. We believe that we have 'spotted the bastard' as much as Newton believed that the moon went around the earth because of gravity.

it's been a while, westernquinoxrocks

well, war is war, and whether warmongers have used religion or science as a pretext, it plagues mankind since the beginning. BUT, what is scary is that while religion may have hung, stoned and burned enough people to death in the past, science today has equally had a penchant for blood, only much to our own horror, as upped the scale dramatically. Religion did not invent the atomic bomb, or the machine gun, or the chemical weapon, these were the toys of curious scientists who with a lack of empathy and hope, used their skills to create tools of death and destruction..

scientists at war are much more frightening to me than religious fanatics. The jihadists are pussies compared to the destructive powers of modern military technology..







while apocalyptics have prophecises the end of the world since its beginning, today scientists have truly made it a potential reality.

by it's very definition, dogma is not up to questioning, nor to corrections, nor to any type of investigation.

newtonian physics STILL works 99.9999 % of the time. it does not apply in highly specific areas such a sthe big bang, quantum world, or black holes.

Dogma is not unerring and is privy to change. The two cathechisms produced within the last century propose often conflicting 'dogmas'. It's only extremist nutters (of whatever stripe) who propose that the an absolute, total interpretation of scripture should be abided by by the faithful. Again, America's vocal Christian extremist minority are among the most abhorrent in the world.