But this is exactly what makes the discussion so unbalanced! We can't just talk about one aspect when there are more than one aspects are present, otherwise faulty conclusions will be reached.

What conclusion were you looking for?

Something that isn't biased by looking at only one aspect of something. Or are you saying that not looking at the other side of the story doesn't lead to bias?

Then your conclusion will be that humans f**k up everything.


Double negative. I can't tell what you're trying to tell me here, please re-phrase?



Also I'm saying it's foolhardy to debate religion and expect any conclusion at all.

How do you know what my conclusions will be? Are you a completely rational and unbiased person?

Lets not forget, if religion is a human construct, interpreted and IMO made by humans, then "humans f**king up everything" can still have religion in it.


What about:

I edited my above post, because I realized I didn't... really have a clear idea what you were saying.

Generally, when it comes to things like this.

I'm pretty snobbish when it comes to literature and movies.

So can everything else.

It seems you're looking for the conclusion that Religion is invariably wrong, a poison, and good for nothing but violence and pain.

Is that accurate?



(out of curiosity, why on earth, if I said "Humans f**k everything up" did you immediately assume I wasn't including religion?)

I was asking whether you thought that neglecting to look at both or all sides of an issue would lead to bias or not, as you gave the impression that you did not think that failure to look at different sides of an issue leads to bias.

Well, yeah, but there are still specific issues in religion that can be debated, such as issues pertaining to the role or religion in politics and suchlike.

No, but I don't like it when people deny that religion is sometimes not purely good by looking only at what good religious people have done and writing everything bad that was done in the name of religion as caused only by other things, with religion not having contributed to the situation, even when sometimes it does.

I wasn't commenting exactly on religion, but on what I perceived to be an imbalance within these sorts of debates.

whereas i've been pointing to both sides and saying YOU'RE BOTH RIGHT!

???

No, I'd assumed that enough had been made of the glaring flaws in the bible, and that perhaps now might be a time to look at the bits it gets right.

In other words, I was attempting to get you to look at both sides of the arguement.

In order to defeat bias.

Are we back on the same page yet?


That's not a debate. Personal morality and politics should not mix, period, not in this country, not in any part of this country.

"ID" is workeable into modern science, and even easily allows for evolution.

The problem is every single person thus far who has tried to make a case for it hasn't even bothered, and instead goes right to creation mythology.

So you are looking at only one side to somehow take bias out just because others have looked on the other side more?

I could find so many people from both sides who disagree with at least one thing up there...

And now, you are deliberately misunderstanding me.



Oh?

Which?

First, who or what would the Intelligent designer be?

Also, ID is just a reworking of the creation myth to circumnavigate legislation on the separation of church and state .

ID falls apart when regression is brought into the equation.

ID flies in the face of science which deals with the natural world, science doesn't deal with the supernatural

Energy cannot be spontaneously generated. It doesn't simply exist out of thin air.

"What came before the big bang" is a very serious question that we cannot currently answer.

We know - or are at least really damn sure - that it happened, but we don't know where all that matter and energy came from.

And if you believe Hawking's cyclical universe (unless he recounted that, i don't remember), there still needs to be a starting point, unless time is also cyclical.

A divine entity that is beyond human understanding can fill this gap: God created the energy, caused the Big Bang, and kickstarted the universe.



I don't claim to believe it.

I claim it's workable and allows both God and Science to co-exist.

Why are they human and not divine? By whose interpretation? By scriptural interpretation Man is made in God's image...meaning that what is human is a reflection of the divine. You get angry? So can God. You get jealous? So can God. You want to be loved? So can God. You see by your interpretation you are right...but by another you could be wrong. Is it possible that God is bigger than you imagine? By the very definition of God it should be.

I think these go together, so I'll leave them together. God requires worship and love because He created us. Some will say He created us for that purpose, others will say that we should love and worship Him for that purpose.

Actually the Bible says that not all who call me "Lord, Lord" will enter into the kingdom. So love isn't it. The Bible does say that Jesus is the only way to get to God the Father. The Torah says that through the Law and obedience you will achieve paradise. The Qu'ran says that only by utter obedience will we enter paradise. The Bhagavhad-Ghita states that by achieving good kharma (and not upvoted kharma...but the real thing) we will reach enlightenment (among other things...it's been a while since I read it). Love isn't mentioned anywhere.

No...it isn't human...you don't like it and you are human, most humans don't like those rules. You seem to understand the rules, so you can choose to play accordingly or not. If you don't play accordingly you get punished. I wouldn't say it was arbitrary...but I can see where you might think so.

No...it's your interpretation of such. It does interest me that you choose the Bible as your definition of God, since you claim He doesn't exist in ANY form...

Here is my point. Ask any Muslim and they will tell you that Allah is God. The same God as in the Bible.

You are right about that. But say you were the only God and you created everything. Wouldn't you be a little jealous?
It sounds to me like you are more "anti-Christian" then atheist. I wonder, are you from a "Christian" nation? If you aren't you have obviously been influenced by the Christian idea of God. Now you know I am a Christian (I hope you got that by now). But I am not currently arguing the merits of my faith in Jesus, but rather the existence of God. You have to admit there is more than one idea of who God is. By calling yourself an atheist you have claimed that none of them are right...yet you seem to only be familiar with one. Interesting.

*PS* The Bible actually puts women in a positive light. There are some women mentioned in the Bible that I would not want to mess with...or who have managed to single-handedly save their nation from destruction. If women were so vile, why make hero's out of them...if you are writing history...you can say whatever. No you seem to want to think that women were considered vile by the Christian God. If you interpret Genesis with a "Christian" mentality, Eve was no more to blame than Adam...I personally blame the serpent.

Compare it with the Allogenes from The Nag Hammadi Library:

"He is neither divinity nor blessedness nor perfection. Rather, this triad is an unknowable entity of him, not that which is proper to him; rather, he is another one superior to the blessedness and the divinity and perfection. For he is not perfect, but he is another thing that is superior. He is neither boundless, nor is he bounded by another. Rather, he is something superior. He is not corporeal. He is not incorporeal. He is not great. He is not small. He is not a number. He is not a creature. Nor is he something that exists, that one can know. But he is something else of himself that is superior, which one cannot know.

He is primary revelation and knowledge of himself, as it is he alone who knows himself. Since he is not one of those that exist, but is another thing, he is superior to superlatives, even in comparison to what is his and not his. He neither participates in age nor does he participate in time. He does not receive anything from anything else. He is not diminishable, neither does he diminish anything, nor is he undiminishable. But he is self-comprehending, as something so unknowable that he exceeds those who excel in unknowability."

Since you were referring to parts of the Bible, I guess this should be an appropriate answer to some of your questions.

So this almighty, omnipresent, omnipotent god is needy and egomaniacal?

Ahhhh, so might makes right? God makes the rules, play or else? Sounds like a bully to me, if he exists I choose not to play with him, I'll take my toys and play with the fair kids thanks.

Jealousy isn't a commendable trait in humans let alone a deity worthy of worship.

Also, you still haven't answered my question as to why your god has saved your life many times and daily allows millions to die by starvation, murder, warfare and natural disaster

By the interpretation of any individual with any basis in human behavior.

Emotions and emotional responses, such as Wrath and Love, are human responses.

And yet the Bible also calls humans flawed, we are sinners, we must repent.

Are you saying that God is so flawed, he would have us as his reflection?


No. I do not believe we are cosmic chia pets.

I do not believe we were created for the only purpose of loving a divine entity.

A child demands love and worship, and punishes for not being loved.

A child.

Not a divine entity.


You are forgetting your Ten Commandments.

The first Commandment is to love God above all else.


Obeying one God over another is grounds for eternal punishment.

That is Human. And that is childish.

And that is cruel.


No. Those are words you placed in my mouth.

What I said is I don't believe that your God exists in the form you accept him.


No.

I would be God.

I would not be jealous. I would not be wrathful, and it would hardly concern me whether a handful of motes on a speck of dust swimming in my cosmos recognized me or not.

Because I would be God.

The desire to be acknowledged is Human.

Because I'm speaking to you, and you are clearly Christian.

It would be pointless for me to debate the ins and outs of a religion you do not adhere to.

The Bible blames the first woman for being weak to temptation, and that is the birth of Sin.

We were cast out from the garden and made mortal because of a woman.

From Genesis, the bible does not put women in a positive light.

Women were considered vile by Paul.

Paul preached Christianity to the most people, following the death of Jesus.

How? The way I understand it is that people are on one side of the spectrum, so you try to push towards the balanced/less biased center by being on the other side of the spectrum.

Well, you said that the role of religion in politics is not a debate, that it should be excluded from politics because it is the personal business of individuals. So what do you think about the controversy surrounding Islamic modes of dress for women? Here it is the atheists who try to mix religion and government by putting government into religion. Or, from the other side, what about those American rednecks who keep on trying to put their religious views into public policy?

Next, your statements about ID. The fact of the matter is that the theory of evolution, while it can be accommodated with the view of ID that you speak of (which sounds a bit like deism to me), it has no need of that theory. If we say that evolution is 'divinely guided' by a 'designer', then what is the point of having theories about natural selection? Natural selection explains changes in species better than ID because some adaptations have been witnessed over the centuries (bacteria becoming resistant to chemicals, bird species 'learning' to reject cuckoo eggs, and some species of cuckoo laying different eggs which some species of birds have not yet learned to reject, etc.), so having that version of ID there would be more like a scientist having a personal conviction beside the scientific theory.

Therefore, I think that there are very few people who would agree with your statements about ID.