Defending the Truth

I can answer all those questions


It is illogical, all religions are the same illogical mess of hearsay based on hearsay of some rather dubious probably never happened event as an explaination for what we until recently didn't understand. It is also the rather interesting desire to extend our lives beyond the physical death of our body because we think we are that important...there is not a religious belief in the world that doesn't offer some form of divine heaven, nirvana or whatever you want to call it..which extends our life after death because death is something we don't understand..we don't know what happens and wish to think that we are that important that something beyond ourselves notices us and will give us something if we obey whatever set of totalitarian authoritarian rules set forth..of course if we don't follow the rules we get hell or are doomed to come back and repeat life again or will not be given our ever lasting reward...how vain is this thought?? and if vanity is a sin why would anyone who believed in God think it??


There is no proof Moses ever walked through the desert..try as Jews, Christains and Muslims might they have never been able to prove it...not to mention Abrahams call to human sacrfice which God supposedly stopped to show his mercy..mercy would be not to ask someone to kill their son in the first place..he heard God and then went to kill his son is no more a ludicrious idea then people are sucked up by space aliens and anally probed...I know the answer to this is faith but faith in what??? If I said I could forgive all your transgressions and absolve you of your responsibility if you allow me to have my son murdered it would not only be immoral to offer it would be immoral to accept and yet accept they do beyond all and any logic..faith is the complete abandonment of logic

Religion is not God..I have no idea nor do I personally think it matters if there is a real 'God'..if there is a real God and to take the Judeo Christain tradition as example what has he done since he rested on the 7th day??? As far as I can tell he has been resting since save for a few moments whereby he seems to have appeared or spoken in voices to otherwise average illiterate people and tell them to kill their children. And these 'reveleations' to the less then ordinary are suppose to be 'evidence' for the existence of something they can't prove exists other then pointing to the very thing they can't prove exists..

Relgious people do act do act in desteable ways

I also wonder why if there is a God why no-one can agree what that really means..Christains dont agree with other Christains and in the Balkans we saw the result of such disagreement fairly recently..the little known fact is that the fighting parties in the Balkans were Orthodox Christains against Roman Catholics..so please lets not pretend Christains stopped acting like Muslims ...btw the Vatican and none of the Orthodox religions condemned the actions of the 'Christains" in this instance ...

Human multilation

they also mutilate boys in NYC last year several male children of a very young age were found to have a sexually transmitted disease..what followed was the revelation that Jewish Rabbis (in some sects not all) of that belief system suck the foreskin off these young men after they cut it...if I said there is a man sucking the penises of young children you'd all say he should be stopped locked up and the key thrown away but this is what happened..it was discovered it was for religious reasons and that was OK..it isn't OK its awful and not right ..but we cannot question religious freedom even when it interferes with the personal freedom of a person who cannot defend himself..this was New York last year not in some backward 3rd world country

They blowing things up thing...

They all do it and they all think they are justified and thankfully even when they blow up an abortion clinic we say um NO!!!!!!

Religion and most likely the concept of God is manmade its basis is from when we were trying to explain why we exist..which we can now explain without having to refer to God at all..but people still hold on to God because they need to believe that there is more then the dull drudgery of every life I happen to think life is pretty exciting and am not motivated to do good so I get a reward but hey I am in a minority even if we are a growing minority..to me to do good for reward is immoral....which if you need to hold onto it and cannot see the world is amazing without the need to refer to God then good for you all..but please stop trying to pretend belief in any God makes sense at all because it simply doesn't and stop trying to enforce your thohghts onto other people..please if you happen to be Christain refer to Matthew 6:1-8 and do as Jesus suggested...

A side note: it is impossible to think that prior to the receiving of the 10 commandments people thought it was OK to murder, steal or lie..which means that these commandments were created to fit into what we as a society without reference to God already thought..that is morality pre-dates the invention of religion. One I guess could take the illogical of universal truths but the fact is if the truths are universal why doesn't everyone believe the same things

once upon a time FACT there was nothing but zen true zen and all that zen was , was all intelegence and the all of color due to dencety. intelegence developed thought processes and caused the BIG BOOM all in 1 direction a skin like flim & bubbeled up & the intelegence that was within the skin Created a soul sometime later GOD was created much the same way ....musica........possum....

Gagetory,

Your observations are astute, but at the same time, rather cliche.

It's the same old fight, IMO, between religious literalism and literal cynicism.

Religion ISN'T ABOUT the literal... was never intended to be.

I couldn't care a toss about whether, for example, Jesus actually did hop up out of the grave after three days. Now, I wasn't there, so I can't know for sure. But everything from my basic logic and reason to my gut feelings tell me it did not literally happen that way, and the "resurection" has a symbolic, spiritual meaning.

Either way, getting hung up on stuff like that is, IMO, totally beside the point anyhow. Not to be crude, but it's sort of along the same lines of focusing on a date's boobs, instead of trying to get to know her as an actual person.

Yes, people do detestible things in the name of religion. Then again, people do horrible things in the name of all sorts of things. People will do horrible things and say it was out of a love for the country.
Does that make the U.S.A. a horrible place, or our system of government and the principles of this nation horrible?

Anyway, I think it's just the fact that some people are the type who will do horrible things. And if they didn't have religion to justify it, they'd find some other justification.

As far as the whole life after death thing... well, it just makes sense to me that there's more to us than our bio-mechanical functions. It always has, even before I became a particularly religious person. Sure, it's not anything you can pinpoint, or put into a test tube, or hold in your hand and say, "here it is."

But then again, I think it's rather short-sighted and naive to think that which transcends our physical existance would have physical properties to begin with.

Sure, I could be wrong. But, even if there's nothing after death... well, then it's kind of stupid to be afraid of nothing, now isn't it?

But, until I see more compelling arguments than I've seen so far from the strict materialist side, I'm convinced there IS something after death.. and that it's not at all unpleasant. Will it involve a reckoning? Well, sure. Again, that just makes sense. But unless you're a Hitler or a Jeffery Dahmer, I don't think that reckoning will be all that horrible bad for anybody who made an honest effort to do their best.

As a side note, I once watched a program invovling a talk by a woman who was clinically dead for quite some time describing what she experienced of the "afterlife." She said that the reckoning included the rather interesting feature of experiencing everyting one had done to others from the perspective of the others. In other words, if you had been mean to somebody, you would feel your own meanness from their point of view. She said that during that experience, she learned one of the most valuable things she'd done with her life up to that point was something that at the time seemed rather insignifigant. She had during her time in school been nice and friendly and displayed a genuine interest in a retarded boy who everybody else either made fun of or ignored.
See, now that sort of thing makes absolute sense to me. If there is an afterlife, it makes perfect sense that it would involve things like that.
But people on the "good" list going to bliss and people on the "bad" list suffering for ever and ever... no, that makes no sense.

A cliche exists because at its base is truth. You are correct what I said from all points of logic is true.

I spent 13 years in Catholic School, served on the Alter was an acolite and have a degree in theology..to assume that because I don't have the need to explain my entire reason for being by virtue of an unprovaen supernatural power is an assumption you should stop making.

Religion isn't suppose to be literal. How do you know this?? Because I fear there are billions of people who differ all of whom are religious. Lets take Christianity: you now claim people don't literally think that God put his only son to death so as to save them from their sins??? The You make the like Creligious apologetists argument that its not menat to be literal because knowledge has shown us much of the Bible is complete nonsensical unproven stories of dubious origin. The bible is taken as literal by many people..Lets leave out the religious fanatics who think NO went under because of our support of 'homosexuality' and look in other places because that example is way to obvious. The LRA in Uganda took the Bible literally and decided that they would make the immediate region into a place that obeyed to the letter the 10 Commandments, as a result they turned into a Christain Khmer Rouge and are in part responsible for the things now occuring in Darfur, they were funded by the Sudanese and the LRA waged a war of the power to do so they literally drew from the Bible. Why did God not illuminate them as to the fact it wasn't suppose to be literal?? Did he just forget about them?? Seems strange for an omipresent being

I too experienced being dead clinically for a short period of time when I was 17 and I saw nothing I was robbed. But that aside human decency is not drawn from relgion rather religion was written to suit human decency. You should use Ockhams Razor more productively.

Like all religious apologists you claim there is a God but then anything that is bad is mans fault. God things occur and God did it. If we are made in Gods image and are imperfect then God is not perfect either.

I have the right to question my Government and I can control (as far as anyone is able) who is in control. Alternatively religion is an Authoritarian regime in which people do not get a say you either believe the doctrine of whatever sect you belong to or you don't..stop comparing the secular with the religious because you simply cannot..you can't compare the natural with he supernatural and claim they are the same thing...the simple fact there are sects and no-one can agree on what God is should provide enough evidence in an unto itself that God is made to suit the culture not God created society to suit himself

And you can believe anything you want I never said you couldn't but belief is not now nor will it ever be fact. Its not even a theory, its a personally held thought, one you share with many other people, although you can't all seem to agree on what the afterlife is. Why would God promise you something then not explain what it is?? Because as you say the Bible isn't literal so we can't rely on it to give us a clear picture of what God intends or even says or even why we are here..which seems strange in so far as the Bible as well as all other relgious texts claim to answer all those questions...if there is a God it seems like a bit of a dick.


How convienient that anything we know is impossible you have reduced to a symbollic meaning.. Its good you know that what you see in the Resurection is just symbollic because none fo the 4 Gospels agree as to what actually happened. Given that the death and rising of Jesus is the reason the relgion exists so as to save us from our sins you'd think that they'd have gotten the stories correct or at least similar.


I don't need to believe their is an afterlife for me to be a good person. I am a good person regardless of some reckoning. But if you need to believe this so as to give yourself purpose good for you..not trying to stop you I just wonder why any educated person woudl need to believe in the rantings of people who sought to explain what they couldn't explain when I can now explain why without having to resort to believing in something that isn't a fact.

You said people do horrible things and use religion to justify it but if there was no religion they'd use somethign else. The point is there is religion and when they envoke religious belief old men get to suck young babies penises even though in the secular world we think this is a prison worthy offence.

I don't get why you need to add all this un-neccesary thought to your life. Religion is the source of almost every violent act (major and minor) in history please stop pretending people don't take it literally and haven't since they first conceived of explaining a Flood in the Nile Delta by way of Noah building a giant ass boat to save all the animals and then everyone married their cousins to repopulate the world I guess...

This is why I can't stand religious debates. Why would someone go through so much trouble to study religion just to try and debunk it?

Perhaps it could be viewed from a scientist's thinking, FX. Every scientist have their own view. Doctors are scientists. That's why we are encouraged to get 2nd opinions if we think if it will be beneficial for longer living.

Gagetory,

Relax, man. You sound as if you're trying to evangalize me. I understand your point of view... I just don't buy it... it's really just as simple as that.

Speaking of occam's razor.. well, the idea that the universe just somehow exists all on its own and religion is just a mass delusion/conspiracy of power seems to me about as far-fetched as taking many of the Bible Stories literally... so please, don't lecture me on prudent, reasonable thought.

The truth is usually in the middle. And when I see some people on one side worked up to the point of almost sh*tting themseves over the idea that God might exist and people might believe in Him -- and that religion is the source of every bad thing that ever happened... and conversely.. people on the other side just as worked up that only THEIR concept of God and particular religion must be correct... well then, I can reasonably conclude that the actual truth is somewhere between the middle of those two extremes.


"Like all religious apologists you claim there is a God but then anything that is bad is mans fault. God things occur and God did it. If we are made in Gods image and are imperfect then God is not perfect either."

Ummm, I never said that. I think this life can be unpleasant for a reason. In fact, I think it was DESIGNED to be uncomforatable at times.

And religion says pretty much the same thing.

Yeah, I guess you are right. It just seems like a lot of trouble for something that you pretty much can look at and draw your own conclusions. I can imagine taking a religious class as an elective. But to study it just to turn around and not believe in it seems like a waste of time.

People who are totally convinced they are right and everybody else is wrong rub me the wrong way -- regardless of how they arrived at that conclusion.

Are you totally convinced you're right about that?