[Serious]Why are you not a believer of the existence of God

[thebuffalo]

"So the Biblical scholars mis-translated the Hebrew word for "young woman" into the Greek word for "virgin," which was a pretty easy mistake to make, since there is only a subtle difference in the spelling. But back then it was the "virgin" that caught people's attention. It's not every day a virgin conceives and bears a son. So you keep that for a couple of hundred years, and the next thing you know, you have the Holy Catholic church."

Mainly the point is that over hundreds or thousands of years, stories change and become far from what actually happened.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I thought the mistranslation was from "unmarried woman". The point is still the same, though. Once you translate a document from language to language to language, while also transcribing from book to book to book, all you have is a giant game of telephone.

Still, even with that problem, the bible is uncommonly problematic. The early days of the established Catholic church included a fierce competition between two camps debating exactly what Christ was. The bible is anything but silent on the subject. However, scripture ads equal amounts of weight behind the arguments that he was the son, and that he was an aspect. There wasn't a solution to this question until the Creed of Nicaea, and even that was nothing more than a political compromise.

[Spoo]

Which came first .. the chicken or the egg

FunkyDexter notwithstanding, I'm going with the chicken.

I haven't tried to put this into words before, but my thinking generally relies on evolution.
"First" there was the "big soup" (I'm referring to here on earth), a conglomeration of
chemicals and water. Then comes along a cosmic ray, and a new molecule is formed.
Then comes along another cosmic ray, and a larger molecule forms .. eventually some
genetic string of simple DNA.

This process repeats and simple life forms, such as bacteria, appear. More cosmic rays,
more mutations, and then chickens.

The chickens can't reproduce yet, ie, form eggs .. they just live and die. There aren't too
many of them. But, then comes along another cosmic ray, changing a strand of DNA, and
this one chicken is now able to form an egg. A different cosmic ray hits another chicken,
enabling it to fertalize an egg-forming chicken. As this sexual approach leads to faster
propogation of the species, this randomly formed species "stands the test of time."

[Niya]

[Niya]

[Niya]

[Niya]

[Niya]

The above images sum up why I will no longer believe in the existence of God.

Now on a more serious note:-

I really started this thread in order for me to try putting myself in the minds of atheists but I guess we just have different beliefs. If you don't believe in God and He is true and hell is true then you should suffer in the end but if He is not true and you believed in Him, what will happen to you after you die?

I can tell you how I reason with this but I've discovered people who share the same reasoning but can articulate it much better. Not to mention they're more knowledgeable about the insanities of religious thought than me, some I wasn't even aware of:-





The guy who made those videos articulate my thoughts better than I could. He's pretty spot on.

[Niya]

Here's another cute one:-


Perfect illustration of the twisted mind of a religious person.

[Nightwalker83]

I think the question now needs to be "Why are you not a believer of the existence of this thread"!

[Niya]

I think the question now needs to be "Why are you not a believer of the existence of this thread"!

?

[dclamp]

Here's another cute one:-

(Video)

Perfect illustration of the twisted mind of a religious person.

That is so true. I have met so many people who are like this.

Also loved those God Memes

[Niya]

That is so true. I have met so many people who are like this.

Exactly what I thought when I found that vid. It reminds me of time at an old job where all the employees except me were Jahovah's Witnesses. JWs as far as they're concerned, are mandated by God to convert any creature under the sun towards the "truth" as they called it so you know a little heathen like me was really in for it. It was like 8 hours a day of pure divine propaganda. I was pretty naive at the time and before coming to work there I never really questioned religious doctrines and beliefs. I sorta accepted it as truth so I was quite receptive to their attempts at indoctrinations. But after a while I started to question what it is they were teaching me as there were quite a few contradictions and sometimes, just plain nonsense in what they were trying to sell me as truth. They're explanations for these inconsistencies made even less sense. Ironically it was my experiences at this time with these people that finally led me to fully understand that Christianity was based on a bunch of bronze age nonsense. That video is quite reflective of the times my bullshit detector was scratching and clawing against their indoctrination attempts in the late half of the game.

[Shaggy Hiker]

@Spoo: I'm going with the egg. While you make a good point when it comes to life itself, we are talking chickens here, and chickens came from eggs. It does come down to evolution though, and the falibility of our concept of speciation. Before there was a chicken there was a proto-chicken that evolved into the chicken. At some point there was some change to the genome of the proto-chicken that resulted in a chicken, but it happened when two proto-chickens did the funky chicken and produced an egg that hatched into something that was quite similar to them, but was not them, nor was it a faithful reproduction of all of their genes. While this time cannot be tracked to a single reproductive event, there was a point where two things that were not yet fully chickens mated to produce an offspring that met the full criteria of chickenhood.

[Niya]

Before there was a chicken there was a proto-chicken that evolved into the chicken. At some point there was some change to the genome of the proto-chicken that resulted in a chicken, but it happened when two proto-chickens did the funky chicken and produced an egg that hatched into something that was quite similar to them...

Yea I saw that video too

[Nightwalker83]

?

Well, if the thread didn't exist we wouldn't be having this discussion.

[dee-u]

I am starting to believe that for some people it is easier to criticize God for whatever imperfections we perceive than to criticize "evolution" and it is somewhat saddening. We are all programmers here and we are able to make those programs because of our thought, we cannot make a program just by randomly typing on the keyboard, someone with an intelligent mind created those programs but even if we believe our programs to be perfect, others may still criticize it for whatever reason.

[Niya]

I am starting to believe that for some people it is easier to criticize God for whatever imperfections we perceive than to criticize "evolution" and it is somewhat saddening.

Christianity: The fantasy that life on Earth was perfectly created in 6 days by a supreme entity and got messed up because a talking snake convinced a woman to eat a magical fruit.

Evolution: The idea that tiny changes add up to a huge difference over the span of millions of years.

Come on, should there even be any argument ?

we cannot make a program just by randomly typing on the keyboard

I think I can be quite certain that if I wrote a program to constantly output random bytes of random lengths into executables, I'd get a couple "Hello World"s in a few hundred thousand years.

[Nightwalker83]

I am starting to believe that for some people it is easier to criticize God for whatever imperfections we perceive than to criticize "evolution" and it is somewhat saddening.

Well, saying that there is a god and that he has planned stuff to happen for us implies that we are in-fact robots which, we are not!

[dee-u]

We are not controlled by God, if He controls us then He may have prevented people from criticizing Him, we have our free will and we are free not to believe in Him, alas, narrow is the way that leadeth unto heaven and I'd sure miss having you guys up there. =)

[Niya]

We are not controlled by God, if He controls us then He may have prevented people from criticizing Him, we have our free will and we are free not to believe in Him

Wait a minute....does God have perfect knowledge of what will happen in the future ? I'm pretty sure I've heard a lot of Christians make that claim. I'm curious, where do you stand ?

[jmcilhinney]

God may exist. We don't know what initiated the Big Bang. Many scientists don't rule out the possibility that it was some being that exists on a higher plane than our universe. If that is what happened then that was the extent of that being's involvement in creation. God, as described by organised religion, does not exist. Organised religion is b*llocks and really just a tool to control people.

[TysonLPrice]

I don't believe in God...but I'm afraid of him.

[techgnome]

I think the question now needs to be "Why are you not a believer of the existence of this thread"!

According to Schrödinger, this thread did not exist until I opened it and interacted with it.

As for much of the other points... religion is is imperfect as are the people that created it. Doesn't matter what religion it is... they all have their contradictions (tolerance and love thy neighbor and all that... unless they are gay, Muslim or somehow other wise different from you)... it's because of these contradictions and hypocritical messages that I don't go to church. Do I believe in God, sure. Part of it is because of the way I was raised, and part of it is because of personal experiences. It's the same reason I do believe in ghosts and demons. I have had too many experiences for me to ignore that they do exist. And I don't mean from watching episodes of Ghost Hunters, I mean, real, live experiences. I also believe that some people can be psychic too... most that claim to be, aren't... but some few are.

-tg

[kfcSmitty]

We are all programmers here and we are able to make those programs because of our thought, we cannot make a program just by randomly typing on the keyboard, someone with an intelligent mind created those programs but even if we believe our programs to be perfect, others may still criticize it for whatever reason.

A single programmer cannot program by simply smashing on the keys. However, if you take trillions and trillions of people all smashing on the keyboard, several hundred thousand of them could very well write something that works.

Evolution is constantly criticized, re-examined and if someone were able to prove it false, it would be discarded for a better theory. No religious person has that same conviction. Science is about learning more about the universe and changing our beliefs based on fact. Religion is about sticking to your story no matter what evidence is thrown in your face to prove otherwise.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I am starting to believe that for some people it is easier to criticize God for whatever imperfections we perceive than to criticize "evolution" and it is somewhat saddening. We are all programmers here and we are able to make those programs because of our thought, we cannot make a program just by randomly typing on the keyboard, someone with an intelligent mind created those programs but even if we believe our programs to be perfect, others may still criticize it for whatever reason.

That's not a correct analogy. If we weren't there, who would do the random typing on the keyboard? The point is that virtually all chemical reactions in this world are accepted without resorting to faith. DNA is nothing more than chemicals, and nobody is seriously suggesting otherwise, not even in the wackiest religious views. Given DNA and cell structure, evolution is nothing spectacular. It certainly isn't random, but it isn't directed, either. So the comparison is not to a bunch of coders randomly hitting keys on a keyboard. The comparison is to the creation of the keyboard in the first place. The rest of it is well understood and can be readily replicated.

Now, you might feel that leaves open a window for God, as somebody created the keyboard, even though once the keyboard was there the rest is quite unimpressive. Of course, saying that God created the DNA and the Ribosomes then sat back and watched what happened is hardly a fair reading of scripture. If you chose to believe that, I'd have no particular quibble with you. Of course, by then you have largely abandoned scripture in favor of making up something that feels more accurate, which is all anybody else has done.

But random typing on a keyboard is not a valid analogy, since evolution is not random, and you have the skills to determine this for yourself. It is an unintelligent process, to be sure, but it is clearly capable of producing the life that we see. That's not something that is accessible to everybody, but it IS accessible to a coder of your skill. Therefore, if you choose not to believe it because you refuse to look at it, you can't very well expect us to join in what amounts to willful blindness. You would only use evolution in coding to solve problems that you can't solve with your human intelligence, and it may well be that you have never encountered such a problem, but they certainly exist.

[Shaggy Hiker]

A single programmer cannot program by simply smashing on the keys. However, if you take trillions and trillions of people all smashing on the keyboard, several hundred thousand of them could very well write something that works.

That may or may not be an argument for how the first cells arose, but it still isn't evolution. In the case of evolution, you would have to add some process that selected the product of that typing such that only the chosen typists got to type more. In the case of life, the selection mechanism is the chance to reproduce, but it doesn't HAVE to be that selection mechanism. In computer programs, you can make the selective force be whatever you want. Quite often, you make the wrong choice. Several of my programs originally evolved for the wrong target, which can be a very subtle bug to find. However, that was there because I had a target in mind. If reproduction is the only target, then there is no right or wrong to the evolution, there is only success or failure, which can be as much accidental as deliberate. It doesn't take trillions, though, it doesn't even take dozens in many cases.

[Spoo]

@Spoo: I'm going with the egg. While you make a good point when it comes to life itself, we are talking chickens here, and chickens came from eggs. It does come down to evolution though, and the falibility of our concept of speciation. Before there was a chicken there was a proto-chicken that evolved into the chicken. At some point there was some change to the genome of the proto-chicken that resulted in a chicken, but it happened when two proto-chickens did the funky chicken and produced an egg that hatched into something that was quite similar to them, but was not them, nor was it a faithful reproduction of all of their genes. While this time cannot be tracked to a single reproductive event, there was a point where two things that were not yet fully chickens mated to produce an offspring that met the full criteria of chickenhood.

Shaggy

The above bit seems to be our only (ahem) bone of contention.

Let's take this step by step.

1.

two proto-chickens did the funky chicken and produced an egg

On this part we are in total agreement.
This is the event that led me to "go with the chicken."

2.

that hatched into something that was quite similar to them, but was not them, nor was it a faithful reproduction of all of their genes

This is the part where we diverge.
This is the situation that apparently leads you to "go with the egg."

I'm no biologist or geneticist, but why would it not be a "faithful reproduction of their genes"?
To me, it would be.

Unless, perhaps, another cosmic ray enters the picture and causes a mutation in the egg.
Could you expand?

[Niya]

....and part of it is because of personal experiences. It's the same reason I do believe in ghosts and demons. I have had too many experiences for me to ignore that they do exist. And I don't mean from watching episodes of Ghost Hunters, I mean, real, live experiences. I also believe that some people can be psychic too... most that claim to be, aren't... but some few are.

-tg

I'm sure that we don't even know a good 10% about how reality itself really works but that is taking it a little too far for me. I'm willing to accept weird stuff like 11 dimensions but when we start with ghosts and demons I mean its just....Come on, we barely scratched the surface of understanding our reality. Stuff like M-Theory is massively complicated on its own, but when you apply intelligence to beings that exist in state that is beyond our senses to detect, you're just adding unnecessary complexities to an already complex system that we barely understand. Gods, demons, ghosts ? I really don't how to even begin rationalizing the existence of such things, especially in the absence of any kind of evidence.

You know to be honest, I've heard a lot of people talk about first hand experience with paranormal happenings and I've always wished really hard to get just one such experience. Just one! Man, I tell you I'd settle for a moving shadow or something. I'm starting to think its a little too much to ask

[jmcilhinney]

I am starting to believe that for some people it is easier to criticize God for whatever imperfections we perceive than to criticize "evolution" and it is somewhat saddening.

How can you criticise evolution for our imperfections? It's just a process with no specific purpose. If God exists and he created us then we should be perfect because supposedly God is and he doesn't make mistakes. If that's true then he must have wanted us to be imperfect, so how is He worthy of worship as a result?

We are all programmers here and we are able to make those programs because of our thought, we cannot make a program just by randomly typing on the keyboard, someone with an intelligent mind created those programs but even if we believe our programs to be perfect, others may still criticize it for whatever reason.

Sure we could... if we had enough time. The thing that those who claim that evolution is improbable forget is the vast time scales involved. If we have seen evolution at work in the short time that we have been specifically studying it then imagine how much has occurred in the millions of years preceding. If we had many millions of years then we could easily bash out random bits of of text on the keyboard and repeatedly throw away the bits that didn't work and keep only those that improved what we already had. In the number of keystrokes that could be made in millions of years, do you not think that something useful would result? It's not like evolution was required to make the jump from sea slug to human being in one go.

[kfcSmitty]

That may or may not be an argument for how the first cells arose, but it still isn't evolution. In the case of evolution, you would have to add some process that selected the product of that typing such that only the chosen typists got to type more. In the case of life, the selection mechanism is the chance to reproduce, but it doesn't HAVE to be that selection mechanism. In computer programs, you can make the selective force be whatever you want. Quite often, you make the wrong choice. Several of my programs originally evolved for the wrong target, which can be a very subtle bug to find. However, that was there because I had a target in mind. If reproduction is the only target, then there is no right or wrong to the evolution, there is only success or failure, which can be as much accidental as deliberate. It doesn't take trillions, though, it doesn't even take dozens in many cases.

Completely agree. I was referring to how the cosmos was created and how life began, not evolution itself.

[jmcilhinney]

I watched the video from post #689 and followed some links to an episode of the Australian TV show Q&A featuring Richard Dawkins & Cardinal George Pell, the most senior member of the Catholic church in Australia. During that show, George Pell said that God did not create Adam and Eve and that that was just a religious story to illustrate a point. He said that human beings did in fact evolve, from Neanderthals or the like. Richard Dawkins rightly corrected him on the evolutionary path but, more importantly, raised the question of what original sin actually means if the Garden of Eden never existed. That point was never addressed. Interestingly, George Pell also said that animals have souls, albeit less complex than those of human beings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD1QHO_AVZA

[techgnome]

I'm sure that we don't even know a good 10% about how reality itself really works but that is taking it a little too far for me. I'm willing to accept weird stuff like 11 dimensions but when we start with ghosts and demons I mean its just....Come on, we barely scratched the surface of understanding our reality. Stuff like M-Theory is massively complicated on its own, but when you apply intelligence to beings that exist in state that is beyond our senses to detect, you're just adding unnecessary complexities to an already complex system that we barely understand. Gods, demons, ghosts ? I really don't how to even begin rationalizing the existence of such things, especially in the absence of any kind of evidence.

You know to be honest, I've heard a lot of people talk about first hand experience with paranormal happenings and I've always wished really hard to get just one such experience. Just one! Man, I tell you I'd settle for a moving shadow or something. I'm starting to think its a little too much to ask

Hey, until I had such first hand experiences... I too didn't necessarily believe in them either. It's one of those things... but over the last 30+ years... for me, the personal evidence is a little too much for me to ignore. And in the case of the demon... I wasn't alone at the time, there were about a half-dozen of us present at the sighting and we all saw it. Then again, I will admit that it may not have been a demon specifically as it didn't seem malevolent, and it may have just been a spirit... the reason I think it was a demon was the eyes... but still, that doesn't negate that I think they possibly exist.

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

You know to be honest, I've heard a lot of people talk about first hand experience with paranormal happenings and I've always wished really hard to get just one such experience. Just one! Man, I tell you I'd settle for a moving shadow or something. I'm starting to think its a little too much to ask

You're too modern. If you were a bit old school, you'd have had plenty of those experiences. I think peyote would get you there.

It's kind of odd that I would make a drug reference, considering that the hardest drug I've ever done was aspirin, but when I get old and decrepit, I might try some mushrooms or something. It's kind of like the point behind Demolition Derby: Once the machine has worn down to the point that it isn't really all that functional or reliable anymore, you might as well have some fun with wrecking it the rest of the way.

@Spoo: The analogy breaks down pretty thoroughly, and I'd rather not try to defend that position. The problem is that the term "chicken" is used to describe any number of different animals both specifically and very loosely (prairie chickens are not any kind of chicken, nor is Chicken of the Sea). So, since we can barely say what is a chicken, saying when they arose is pretty near impossible. However, if you could come up with a definitive definition of what is a chicken, then you could come up with a definitive definition of what is not a chicken. Two of those not-quite chickens mated. The genomes separated and recombined when the egg was fertilized. Something got a bit catawumpuss in the transcription, or some incorrect nucleic acid got inserted, or whatever (including possibly a cosmic ray, though those tend to simply break the DNA rather than substitute one base for another), and the result was that a gene was changed, and chicken-ness was where it had not been in the parents. However, since there is no such thing as chicken-ness, and we can't even come up with a sound definition of what is a chicken, the whole discussion is rather specious. I wouldn't disagree with you about life back to the primordial soup, but those certainly weren't chickens. The egg itself came along long after life did, but before chickenhood was in flower (batter, actually), so it wasn't a chicken before the egg, and it wasn't a chicken for quite some time after the egg, but at some point a thing hatched out of an egg that was in some way different from the genes of its parents, and that difference was chicken-ness...but in reality, it is all just a human concept of what is a chick, so, it was neither the chicken nor the egg, but mind, that came first.

[Spoo]

Shaggy

No, I'm afraid we still disagree.

The proto-chicken vs real-chicken issue aside for the moment,
my way of thinking leads me to believe that, in the case of sexual
reproduction, a male and female life-form must be present to create
a fertalized egg.

Hence, the chicken comes first.

Spoo

[5ms?]

Jesus loves you. My gardener Jesus wanted me to let you guys know.

Till him thanks

I never met an atheist before but only in this forum so I was curious as to how an atheist thinks.

Have you not looked at this thread

It is our choice if we want to end up in hell

No... it's your choice if you want to end up in hell.
I know there is no hell to go to, so I have no choice, I can not go there.

Well to me, each is to his own.
People must be free to believe what they want, but must also allow others to hold their beliefs.

I believe in elephants.

I to believe in elephants, and I believe in rabbits

[Shaggy Hiker]

I don't think it is so much of a disagreement in substance as a difference in scale. You are looking at the metaphorical sequence of life beginning, while I am looking at the much narrower sequence of chicken beginning. While there is sexual reproduction without males and females, as a general rule, I think there probably was life before there was eggs. However, there were certainly eggs before there were chickens, too, so by the time that chickens entered the timeline, eggs had been around for millions of years. Life had been around for longer than eggs, almost certainly (though at some point it becomes a bit hard to figure out what an egg is), but chickens are just a sub-plot.

[Spoo]

Shaggy

Yes .. well put.
.
.
.

I think there probably was life before there was eggs

This is the bit I was focusing on.
.
.
.

However, there were certainly eggs before there were chickens, too, so by the time that chickens entered the timeline, eggs had been around for millions of years.

Totally agree.

Spoo

[Shaggy Hiker]

See, the only thing we disagree about is whether or not we disagree about anything.

[dclamp]

According to Schrödinger, this thread did not exist until I opened it and interacted with it.

Not necessarily true. You knew this thread existed when looking through the CC forum. Its more accurate to say that you didn't know if we were dead or alive before opening this thread.