Philo, you should travel a little more! As everywhere, there are plenty of opportunities for those who want them and have the aptitude. Look at Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium etc, all countries where people are doing fine, thanks very much.

Australia too is full of opportunities for those who seek them out.
The queen has nothing to do with it, neither does religion.

We used to be governed by Melbourne industrialists who made a fortune, operating under a semi monopoly, at our expense. Now they have competition and consumers benefit. Economic rationalism is better then irrational economics!

Clinton is religious in name only, which he had to be to gain votes in America. Both Clinton and Kennedy were womanisers, but both were still great leaders. That is far more important if you look at the big picture, then if they slept with their secretary or not.
Now we have Mullah Bush. He might not sleep with his secretary but the man is a danger to world peace and has the people skills of a rhino... So much for religious types in Govt...

Hawke is a humanist. History is full of them. Religion is not required for people to care about other people.

David, Sergei has just made my point. Religion claims objective morality. Yet what we clearly have is what used to be a barbaric god, who is now a jesus loves your god. I thought that god should have known some time ago that barbarism was not part of morality.

Hello there, hellothere,

First, no need to shout: God is not deaf.

Sorry about your homosexual friends and witches. I do not condone any harassment - but like you wasn’t their choice that got them there?

Yes you will spend eternity in hell if you don’t grow up and face your creator soon.

Yes God has a great sense of humour, He is a great artist as well, just look outside your window sometimes or even better still go out and visit His masterpiece or simply look in the mirror.

God never promised a perfect world; after the fall of Adam and Eve sin entered the world...

>> …millions and millions of us are perfectly capable of deciding whats right and whats wrong by using our brains.<<

First of all it is not ‘your’ brain. Did you manufacture it yourself or bought it from some chain store? You had no choice in the matter of the body you now live in. You did not choose to be conceived or to be born, just thank your lucky start your mother didn’t flush you down the toilet when you were still ‘a blob’.

As for what’s right and what’s wrong – if you mean discovering God; obviously this is beyond intellect alone – but if you mean moral values they are built in you (unless you are a psychopath.)

Your distorted perception of Christianity is what is keeping you from knowing God intimately and following Jesus; instead you are taking your cues from what the world is throwing at you.

It’s alright to feel inadequate and rebellious – but you don’t have to stay that way. God will prove real to you to if you genuinely seek the truth. Your choice.

Nogodslessterror, imagine there is a day when suffering ceases forever. Whether that day comes now or in 50 years does that make the suffering itself any different? 50 years might be a harsh sentence but it still has an end. What if that day never arrives? How much worse is suffering with no end in sight? Eternal suffering is what hell would be like! You, I or anyone else would not want to go there. So why is it then that we experience suffering? Why do we have a glimpse of what hell is like? The Bible teaches that suffering is a mark of our separation from God (Genesis 3) brought on by our ancestors, Adam and Eve, who rebelled against God's wise commands. But there is a way out. God has promised that if you put your trust in his son, Jesus Christ, who suffered a criminal's death by crucifixion in our place in order to bridge the separation we have with God then there will one day come an end to all suffering. But before there can ever be an end to suffering there must be suffering. That is the present situation we find ourselves in. Follow Jesus and make suffering history!

It's interesting that creationists refer to Darwinian evolution as though it's a religion of its own. It cannot be, for a simple reason: evolution is useless without understanding, whereas religion cannot function without ignorance.

Medical technology which relies on the application of genetics and artificial selection wouldn't exist if evolution weren't comprehensible and consistent enough to be applied under any circumstance.

Religion, on the other hand, is dependant on its practitioners not really looking for answers to the questions they ask.

Take irreducible complexity. The argument that the eye is too perfect to have arisen through chance has been shot to pieces a thousand times over. Not only are eyes clunky and inefficient organs, but the intermediate forms are well documented. Most of them are attached to creatures crawling around in your back yard.

But the faithful aren't looking for explanation. They want their comfort zone reinforced, even if it means callous regard for facts and a breathtaking contempt for anyone who won't indulge their insecurity about the complex world we live in. So, "the eye!" they cry, "the eye is perfect!", while those who actually care about the answers weep quietly and explain again, but slower.

Creation scientists are out of their depth when they start messing with scientific evidence. They can't even prove their theology, let alone disprove Darwin's tidy theory.

Why is the Christian bible the true word of God, and not the Q'uran or Dianetics? Why believe Jesus was the son of God, and not Mohammed or L. Ron Hubbard? They've all staked a claim and have plenty of supporters.

The answer, of course, is that the believer believes in Jesus, not Mohammed. Because the believer reads the bible, not Hubbard's recycled science fiction. There's no rationality, no reason. You might as well say capsicum is God's chosen food and watermelon is the devil's work because you like capsicum but not watermelon.

The ID movement itself assumes that every biologist, anthropologist, astrophysicist, and geologist on the planet is involved in a grand plot to falsify and grossly misrepresent data in order to support an explicitly anti-god agenda.

No other conspiracy theory even comes close. If I claimed that the millions of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers on Earth were, in fact, alien freemasons hell-bent on eating our brains, I'd get to spend the rest of my life in an asylum. Yet the paranoia which drives ID is swallowed whole by millions of Christians and receives government funding in the US.

If you wonder why rationalists oppose ID with an almost religious fervour, pause for a moment to think about how destructive and dangerous it looks from the outside.

Dear Serg

I appreciate your colorful and creative efforts to make your point :)
yes.. clearly you put some effort into those. What you are doing though, is actually showing just how '2000s/western' is your outlook.
I don't mean that in any way other than constructive, and here's why.

In my own life, I have worked in Borneo with tribes who shared a similar background and history in so many ways as we read of in the Old testament. It was as follows:

-Kill or be killed (=Rule or be ruled)
-Take slaves, (usually kill the father and take the children)
-My own wifes Grandma had slaves as a result of this. (but slaves were freed when the tribe embraced Christ, yet still they regard my wifes family as 'their' family. I have a nice photo of former slaves with granny I can send u :) jdrmot@tpg.com.au <= my email.

In the case of my wifes people, they didn't commit genocides, they just sliced and diced a few heads and grabbed the kids, (who in some cases were relatives )

Other tribes had this approach:

-We want your territory
-If you stay on it, we will kill all of you except the kids who we will make our slaves.

This was in the days before such luxuries as central governments, which is exactly how it was in Israels day.

http://www.rationalchristianity.net/genocide.html <= for a discussion of the issue.

Apart from the Canaanites, The Israelites were commanded by God to destroy certain tribes for specific reasons which I hope you will read yourself. There was no generalized "You can wipe out any other race which u choose to" type of command. It should be remembered, that the judgement on some groups came from God...not the Israelites.