All the best with that, my friend.

It is pointless arguing with a religious person about evidence based reasoning. Faith is about just that, the holding of a belief in the absence of proof ie. no evidence.

On that premise, science can never hold its own in an argument about a belief in a supernatural being because it has to contend with the powerful weapon of indoctrination. Intelligent religious people seem to be able to compartmentalize away that aspect of rationale and logical reasoning. This is not to put religious people down, afterall we are all brainwashed or influenced to some extent via marketing and advertising.

Without the usual tangible tools of debate, it is really like banging your head against a brick wall so why do we keep doing it? The religious articles and posts seem to get more responses than other posts. Why is that?

"I may find out what it’s like to be part a bolt of lightning above Tanzania. Or a breath of wind in a sail."

Sorry David Dawson but you will never feel what it is like being lightning or wind because YOU will be dead, nonexistent, and incapable of feeling anything. Nice thought though.

A heap more pleasant than the ones put out by our resident three amigos. These chaps tout words like 'hell', 'lake of fire', 'eternal damnation', and 'see you at the resurrection' like the best death cultists going.

As the good rabbi explains "Few Jews have believed in hell. One would have to ascribe too much sadism, too much of a delight in punishing, to God," and who "like to think God is above the sort of vindictiveness some hellfire preachers ascribe to Him."

Moses did his best to rid the Jewish people of the death centred beliefs they had picked up from the Egyptians while enslaved. There is virtually no mention of hell or eternal damnation or even an afterlife in the Old Testament. In reality it is sometimes difficult not to view Christianity and Islam as the bastard offspring of the Jewish faith, like rebellious teenagers fixated on heavy metal death music and gothic themes.

While as Martin, Boaz, and runner prepare for the 'Rapture' I had better think about how I'm going to die by being thrown into the lake of fire but still face eternal damnation, though I'm sure their personal gods will find a way.

Some posters on these forums suggest that religion is the basis for our morality.

I don't think that's the case. Religion tries to induce a type of false morality by the carrot-and-stick method.

Do bad things and you will be punished - do good things and there will be a huge pay-off at the end.

Nothing about doing good just because it's the better thing to do.

Now that's a pretty selfish and totally self-centred attitude for existence.

Take away the notion of a chance at eternal life and religion (and life itself) becomes meaningless for many people.

For them, the purpose of the entire universe just to create an environment where people can live while they accrue enough "frequent-flyer points" just to make it to the next level.

Hey Sam said...

Yeah I am with you in my absolute awe at the process by which a zygote becomes a fully formed human.. quite incredible. I am a 4th year med student and I never cease to be stunned at the intricacies and complexities of the human organism. But I can't agree with this:

"I mean there has to have been some centralized control otherwise too much risk of variable results which I know does not often happen."

Why does this have to be? I know we may not be able to currently explain the mechanism by which this happens, but we might one day, mightn't we?

If that centralised control does not reside in DNA (or mitochondrial DNA or something else that is present in every cell) then where could it be? I know that the researchers were pretty flummoxed when the genome was sequenced, that there were only approx. 30k genes when they had expected far more to account for the complexity of the human animal..
http://biochem118.stanford.edu/Papers/Genome%20Papers/Genome's%20Riddle.pdf

Their theory seems to lie in the ability of the relatively small number of genes to combine proteins in different ways that lower order species have not managed.

Interesting stuff anyway but none of it is remotely evidence for a creator, IMHO.

<< Richard Dawkins said it best: "When you understand why YOU don't believe in Thor, then you will understand why I don't believe in God.">>

I did not know about this gem, Jon J. This sounds like: When you understand why you cannot speak Chinese, then you will understand why I do not speak Turkish.

In both cases it is a statement about the ‘unbeliever’s’ mind, not about the subject of his unbelief or ignorance, but only up to a point. I, for instance, do not believe in Thor, and I think I understand why, but would not need to write a book about the “Thor Delusion” filling it with arguments why I do not believe it. The idea of Thor is not that important for me, to be anti-Thor it is not an important part of my world view.

David’s article itself is more or less classical pantheism in an agnostic robe. The Buddhist, or other oriental versions, seem to me more inspiring in that they complement the Western/Christian way of seeing things.

C.J. Morgan, rommel, snake, pelican (and others): I think J.W. Goethe in his Faust expressed a good understanding of your position. In the best English translation I know,

True, human beings may abound
Who growl at things beyond their ken,
Mocking the beautiful and good,
And all they haven't understood ...