Hey good thief,

It is not my goal to diminish your beliefs but rather to hold mine up to give you some idea of why they sustain me. Meanwhile I do agree that Dawkins and some of his followers are lacking a degree of empathy.

Maybe it is the curse of the optimist but I have a faith in the human race. I believe that given a chance most humans want to live in peace and harmony. Also given a chance for our natural empathy to develop, free from the whims of those who would confuse or deny it, I feel any of us could comfortably co-exist with any other human being. Whatever gets in the way of that is my take on ’evil’ and if that includes any of your lot good thief then they will have to put up with me telling them why they are wrong.

Like davidf I had real problems with the story of Abraham, but the biblical story that troubled me most was the Passover. To think of a God who would actively harden the Pharaoh’s heart against releasing the captive Jews then to slaughter the firstborn of every Egyptian family when he didn’t was incomprehensible. What partly resolved the issue for me was learning that when Jewish families gather at their Passover celebrations there is a little wine spilt from the cup in remembrance of the children who had to die to secure their release. In the enormity of the whole God epic this little annual human act of empathy, resting outside the bible, something that was not commanded by god, proclaims something about us as a species and it is that something I cling to.

To paraphrase your good self, is God the only source of morality? No he is not, and his adherents and advocates shouldn’t claim that he is.” But you do have a great advocate for empathy and that was Jesus. May I chastise you for omitting ‘enemies’ in your Love Commandment? He was saying to love them you have to think of them as fellow human beings. Empathy!

Hey bushbasher,

This (?) is a he.

Watching Compass the other night I thought about your (a). It was a story about a Jewish teenager who survived the concentration camps and who later became a Jehovah's Witness after observing them in Auschwitz. Here was a bunch of ordinary people who refused to salute Hitler, or the Nazi flag, or fight in the war and where imprisoned and executed for their beliefs.

In the camps they were offered their release if they chose to renounce their faith. Most refused and many lost their lives.

I'm not sure I can dismiss lightly the thought that a critical mass of people who hold a deeply felt religious belief against war might be capable of a great service for the human race.

Don't know about giving up my birthday though.

Just had the thought, it would be a little depressing if we were all JWs since every weekend we would be out knocking on doors and there would never be anyone home.

What has all this bumph got to do with Darwin, evolution and Natural Selection?

You either decide to take a leap of faith and believe in God or not.

Then you take another major leap of faith in believing that the bible is the inspired, literal word of GOD

It seems to me that the Biblical version of creation depreciates "GOD"
Why couldn't he/she/it take a million ++ years to perfect his creation; rather than c. 5,000 years?

What has all this got to do with the original article under discussion?

hi michael2, i think all of us left have either decided the original article was pretty boring or pretty dumb, or both. but i'm sure if you wait around, there'll be a silly anti-evolution article along soon.

hey that-he-csteele, i don't dismiss for a minute that a community of people following (a) could, and do, do great good. of course, with the wrong (a), they could do great harm ...

but are they being moral? again, maybe i'm just playing semantics, but i don't see following rules as being moral, even if we judge their actions (from our moral perspective) as doing good.

what i was suggesting was that perhaps people know their gods a la (b), and then (a) is really an extension of (b). then, i could see (a) as being a form of morality. but goodthief for one seemed very dismissive of this formulation. which is fair enough, of course.

It’s the nature of the creation/evolution debate to lend itself to complex moral and social issues. The meaning we apportion to life (or anything else) depends on how we perceive its origin.

The reason the debate will inevitably continue is that we are arguing over a theory of history, of how we came to be here. As history cannot be repeated, one of the major planks of the scientific method is sidestepped. Therefore the debate will always be outside of the practical realm of repeatable, scientific investigation, and will always tend towards social and philosophical considerations.

Why America? That the most predominantly Christian founded nation also became the most technologically advanced the world has known is no surprise; the contradiction exists only in the minds of some. Scripture has alway encouraged sensible, lucid, and logical thinking.

Another weakness in the article is it’s decent into undefined terms and name calling, in particular the term ‘literalist’. Such a creature does not even exist. Nobody in the world takes all of Scripture literally. Instead, we try to apply reasonable exegetical principles, assessing the style and genre of the writing. In the end creationists take Genesis as straight forward narrative – the same way Jesus took it, the same as all of the New Testament writers, as well as all of the church fathers and church theologians up until about the 19th Century, not to mention all leading Hebrew language scholars.

I also tire of the intended insult that I often read in these posts, referring to Christians acting upon ‘whispers in their head’. This only shows a lack of understanding and even lack of will to understand the faith and the propositional truths contained in Scripture.

I'm no great fan of Crhistopher Hitchin's writing style goodthief, his self-righteousness occasionally mimics that of bible-bashers and is likely to offend. But I, like him, don't accept it takes a belief in the supernatual to sustain morals. Many with strong faith seem to believe atheism leads to poor morals. I've never seen an example of this. I have however seen those professing strong faith with poor morals.

The bible's a fine read - if you take out the supernatural bits. I agree with its sentiments. However there's no reason religion and science should be in such opposition to each other, it's not either/or. Such a position posits science as a religion. Science is a verb, not a noun. How anyone can fault a logical process because they don't like where it leads, is beyond me. Perhaps they don't use their god-given powers of reason?