Re: Re: Re: do you believe in god?
yes i agree thats perfect!
yea, this life is our test that god has set for us to tell him who believes in him and loves him. Most people just think were just here and we live and then die. Thats not true at all. Youll find out when you die if you dont believe me now, and i dont think youll want to find out the hard way( that way) because its too late and you will burn in hell!
Until recently put into written languages? Do you consider almost 2,000 years ago recent? If the Bible is so open to human error, where is the (significant) evidence? The human error argument seems to me like a last ditch effort to excuse seriously considering the possible validity of the Bible texts because no one has found any evidence for significant changes in the text. If you want to hold so closely to science, perhaps you should stick with that which is supported by evidence. 
Also, I wasn’t referring to scientific evidence in my previous post. I was referring to the age of the scientific method. The evidence doesn’t render the method any more or less valid.
i think alot people choose not to believe in god because they know there has to be a rite and wrong and its to hard to follow gods rules. So they choose not to believe in god so they can do what ever they want.
So you’re saying that all people who don’t believe in God do whatever they want??? By " whatever you want" you probably mean something that is a taboo in your religion like killing and rape…Yup, I do that all the time like a few centuries ago when people went about killing each other in the name of God.It still happens now except not so much with your religion(i.e. today)…People who don’t believe in God, don’t “do what ever they want”. They just have a choice. They question their various options and choose what they think is right…I heard they are unicycles in hell.Cool!<<<insert smiley
PS- Having morals and believing in good and bad is possible without believing in God.Technically, we all go to someone’s hell coz if you believe in Religion A, you probably will go to the hell of Religion B…I guess I failed my test
Re: Re: Re: do you believe in god?
Yeah, hard to explain b/c you cant explain something you know nothing about …get my point. you dont know these things…you really dont.
You may quote scripture of feel “love” towards your family or puppies/ kittens, but this is not evidence of divinity. Especially down to the specifics that organized groups claim. epistemology is a very humbling thing. I think the world would be a less oppressing and dangerous place if people began to realize that their traditional knowledge system is flawed.
I know nothing, and I acknowledge this….but that’s the thought process of inquisitive, critical and rational individuals. Don’t believe me? Look at the state of the world today. Why are people willing killing themselves to kill others? They “KNOW” god wants this and will reward them for such acts.
Come-on folks, living life through eyes of reason is not such a bad thing. We can get a lot of great stuff done that way……stem cell research anyone? Nope! God wouldn’t want it! So suffer with your crippling illnesses….hey instead of walking or overcoming your cancer, why don’t you just offer you pain up to jesus? He’ll let you in b/c you suffered too. poop poop poop, thats all it is. We humans don’t give ourselves enough credit.
Bla.
Ive seen alot in my life to make me sure there is a God. I think the problem is that there are too many outside forces influencing a persons mind into thinking that the only way to see God in our lives is through miracles. We’ve all been programmed by tv and movies to believe that God will miraculously rescue you from a near death encounter, and this is the only way He works in our lives.
I think we see God everyday in the beauty of the world. I don’t mean just nature and all that jazz, but the little stuff we as technological-age humans tend to overlook. If you really want to find God, you gotta find yourself first.
I’ve read plenty of interpretations of the word of the Bible, about heaven and hell and the afterlife and heres my take on it all:
Jesus said he will save us all, no one will be left behind when he returns. Now, Hell is a loose translation, not the firey pit most of us think of, but an inbetween world, when we are not alive in body. When the Bible talks of dying and going to hell, it means that purgatory between lives, not the endless torture tv has made it seem to be. After all, if one was doomed to eternity in Hell, how could he be brought back by Jesus? Is the resurection story false? I think God is above contradicting himself, this is why I do not believe in Hell. I do think after the apocalypse, we may reach heaven, which is the sum of all our souls out of body, but thats a whole other thing… maybe later
back to evolution: Darwin wrote his books a few hundred years ago. he coldn’t explain the evolution of the eye. scientists now can. if you look closely in nature/fossil record there is a solid set of steps for the evolution of eyes/occular systems. there are fish that are totally blind, there are animals with very poor vision, hardly sensing more that light and dark, and example of everything from that to eagles that have better eyes than we do.
also darwin was a christian and thought god created everything, then allowed it to evolve.
furthermore, what about the dinosaurs? no fossil evidence suggests that people were alive at the same time as dinosaurs. were these huge bones just hidden there to test our faith? (some people honestly believe that) what about the science of geology? do you not trust anything they say?
i should probably stop as i will probably just make a bunch of not-friends, whose minds i won’t change anyway. not that i’m trying to. just asking people to examine why they hold certain beliefs.
I’ve always wondered this as well… do Christians believe in dinosaurs?
most do. they also belive they were all dead and gone before the flood so Noah didnt have to load those beasts.
i belive in BOB.
Actually, I’m sure I’ve heard that a set of fossil dinosaur footprints were found somewhere with a set of human footprints right alongside and inside them. That seems to me to be some sort of evidence. Also, paleontologists in Montana recently discovered T Rex bones which still had non-fossilized tissue inside them. Aparently sixty-five million years wasn’t enough to complete the fossilization process. 
There are a lot of creationist geologists who have developed quite sound theories (at least as far as I can tell. I’m no geologist, but the theories seem reasonable. A global flood can explain a lot of geological phenomenon.) which explain the strata and other phenomenon at least as well as most evolutionists, but they don’t get much attention, because since they are creationist, they are automatically assumed to be “unscientific religious wackos.”
I don’t want to get involved in this discussion too much, but I think those pieces of evidence should be known.
I think most creationists actually believe dinosaurs were present on the Ark, most likely as juveniles.
well the problem with the creation “science” people(generally) is that the theories are sound, if you assume god. they basically take the same evidence that’s around and add god and come up with a god-centric explanation. also, no creation scientist has published an article in a peer reviewed scientific journal. if they have please post link(s).
and from what i understand the T-rex tissue is a very small amount and was protected by the fossilized bone around it. basically the fossil process stopped about 80% of the way through. drought, mud slide, or some other climate/weather thing could’ve stopped that.
there’s also evidence of periodic massive scale flooding of certain regions. such as the middle east. it’s possible that a regional flood(some geological evidence of) would seem like a world wide flood to people who essentially never traveled outside of their town. if everywhere within 100 miles of your house got flooded, and you didn’t even know of anything outside of (generously) 50 miles from you house. it would seem that the whole world just washed away.
the foot prints i think came out to be a hoax. like the “jesus’s brother’s coffin” thing from last year.
Do God believers also believe in Satan?
Billy
whats with all the satan stuff?
do i detect the signs of a fellow ‘Hicks-Head’? ?
It just occured to me to post the lyrics to a wonderful song called “Let the Mystery Be” by an equally wonderful singer, Iris DeMent. It’s from her Infamous Angel album. It is apropos and funnier and lovelier when she’s singing it.
Let the Mystery Be - Iris DeMent
Everybody is wonderin’ what and where they all came from
Everybody is worryin’ 'bout where they’re gonna go
When the whole thing’s done
But no one knows for certain
And so it’s all the same to me
I think I’ll just let the mystery be
Some say once gone you’re gone forever
And some say you’re gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of The Savior
If in sinful ways you lack
Some say that they’re comin’ back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I’ll just let the mystery be
Some say they’re goin’ to a place called Glory
And I ain’t sayin’ it ain’t a fact
But I’ve heard that I’m on the road to purgatory
And I don’t like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
But I choose to let the mystery be
Re: Re: Re: Re: do you believe in god?
Yes, studying epistemology can be humbling, but it doesn’t require that we all become Cartesians and discard everything that we do not know with absolute certainty. Just because I live “life through the eyes of reason” doesn’t mean that I should neglect or denigrate other sources of knowledge.
Borrowing from The Will to Believe by William James, choosing to not believe in religion until having found “sufficient evidence” trades the “hope that it may be true” for the “fear of its being error.” James chides, “Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof.”
You point out people killing in the name of God, but that is small minority. I think it’s a mistake to entirely judge an idea by it’s believers, especially a very small minority of its believers.
Perhaps the traditional knowledge system being flawed is evidence of the flawed condition of humanity. Why should we give ourselves more credit if we haven’t even been able to fix our flawed knowledge system?
what exactly are you appealing to when yo utalk about “other sources of knowledge”? what your heart “knows” to be true? things you hope to be true? some sort of intuition?
all easy to disprove. ever wanted something to happen so badly that you knew it would? i have. particularly with women. they don’t act like what i built them up to act like and i’m disappointed. but a few hours ago i knew with all my being that they would. oops.
what else is there besides logic and reason that give reliable results?
As an example, sensory experience is another source of knowledge. You cannot simply dismiss the validity of another person’s sensory experience without first explaining how you have access to it.
What do you consider “reliable”? When you speak of logic and reason, which logic scheme and whose reasoning are you referring to? Logical coherence does not guarantee truth outside of the system (in reality). Consider Euclidean geometry. It’s built on logic, but it doesn’t perfectly match reality. So while you can use it to assert true propositions about the system, caution must be taken when applying it to reality. So even logic and reason can be tainted by uncertainty.
no you know what i mean. Dont you get it? You will go to hell, and jesus could come back any time to take every follower up with him in heaven and you will be left behind down here when this world is falling apart and people are gettin killed. You wont be laffin then you will be scared and go to hell.