To start off, I don't equate being Bad Jew (or Christian or Hindu or whatever) with being a Bad Person. Just so we're all clear.


What you're saying you're not doing in the first sentence is exactly what you're doing in the second sentence.


No, no, no. My example was not about being Pod People.

I'm asking you why a God that loves us would play a cosmic game of hide and seek with us. It seems to me that a loving God would make his presence very known, lay out his expectations of us, and offer us a clear method of asking questions that would come with documented answers, so we can share the information he passes down without confusion.

This does not mean that we would not have free will. You realize we would still be able to chose to reject Him, if we wanted. Informed Person =/= Pod Person


I'm not trying to "turn" anyone, but I would ask you to keep in mind that I said the same thing once. Except the dude didn't call himself, Hobbes. Otherwise, though, same thing.


Don't ever confuse human behavior with logic.


The text in bold was referring to you, Mr. Don't Call It A Fairy Tale.


My point, though, is that feelings are demonstrably useless as a gauge of what the truth is.

Isn't science a natural progression from religion? And if God does exist, his creation is still governed by science, so science is above God.

Not to flame, but I personally feel that Santa Claus feels more right and special than parents sneaking around after their kids have gone to bed. However, that doesn't make it more correct than logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

Looking back at the quotes from Einstien's letter, I think it just further corroborates my suspicions that many educated people in earlier periods of history probably weren't much believers at all, that they probably paid it public lip service in some form or other more to sidestep religious backlash because the stigma of being anything other than some kind of judeo-christian or other was just that great. I mean, just consider how much violence and tension already existed between various Christians and Jews already, then imagine anyone having the audacity to declare themselves an atheist..

Oh, definitely. And people also continued to use religious language long after they had abandoned the original meaning behind such language (viz. the Founding Fathers -- sorry, Pat Robertson).

The only other thing I'd like to mention is that Jesus' statement about "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is unique among world religions -- the idea is only expressed in the negative elsewhere (i.e. "don't do anything to anyone that you wouldn't want done to yourself"). Just a little

I think they all gave up on Zeus after he turned into a deer so he could hump some guy's wife by turning her into a deer.



Sometimes I think perhaps the same thing... But don't tell the pope I said that.

I think you just have to define what that "summit" is.

Why... returning to the source and rebooting the matrix of course.

It's funny that we, as Transformers fans, can have a discussion about "religion" for 16 pages in the space of about 4 days. *checks the Toy Discussion forum.* Why are we here again?

Dunno 'bout you, but I came here to discuss the impact of religion, philosophy, and politics on society as a whole transformer brand toys.

I suspect that this will change in about a month...
6/21/08'D

*checks calendar*

SUMMER'D???

TF: Animated toys are supposed to hit shelves

=> me

DERP!

Well it's not like claiming to like Air Wolf for no other reason then my dad liked it.
And it's not like I'm just going along with this Judaism thing for the sake of my family. If I cared what they thought regarding my own personal beliefs and morals I wouldn't be a card-carrying Liberal Party member.

It's something much deeper....it's the belief that my father has, as did my grandfather, and his father, and his father, going back to ancient Israel. It's the belief that G-d chose us to follow His faith. It's been that belief in the One True G-d that has guided us through thousands of years of oppression. It's not a belief that I take lightly, and it's part of the reason for my own faith.


If we were talking about, say, evolution vs "intelligent" design, I would agree with you.
G-d creating us perfect in His image, and placing us in heaven-on-Earth is a much nicer thought then knowing at one point we were nothing more then apes, who in turn came from pre-historic rats. Yet the evidence points to evolution, so that's what we (should) inscribe as fact.

But in the border sense of Atheism vs theism? Show me overwhelming observable evidence that proves G-d does not exist.
You seem to like to narrow it down to "science or religion, you can only believe one."
No, it doesn't work that way. I believe science is the "how?" not the "why?"

Isn't science just the way to understand the universe/creation/nature? G-d Himself is part of creation/the universe, therefore science is simply a way to explain Him and His creation. The whole "Science vs Religion; There Can Be Only One!" debate never made much sense to me.

We're still apes, FTR. "Ape" is a man made classification that we lumped ourselves into. In fact, all animal classifications of any kind are just arbitrary man made labels that we assign.

I know you know this, but I think those sorts of details create a real wall between people and understanding evolution, and I figure someone reading might benefit from that knowledge.


Try and understand: No one takes the position that no God can possibly exist. Well, no reasonable person takes that stance - no one can prove that. But we can make observations that suggest strongly that if a God exists, there are certain attributes he does and does not have.

For instance: Zeus. Defining characteristics: Lives at the top of Mt. Olympus, responsible for lightning.

Great, well, we've got satellites pointed at the top of Mt. Olympus. People have traveled there. No Zeus that we can see. Lightning? Well, we know what causes lightning, and it's not him. No one can prove definitvely that Zeus does not exist, you can't prove a negative. But we can be a little more than reasonably sure that, if he does exist, he does not live on top of Mt. Olympus and he does not create lightning.

Same thing with the God of Abraham. Defining characteristics: He loves us, He guides creation, He wants to reward us for a well spent life. Well, if He loved us and cared what we were up to, wouldn't He make the rules a little clearer, make sure everyone had heard the same rules as everyone else, and clarify what was really important to Him and what was irrelevant dogmatic bull?

And, if He had guided creation, why did he make your windpipe so capable of being clogged by food? Surely a loving God would separate the food hole from the air hole to not cause needless suffering - as well as a number of other biological quandaries. How come there is no one single perfect food that provides all that our body needs and none of the bad stuff. To get your full nutrition you have to pick and choose and be careful to take in enough good stuff and not too much bad stuff...and different people all react differently to certain things. Peanuts are a healthy tasty treat for most of us - deadly to others. I mean, what the hell, God? Why are you playin' games. Just make chocolate cake nutritious and plentiful so we can go feed the hungry with it. And why did He make it so hard for some people to get food in the first place?

There are all kinds of things like that point towards that, if there is a God, His attitude towards is pretty much complete and total apathy - or even maliciousness.

I think peanuts and windpipes are God's way of culling the herd.

Considering you're an Atheist, I gathered that already
Thanks for the clear-up though.


Is it? I don't think so. I have 10 Commandments that came directly from G-d. They were inserted into a book written by man.
If I write a newspaper article, but quote you, you get credit for that quote, even if it's in my article. Same thing on a larger scale.


You also have to take into account the period when the books that make up the Bible were written.
Lets say G-d appears today and lays out a brand knew set of expectations for us. We write/type/save/e-mail them. Don't you think the language would sound strange to people 2,000 years later?

It's not so much that G-d's playing hide and seek, it's that we're struggling to make sense of works that were originally written in ancient languages, some of them long dead, that don't necessarily translate that well into modern English.


Well here's the thing, I'm well aware that there very well could be some revelation that causes me to question my faith. If that happens, well that's a personal decision.


Call it a story, call it an epic work of fiction, if that's what you believe. I'm just not keen on the beliefs my people have held for 5,000 years being reduced and compared to a story about a chick who leaves her shoe behind at the dance.


No, but when you factor in the truth, or what we know of it at least, feelings become more reliable because they're now guided by fact.


Human behaviour and human logic....two sides of the same coin, really.

You have stated that religion has caused death, destruction, oppression, and other forms of senseless slaughter. Dude, Jews were persecuted in the middle ages because they had the common sense to take baths. I know what religion is capable of.
And I know that more people have died in the name of G-d then for any other cause.

So yes, religion has given us the likes of Osama bin Laden and the Fred Phelps. It's also given us Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., however.
Now you claim that the timeless virtues of religion are common sense anyway, that we don't need religion to figure them out. That, essentially, King and Gandhi didn't need their faiths to achieve the good they achieved. That could very well be true.

While I accept that religion may not be necessary to understand it's positive points, I also accept the flip side; that people like Phelps and bin Laden wouldn't necessarily need religion to do connive, trick, and sucker people into following them.
Religion may not be necessary for the good in humanity, but neither is it necessary for evil in the world.

We would be just as f'ed up as we are now if we didn't have religion.

No you don't.

I'm always up for spreading a little


No, I understand where you're coming from. I was simply responding to Haggisjin's assumption that there's "overwhelming observable evidence" that G-d does not exist.

What Pete said.

Men could easily have made up those commandments and just said, "God said this." In fact, I'd say that's likely the case, since Moses brought us the commandments, and Moses is part of that whole "no evidence outside the Bible for Jews enslaved in Egypt" thing. So the whole thing is likely a story some guy made up. You're giving value to one part of the book and discarding the rest, based on your own feelings of right and wrong, just like you said you don't do.


You're changing the subject. No one argues over whether stuff was translated properly, we argue over whether God really cares about what we eat, or who we sleep with based on the translations that we all agree on. A loving God would make it absolutely clear what he felt about those subjects. Like the creator of the universe couldn't give everyone a common language, or at least made sure documents were updated timely and properly.

Hell, if He loved us so much, He could also just come down every ten years and let us know directly from the deity's mouth in whatever language we happen to speak (I'm assuming He'd speak all of them).


I think that's twisting what he said a little.

"Excuse, me"

"Yes?"

"What shade of Brown would you say the sky is?"

"Well... It's blue."

"What!?"

"Um... It's blue?"

"That is SO rude! I just asked what color brown you thought it was."

"Huh?"

"How dare you not acknowledge the brownness of the sky?"

"But it's blue."

"It is not!"

"It's RIGHT THERE. Look up."

"Looking up is amoral. Besides I don't need to look up to see what color the sky is."

"Why not?"

"It has been revealed to me what color the sky is."

"Where?"

"In this informative pamphlet. See right here "The sky not beith Red, or blue, or purple or pink, not Lavender, Green, Orange or moave, Not white, nor purple nor black exept betwixt the stars at night."

"... That doesn't say it's brown."

"HEATHEN!"

"Here, you don't have to look up just look at the horizon. You can look at the horizon can't you?"

"Of course, I am an enlightened Skybrownist. We disdain silly superstition like not looking at the horizon."

"Right... Now what color do you SEE above the horizon?"

"Blue."

"Good now lets say you wanted to match the color of the sky in a photograph to a paint color... what would it probably be?"

"Blue."

"Ok... so then what color is the sky?"

"I believe it's Brown."

"YOUR LOOKING RIGHT AT IT?"

"Why are you shouting?"

"BECAUSE I... Ok. If when you LOOK at, it is blue, then why do you believe it's brown?"

"The pamphlet."

"The Pamphlet?! What's it got to do with the pamphlet?"

"It's the TRUTH."

"Why do you think that?"

"I don't think that I know that."

"Why?!"

"My parents told me so."

"..."

"And it's really old."

"It's wrong."

"How do you know? Prove to me the sky is blue."

"You just saw it!"

"But what if it's brown through the blue...."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Prove to me the sky isn't brown."

"Ok...A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight."

"That just proves it looks blue, that doesn't prove is isn't Brown."

"Fine, Prove to me it isn't beige."

"The sky? Beige? That's silly."

its actually clear.

Whoo hooo! Midday telescope time! Here I come!

OHHHHH, How Clever.

And on a forum comprised of text I should express my self how?

Perhaps the deists would prefer LOLcats?

If everyone agrees to believe THAT instead of Yahweh , I'll call it a draw.

ceiling cat contains a linky

Oddly enough when I go to that link it glitches. All I can see is the title of the article and a blank page... which is pretty funny.

Looks like MSNBC's ad servers are in need of some divine intervention...

edit: let me cut to the chase

http://www.templeton.org/belief/

I'll chock this up to straight up differences in personal belief. Not going to bother arguing the point.

Well, what makes you think those are, indisputably, handed down from God? Don't worry about trying to convince anyone else of it, just explain why you're convinced.

Well, if they weren't from God, I doubt all those Nazis would've been smoted just for looking at them.

Yes, and Julius Caesar could very well have been a fabrication constructed by the Romans to justify their empire. Not that I believe that. I don't. But the "this could be the way things really happened" game is one we could play all night.

10 Commandments being the word of G-d? Moses leading my people from slavery in Egypt (not completely without historical backing FYI)? These are articles of my faith. You're right, it all could have been fabricated. But guess what? Maybe it wasn't.
If you want to discuss Atheism vs theism all day long, I will do so, and I will enjoy doing so because it's when we're forced to confront our beliefs that strengthen our sense of self. It's when you force the believer to question the teachings that true understanding of those teachings takes place. That's an other article of Jewish faith, BTW. To question and to expand understanding.

If some people decided to do that in regards to Judaism, they would see we're more then just a bunch of ignorant war mongers patting ourselves on the back for being the "chosen people."

But like I said, I will gladly debate you on the G-d vs No G-d question 'till the Messiah himself shows up. Understand if I get a little peeved when one of, if not they, most important stories of my people is accused of being fiction just so someone can get a well-timed internet zing in.


Sorry if it seemed like I was changing the subject. That was not my intention.

You do bring up good points. It's one of the classic questions posed in these discussions. It's really the same question, you've just expanded it. In short the question is "if there's an all-powerful G-d, why is the world imperfect?"

I don't know. I just chock it up to faith. I'm by no means a strongly religious person (surprise!) but I do have faith in G-d and His creation.
I can attempt to answer your question, but it wouldn't be anything "official," just one man's understanding....
It's possible that G-d doesn't want us to live in a perfect world. Yes, He loves us. But I'm not a Christian, I'm Jewish.
That's important, because the G-d of the Torah/Old Testament is a ball-buster, to put things lightly.
It's entirely within His character, from what we know of Him, for Him to say "Ok, look. I could make Earth a perfect place, but would you really learn anything? Here, lets put this thing on expert level, a little adversity builds character."
Similarly, you may be right. Maybe we have pissed Him off to the point where He no longer cares. I don't know.


Maybe, maybe not. He's free to jump in and explain what he meant, and if I'm wrong I'll apologize.

Well you touched on it earlier, actually. It ties into the Exodus story.
Every religion has their articles of faith, some things that if you believe, you just accept. And the Exodus story is one of them. In fact it's Exodus and the, for lack of a better term, sequels that followed (Books of Samuel) that I've studied the most.

Anyway I accept that the Exodus happened.
Was it as grand as it is told in the Bible? Probably not. Did it happen word for word? In all likelihood, no. No story that has survived 3,000+ years is going to resemble the actual events word for word.
I do believe, however, that the Exodus happened, that Moses lead my people from bondage in Egypt with the help of G-d. Part of that means that G-d gave Moses the 10 Commandments atop Mt. Sinai.

y'know, I've kindof always wondered at the vast differences in the "gods" of the jews vs. christian. I mean they don't sound very much alike at all from what I've heard or read.

Guh... my eyes started glazing over after page 12 of this thread.

But what Einstein said is basically the fact that religions are, scientifically speaking, like fairy tales and therefore he's concluded that devoting your life to the belief of religions is about as logical as devoting your life to the belief of fairy tales.

Science cannot prove nor disprove the existence of God. But being unable to disprove God doesn't necessarily make him real. The fairy tale analogy is used because there are many things in fairy tales which science cannot disprove either.

For example, we cannot disprove the existence of fairies, elves, sprites, hobbits, dragons, the Easter Bunny etc - heck, we can't really disprove the existence of Cybertron and a sentient race of transforming robots. The fairy tale analogy is basically stating that just because something cannot be proven to be not true, doesn't mean that by automatic default, that it is true.

He uses this analogy because so many times religious people try to prove their religious beliefs (e.g.: existence of God) by demanding that science cannot disprove it. The fact is that it's not actually up to non-believers to find evidence of God's non-existence, it is the responsibility of believers to find evidence of God's existence.

For example, if I were to take someone to court over committing a crime. Say there was insufficient evidence to prove that the accused had committed the crime, I couldn't then try to argue that there's insufficient evidence to say that the accused had not committed the crime!! Such an argument would be thrown out of a court of law. Likewise the notion of claiming that God is real just because we can't prove that he's not.

Now, before anyone gets their panties in a knot, let me just say two more things:

1/ Religion is a matter of faith - people believe in it because they want to, regardless of the existence or non-existence of evidence.

2/ So long as a person's beliefs are not harmful to themselves or others, then who gives a flying fcuk what people want to believe or not believe???

If someone wants to believe in and worship the Tooth Fairy, go ahead. Who cares?!? So long as they don't decide to wage any holy war against pagans and start up some terrorist cell, then go ahead and stick your teeth under your pillow!

*starts first church of the holy word of goki*

Well from a detached perspective there are three possibilities to consider....

1) Ancient Israel was a harsh place. The land barley agriculture-worthy, and enemies existed on all sides. Furthermore, according to Exodus, the Jews had spent a pretty long time in the desert.
So the argument could be made that people needed a harsher G-d back then. Someone to tell you to get back up pronto when things look down.
By the time Jesus came along the needs of the people had changed. Israel was in the hands of the Romans and people were looking for hope. A harsh G-d wasn't needed, a compassionate G-d was.

2) The early Christians did what they could to distance themselves from the Jews. In the minds of the Romans Christianity was just a subset of Judaism. That's why many of the New Testament's passages take an unfavourable stance when it came to Jews. The early Christians were trying to convince the Romans that they were in fact not Jewish. So the change in the demeanour of G-d would be in keeping with that practise.

3) Sometime between the Old and New Testaments G-d discovered Valium.

EDIT-Goki, well said.

best thing to come out of this debate so far!

Unless you're getting tried in China or something...

Occam's Razor, dude.


I'm not trying to internet zing you but, to the best of my knowledge, there is no archaeological or historical evidence of any kind for the Exodus, or even the Jewish people having been enslaved by the Egyptians at all, outside of Torah/Bible. You think a people wander around in the desert for 40 years and don't leave some evidence of themselves behind?

If I'm wrong, please link me to the evidence and you'll have my most sincere apologies. It should be readily available on the internets, right?

A nomadic lifestyle like that, from people that aren't really nomads, is unlikely to result in hard archaeological evidence.

Actually, we could prove/disprove that. Science claims only to know what it can observe, and if the (popular, I will assume) claim is made that God is outside of the observable universe, then it would follow there is no way to prove/disprove God's existence. Cybertron, according to what we know, is inside the observable universe, though we may not have the technology available yet to see as far as the robot-planet might be.

I can't believe I just made a Goki-esque post

The "disproving" of G-d is not necessary. Science is not in the business of that kind of absolute to begin with. The whole point of it is that it is an ongoing investigation.

Just because the existence something can neither be proven nor disproven does not mean that there is a an equiprobable chance that it exists.

If you were told by some one that they have an invisible, intagible, inaudable dog, you couldn't really prove them wrong but through reason you could deduce that it was much more probable that the individual was

A: Mentaly unstable.

B: Missinformed.

C: Lying.

ect.

After factoring in the likely, the chance that the dog exists become neglegiable. So negligible in fact as to become ridiculous.

So the "You can't disprove it either." excuse is of no more use to g-d than the tooth fairy.

The only real difference being our parents have the decency to let us in on the tooth fairy gag before it gets out of hand.

No matter how much love I have for Occam's Razor, being the simplest solution doesn't always make it the correct one. Sometimes stuff is just complicated. A simpler solution is always easier to test, which is one reason why it is more preferable to want to break things down as simply as possible. Just to make comments.

Well...the Bible (the Old Testament) has been right about several things archaeologists at the time had not yet discovered. Hezekiah's Tunnel is one of those examples. So it could be the case we haven't discovered evidence yet- even though that's a pretty significant part of the OT stories. Though they were in a big-ass desert most of the time.

That may be true, but as a bettin' man, I'm not gonna lay my money down on it.


There is a world of difference between the existence of a single tunnel and the enslavement of a culture by another culture, especially when we have lots and lots of evidence about the history of both cultures.

Nice way of ignoring all the contributions religion has made over the years, such as the Islamic institutions that were very advanced in mathematics. Hell, they were more advanced than European institutions at the time.

You also forget religious charities.

And you wonder why people don't like debating religion with you.