2009-09-26, 13:05 | Link #2086 | |
Banned
Join Date: Apr 2006
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If not, you must have some sort of basis for your belief that your faith will eventually be rewarded by in fact having been reality all along. Otherwise it is no different from any other kind of faith, which is commonly defined as belief without evidence. No offense to your belief, just curious. Last edited by Xrayz0r; 2009-09-26 at 13:18. |
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2009-09-26, 13:06 | Link #2087 | |
廉頗
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Massachusetts
Age: 34
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But why create a ratio when you've just admitted this is an indefinite area? By definition humans are neither 'good' nor 'evil,' if they were then the words themselves would not exist because we would have no comprehension of the opposite. We do not have society, order, and peace. You've been feeding me the poverty line for a while, we're far from a harmonious perfect human organization. Civilizations prosper and fail at different times, and humans' nature to socially organize is what tends to bring it back again and again. This isn't a comic book where people are 'good' or 'evil,' so trying to understand the root of the problem will get you nowhere. Humans are way too complex to be dichotomized in that manner. |
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2009-09-26, 13:14 | Link #2088 |
Bittersweet Distractor
Join Date: Nov 2007
Age: 32
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These logical paradoxes are often created by human speech and thinking. Using them in actual arguments I think actually creates little discussion of merit.
For example I could argue that if I throw a dart at a wall, it will never reach the wall. My reason for saying this is the dart will always travel half of the distance left to the wall. If it keeps traveling half the distance, it will never end as you can always take half of a distance even if it is infinitesimally small. I think we can already establish that humans cannot know something past 99.999999%. It is impossible to get to that 100%. You should read Edge's post a couple pages back as he elaborates on this. When humans do take that leap of faith in reality (That extra .00001 is covered by this) we are able to find mutual understanding. However, using that the logic of this leap of faith to argue one's point is silly as you are basically shaking the foundations of existence. If you do that, you are implying to me that your own beliefs might not even really be there. You cannot even be certain about yourself because what really is yourself? Look I can say that everyone in this forum is a figment of your imagination and you could not argue differently (And even if I allowed you to under your logic, you wouldn't be able to seeing as your own thoughts are uncertain already). Anyways, all I am saying is that this leap of faith you point out to is a very silly discussion point. Humans are not absolutely certain about everything, but we are more certain about somethings than others. I'm more certain about the existence of us human beings that some supposed omnipotent force we like to call "God."
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2009-09-26, 14:00 | Link #2089 | ||
Hina is my goddess
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Dec 2005
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Thank you to monstert and Cipher for your responses, but i think i'm going to try to simplify my original message and meaning and start over because i think it got lost among my metaphors. (oh, and i may be updating this post so if it changes in a bit i apologize)
First off, lets assume there is a god, who is all powerful, for the sake of argument. I was born into a family of science and grew up with science. I have been taught to only believe those things that have been explained and can be proven. Fact. Out of my control. One who learns something at an early age incorporates that into his core beliefs and it is very difficult as an adult to reject it and adopt a new set of beliefs. Debatable, but accepted by many people. According to some religions, no matter what i do and no matter how good i am, i will never get to heaven for being an atheist. Fact. Out of my control. I am willing to accept god, if i can see something that convinces me he exist and wants me to believe in him. He has not done so. Fact. Out of my control. Thereby, the chances of me believing in god are slim, and would be very hard. Most of the circumstances surrounding it are out of my control. Even taking me out of the equation, there are people far removed from society living in remote regions of the world who have never heard of these religions. So is god really that unforgiving that we don't deserve salvation for circumstances that are (mostly) out of our control? Even taking the argument i could change, if god is so powerful but refuses to help me by giving me some small amount of proof, why does he deserve my praise? Quote:
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2009-09-26, 14:21 | Link #2091 | |
Member of DOLLARS
Artist
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: In the magical land of Moonswell pass
Age: 28
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If you think about it the Big Bang Theory and Theory of Evolution makes less sense than the belief of God, I mean how did evolution create language, independant thought, conscience, abilities such as art etc... Charles Darwin himself said that if irreducible complexity was ever proven his theory would be shattered
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2009-09-26, 14:26 | Link #2092 |
Obey the Darkly Cute ...
Author
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: On the whole, I'd rather be in Kyoto ...
Age: 66
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I'd be interested to hear where you got that idea of "pardoning"... I've not seen anything Biblical that supports it. (However, the phrase Jesus actually uses in the early Aramaic that is the basis for "my way or no way" ideology actually can be interpreted more than one way.... its just that it was useful to the aggressive early imperial church to assert the "my way or no way" interpretation).
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2009-09-26, 14:29 | Link #2093 | |
Knowledge is the solution
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: St. Louis, MO
Age: 39
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2009-09-26, 14:30 | Link #2094 | |
Hina is my goddess
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Dec 2005
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As far as Science having a shaky understanding of the fundamentals of the universe, that may be true. But science grows and science changes and adapts when it is wrong. Religion is supposedly never wrong and what is true a thousand years ago should still be true today, even when proven otherwise. |
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2009-09-26, 14:56 | Link #2095 | |||||
I disagree with you all.
Join Date: Dec 2005
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2009-09-26, 17:10 | Link #2096 | |
Member of DOLLARS
Artist
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: In the magical land of Moonswell pass
Age: 28
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It isn't being vain and fickle, you all-powerful created an entire race you didn't have to and after giving them life you ask a few things: Appreciate that I created you and worship me as your God, then go on and do whatever you like and dont break a few of the laws Im about to give you because doing so can lead to chaos. Then that race cant even do that, most people get frustrated when something they built can't do what it was intended so they destroy it and start from scratch I think God is being quite patient. However this is all matter of belief and opinion so if you don't want to believe then I can't change your opinion and you cannot change mind so in the end we have to agree to disagree. To add to that you are all much older than me and have a lot more knowledge than me and for all I know you might be an expert at philosophy etc...
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2009-09-26, 18:54 | Link #2098 | |
Love Yourself
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Northeast USA
Age: 38
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On the topic that you've mentioned, it's hard to say where everything came from. On one hand, I (as a scientist) do not buy the argument that "life evolved from nothing through evolution." Evolution makes a whole lot of sense (and there's an abundance of evidence for it at this point), but why did things come about? People like to claim that things that replicated themselves simply continued to do so, and over time they built up in complexity because that guaranteed their ability to replicate over everything else. Yet replication - life itself - requires energy. All forms of life, all processes of life, revert to the lowest energy level as they possibly can. It's an effort to expend as little energy as possible while gaining as much energy as possible (which also makes sense), but why should life have existed in the first place? Why did certain chemical processes build up and attempt to subvert others? Then again, it's almost impossible for us to comprehend what can happen on the scale of time that the Earth has existed. It's a concept known as "deep time," if you're interested in evolutionary biology. We have no innate sense about it, and comprehending the changes that can take place are also very difficult. It seems impossible for something like a single-celled organism to evolve over the course of thousands of years, but there were many more than that involved in the formation of life. Beyond single thousands of years, I find it difficult to comprehend the span of time. This may be the reason for my skepticism. Given how wonderfully life operates, and how beautiful life systems are in their mechanisms, it's also very difficult to imagine that such things came about by random chance. Or perhaps, just as we view and appreciate a work of art and revel in knowing that it has a creator, many of us would like to credit someone or something for the artwork that is life. Of course, if life were not as efficient or well-put together ("designed") as it is, it likely would not exist in the first place. Knowing how evolution works, combined with the idea of deep time, it's quite possible that everything could have arisen from random chance. I'm not an evolutionary biologist - my training area is immunology. Interestingly, an immunology journal club of mine recently chose "evolutionary biology" as a topic. Even within immunology you can find the concepts of evolution at work. I'd expected it to be relatively boring, yet our first paper was an example of convergent evolution - that is, an example of an immune system that operates and is set up very similarly to how ours (and those of other mammals) does, but the specific mechanisms that govern it are rather different, indicating that it forked away from ours very early on...
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2009-09-26, 19:53 | Link #2100 | ||
I disagree with you all.
Join Date: Dec 2005
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I understand that nothing I've said is an actual answer to the question "Where did life come from?". AFAIK, our present answers to that still involve a lot of hand waving. Not so sure. The Christian thing is to love your neighbour... but also to believe he deserves to suffer in hell for all eternity if he's an infidel. So, yeah. |
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not a debate, philosophy, religion |
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