[NEWtoTHEjeepLIF]

Originally Posted by Coils Rule

I choose to belive in karma. Karma teaches me that if I do bad, bad will happen to me. I have tested this theroy and it works.

.

RANT! this is not Karma.....Karma is a force that is built up during life, an accumulation of all your deeds, both good and bad. This force affects you destination in the after-life or next life depending on your belief system. You my friend are talking about an americanized verision on Karma that is based on the Golden Rule and actually has no basis in religion or Any "real" belief system.

He is not a Buddist or he would know what Karma is.........

AND THANKS MOOSEGOD for realising that Buddisim is NOT a religion, it is a way of life!

[NEWtoTHEjeepLIF]

Originally Posted by kapplera

And please, spell atheism correctly.

Dude I am sorry but you are tooo well spoken to worry about someone elses typos It makes your argument seem petty when in fact it was very intelligent

[cherokee xj]

I have never really been into religion at all. I guess i could concider myself atheist, only because i take a scientific outlook on life. I don't believe in a "higher power" or any malarky like that. It is hard for me to believe something that was written on a stone a long time ago in a galaxy far far away (a joke) when there is scientific evidence that supports otherwise. Why be good you ask? That's like asking "Why eat? Why drink? Why take long smelly craps every morning?" You just do. It's human nature to do what they want, yet conform to what everyone else does at the same time. Everyone has their own opinions and views on life. You are good, because thats how you want to be. You want to have respect and be respected by OTHER PEOPLE. No higher powers come into play with this. It's all chemical jargin and other crap that a cool scientist would know. I never question other people's beliefs, I simply dissagree with them. It seems like more often then not, the religious people are the ones ridiculing the non-religious people. I have been told to attend church so many times, that if i had a nickel...

[ChewyXJ]

I'm an atheist because I'm indecisive. There are just too many gods to choose from .

On the morality issue, people were moral long before christianity came onto the scene.
Believe want you want and let others do the same.

[cherokee xj]

This also made me think of this... haha I saw a video earlier today of a precher that was talking and was going to say "pitching his tents" but said "pinching his tits" on accident!!! haha who knows where this guy is preaching now...






little boys be ware...




SORRY HAD TO DO IT!!!!! don't kill me i know im going to burn in hell by all you guys' flaming of me!

[trailboss]

Originally Posted by starheimberger

If we are not "created in Gods image" are we not just animals?

many of us are animals...its nobility that sets us apart...you dont need God to be noble...

[hansimusmaximus]

aside from the fact the we were created, how else would we become how we are today? to have a conscience is not evolutionary. it is counterintuitive to believe it is. evolution promotes 'survival of the fittest.' how does that relate to having a conscience? it doesn't. if we were creatures of evolution, there wouldn't be doctors, or people with disease, or elderly. we would all just be taking care of ourselves.... i don't know how relevant this is, i just thought it was kind of interesting...

[mecompco]

Perhaps there was/is some sort of a force or "creator" that set the universe(s) in motion (if so, who created the creator?). I doubt we'll ever know for sure. But, the whole concept of praying to some god/dead guy for devine intervention into our lives (oh, please let me win PowerBall this week!), or to beg for a place in heaven in our afterlife is, in my very humble opinion, simply preposterous.

Of course, this is my opinion, and I could be wrong. I don't begrudge anyone else their opionions, and expect the same in return.

[GothicJeep]

Kinda long - sorry!

I am an Atheist. ” I was raised Roman Catholic and, although I was never devout in the strictest sense of the word, I still have some very clearly ingrained Catholic tendencies. For example, I have an almost uncontrollable impulse to genuflect whenever I enter a church, or after someone says a prayer. Things like that. Thank my very Catholic mother for that.

I’m not certain when I decided there was no God. When I first started high school, I decided it was time to get a religious identity. I thought I’d better see what all the fuss was about, So I read the Bible, cover to cover, I guess this is unusual. Most Atheists, as I understand it, won’t touch a Bible. I’ve found this has helped me in numerous ways in later life. Besides being able to answer bible questions whilst watching Jeopardy, I can argue theology and hold my own with most Christians. My wife finds it annoying as hell that I can say I don’t believe in God, and yet quote his supposed word. So I went through high school, then college, and my opinions become more clearly defined and I fell on the side of science.

I believed, and still do, that there are irreconcilable differences between being Christian and being a logical, science minded person. I believe in Evolution. I believe Creationism is a story. I believe Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking when they say that the universe is several million years old. I don’t believe it’s only ten or twenty thousand years old. I once actually had a Fundamentalist tell me that dinosaur bones were fake, put there by God to test our faith in His word. I believe in Darwin - don't even get me started on Intelligent Design!

The list goes on. I’m a Liberal and I strongly believe that a woman’s body is her own body and that she can have an abortion any damn time she wants to. I truly believe in the separation of Church and State; get rabidly angry at judgmental, homophobic, and racist Conservative Christians; and I feel that the ACLU is one of the best protectors of our Constitution we have. WWJD annoys me for no apparent reason. Taken as a whole, it seemed to me that all of these things made me personally incompatible with organized Christianity.

That wasn’t what decided me to abandon God or religion in general, though.

What made me decide was the essential and arrogant belief that almost all religions have regarding other faiths. It’s sort of a, ‘Well gee, Wally. It’s great that you’re a (Pick one - Buddhist/Muslim/Shintoist/Jew/Christian/Etc.)! The thing is - you’re wrong, we’re right, and you’re going to Hell. Sorry!’. This was the biggest thing that deterred me from religion. Who’s to say who’s right? And, if we can’t decide who’s right, why can’t we all just get along?

So. I had to make a choice. When considering all of the above views, I decided that myself and organized religion were too strange a bedfellows.

My point in going on so long is this; I am an Atheist. I don’t believe in God. However, reading of the Bible has given me an insight into the ‘meaning’ of Christianity that should not be ignored. Beyond the smiting of non-believers, beyond the ‘Lake of Fire’ into which all sinners will be cast, even beyond the burning bushes, pillars of light, and miracles; there’s something much deeper there that everyone can learn from. The Bible is a primer of right and wrong. Regardless of your view, there are some basic tenets that can be found there that any Atheist, Agnostic, or non-believer can learn from.

In a nutshell; be nice to one another, don’t do bad things to each other, help those who need it, and try to do the right thing when you can.

Granted, you have to wade through a lot of begatting to get to it, but there’s the kernel of it. Jesus Christ, whether a man or a God, hit the nail on the head when he said, “Dudes! It’s real simple - love everybody else.”

Goth

[creature]

Originally Posted by hansimusmaximus

if we were creatures of evolution, there wouldn't be doctors, or people with disease, or elderly. we would all just be taking care of ourselves.... i don't know how relevant this is, i just thought it was kind of interesting...

There are many animals in nature that care for one another, geese and swans mate for life, once one dies the other lives the rest of it's life in mourning.

Just my $0.02.

[Swindle133IWB]

Alright guys, rational 17 year old Christian pipin' in here,
First of all, I do respect other religions, and I do respect other's rights to practice/believe whatever they want.
I want to call Darwinism enthusiasts out though, on their thinking. I know someone said "Don't get me started on Intelligent Design", well I'm going to start, but I want to see what you think about Irreducible Complexity. Correct me if I'm wrong, you do believe that all organisms on life, have evolved from simpler forms, all for the sake of being more efficient, stronger, and those more effecient, stronger traits are passed on by the surviving organisms/generations. This is a pretty incredible thought from Darwin, in fact, revolutionary, it has changed science forever. But Darwin was missing the ability to look into the makeup of cells, the specifics of VERY IMPORTANT functions in the body, and I will specifically talk about the human. The building blocks of life, are DNA, and DNA is made from 4 different nitrogenous bases, adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine; and they pair with each other, Adenine and Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine; not to mention the one more that are involved in RNA, called Uracil which has no use except for being a part of RNA, and therefore serves no purpose otherwise, and must have been created, as it wouldn't have evolved because there wouldn't be a reason for it to exist and continue to do so. First, these are made from RNA, and without DNA, RNA could not have been made, because DNA is transcribed to a RNA, which in turn then makes more DNA or DNA is replicated. Now to the irreducibly complex part of it (basically, it's a system that if one part is taken away, it will not function correctly, and therefore, under Darwin's theories this would not be the strongest nor the fittest, then it shall be eliminated). This link right here, shows the whole process of DNA forming RNA, and then RNA creating proteins or DNA replicating.
And further, here is the diagram for DNA replicating,

and if you look at this second diagram, without the supporting proteins, or any of the enzymes, the process wouldn't work, and under Darwin's theory, the evolutionary steps are VERY small, and enzymes are, in themselves, complex molecules, made of many different elements, and have active sites, that have SPECIFIC charges (positive or negative) that specify what substrate they will act upon. So we can take this, and look at it in a logical sense, and see that, if one of these enzymes doesn't evolve at the EXACT SAME TIME as the others, DNA therefore wouldn't exist, and without DNA, multicellular organisms can't exist, without multicellular organisms to evolve into more complex organisms, evolution cannot exist. That means, that Darwin's theories crumble under the building blocks of life (DNA), and the existance of DNA points to the existance of a creator. If this post is confusing, I'll revise it, and i do have more examples than this. Thank's in advance for reading this really long post. I will add more, as this is a very big interest of mine.

Mark Wheeler

PM me with any questions, as it is really hard to convey this while just typing, I may have omitted certain important parts in my thinking.

[biffstephens]

So you point is this is way complext.....and becuase it is way complex and Darwin didn't know how complex it all really was.....so there must be a Creator?

Nice lesson....I am sure you right about that part at least....

[Swindle133IWB]

In a nutshell, yes, but the thing is, I do feel that Darwin was a great thinker, with great imagination (very important for science IMO) and althought I disagree with his theories, I would be remiss to say that his ideas haven't changed the face of science forever, but the technology available to him at the time didn't allow him to see processes, like the one I explained, and I think that if he saw this, he would have either changed his ideas or revoked them, again that is my opinion, but what is stated above in the process is fact, and the probability of all of that evolving at the same time is practically zero.

[War Eagle]

Originally Posted by hansimusmaximus

aside from the fact the we were created, how else would we become how we are today? to have a conscience is not evolutionary. it is counterintuitive to believe it is. evolution promotes 'survival of the fittest.' how does that relate to having a conscience? it doesn't. if we were creatures of evolution, there wouldn't be doctors, or people with disease, or elderly. we would all just be taking care of ourselves.... i don't know how relevant this is, i just thought it was kind of interesting...

Humans are social animals living in a socially constructed community. This, in turn, means that a certain amount of self-sacrifice is necessary to ensure the survival of the individual and of the species. In most cases, the "right" thing to do is the thing that will either improve your standing in the community or at the very least not get you beaten to death in a dark alley because everyone else thinks you're an *******. If we didn't form cooperative relationships and simply continued to look out for no.1 we wouldn't be much better off than we were 200,000 years ago.

[0IIII0]

Originally Posted by starheimberger

There have been quite a few threads about Religion/Morality lately, and there seems to be quite a few athiests chiming in. I have some sincere questions about your belief systems. This is not a test. These are not trick questions. Your beliefs are so foreign to me that, as a thinking person, I am very curious.

Why be a good person? If no eternal penalty,why not get all you can for yourself? You know, survival of the fittest.

First of all, you do not need a God to establish moral principles. All you need is a set of values in which to live by. For example, Ethical Humanist value life. All life. Therefore, their morality flows from the principle that life is precious and should be placed as one's highest value. When you think about it, this principle can lead one to such laws as "thou shall not kill"...etc...That said, many of their morals parallel other religions. On teh topic of penalty, it is clear that transgression, deemed as "wrong" by your peers WILL bring about social sanctions. Morality is very much socially constructed.

Originally Posted by starheimberger

How can you look at something as simple as a Jeep and know there was an intelligent design behind it,But can look at the very complex human body and be certain that it was not created?

Just as I can look at a Jeep and know it was intelligently designed, I can look at the human eye and know it was not the best design possible. Or I can look at DNA replication, and all its error and say, "why is it not a perfect copy"? (of course we know why)...

Second, the "Intelligent Designer" in Intelligent Design is neither observable nor repeatable. Critics argue this violates the scientific requirement of falsifiability.

Third, there is evidence of "unintelligent designs": There have been 23 elephant-like animals in history, and yet only two survive today (and we add, they’re not doing very well). Clearly, this is the mark of an all-powerful creator who is stuck on the same stupid idea and can’t figure out why the hell they keep dying off. Hmm, perhaps it’s because giant, big-eared mammals with huge, prehensile noses are ridiculous? I mean, WTF? A giant, powerful, grasping nose? It looks like something a preschooler would make up.

Finally, if we are to assert that there is a designer we are left with the question of "who designed the designer"...ad infinitum...

Originally Posted by starheimberger

Why is my spiritual perspective so offensive? I mean, I look at you, and just think you are wrong, but you look at my customs/rituals/public displays/ideas and feel obligated to ridicule me. (broad generality)

I don't find you offensive. Actually, I am of the opinion that religion must serve some useful function...it has been around for a very long time. Although, I haven't figured out what that function is...

Originally Posted by starheimberger

Why are faithful people thought of,generally,as simple minded?

I am seriously wondering.

Because they replace REASON with FAITH when it is not appropriate to do so.