Let's talk about the big question. I want to know, that is if you don't believe in God how to you think we all got to earth? How do you think earth got here? The planets? The galaxys? I you do believe in God I want your feed back too, but on how God was always there even before there was nothing. This is really all opinions so don't be closed to other's ideas. This is a very baffleing subject that needs to be talked about. -gina marie

de omnibus dubitandum
look that up and stop asking stupid questions

The more I know and realize, the more I want nothing to do with this world. Hostility and apathy towards these amazing creatures we call humans is more than I can wrap my mind around. How is it possible to have such feelings of hate towards someone who is of the exact same makings as you and the ones you love are? How is it possible that we can treat even the ones we love- the ones that our soul reaches out to in the most beautiful and delicate way, in such coldness? High school is the best example of people's shallowness. Honestly, does it really matter that "so and so" is being super annoying today? Does it make them less of a human being? Less of a miracle? We should be grateful that our lives have even been in the presence of such intricate, unimaginably complicated living thing. The miracle that we are even alive and bound to this world together should be reason enough for us mortals to have an unbreakable, loving bond.

These days, I'm finding it more and more difficult to tolerate this unfathomably cruel world; what could have been a perfect system of life, tainted by people's selfishness. If this is what life is, I do not want to be a part of it. I truly believe that in my lifetime, my mind will never come to rest, ushering me into insanity before I am content with the way things are. I keep hoping that peace of mind will come to me with age, but I am regretfully realizing it may only come after death.

god is an excuse for people who are afraid to say i dont know

i dnt know when the islam is remind
why the some carry adjective the(kill) with islam's word?
do u know really what is the islam?
and please outlying about any personality feuds.
just take a look just a look about islam
we don't slang any religion but others always slang muslims.
and when some members talking about kill in islam.
we the muslims disagree with thoughts some who they out the islam meaning.
and why always any problem in this world put it in islam?
i wanna here remember the some
isn't america who kill indian people before ?
isn't america who killed iraq people?
isn't america who killed people in hiroshima and nagazaky?
isn't america who support israel to kill people in gaza and lebanon ?
isn't america who killed people in afghanstan?

or all those victims were because of islam.

we always put the blame on government of america.
but the most put the blame in the religion.
if our religions are different but our humanity is one.

and where is humanity of the human in front of all these bloods?

tell me..

to all of you reading and replying, I just want to tell you all that if you ever wonder and i mean that you really want to know if there is a God ... just open your heart and have a speck of faith, just a speck is all you need, and the lord jesus christ will reveal himself to yo. Yes, you can know without a shadow of a doubt that you have a father in heaven, and that jesus died on the cross for your sins and that he has a much bigger plan for you than you ever thought..He loves you .

Listen, Nephilim. Stop posting here. This thread is dead. The people aren't going to respond. Good lord, child. Just stop posting here!

quote:

Crazychild, I hate to break it to you like this, but the earth as we know it is not thousands of millions, hundereds of millions, or even millions of years old. For that matter it's not even a million years old.

Yes, the earth is not hundreds of millions of years old; it is billions of years old!! This has been very well established in science and is only disputed by a number of the so called Creation Scientists, who have decided that they will attack anything that they deem related to the Theory of evolution.

But of course, some people can't let anything alone.

quote:

What if it just is? Infinity is a hard thing to grasp but it's possible that the earth has always existed and will always exist.

Just wanted to interject that they have very accurate assessments of the age of the universe, dated back to about 13 billion years, so the universe can not be infinitely old. This idea has died in the scientific community, as we learn more and more about the universe.

Let this thread die.

Read this and join the 21st century. You may realise an antiquated code of living for the common good was devised in the form of a manual called The Bible. The common good, is infact GOD just an ebreviation of the word good. Jesus a sales rep and his team of sales disciples tried hard to coorect our animal instincts.


There are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten Commandments, which are the subject of such bitter contention in the culture wars of America's boondocks. The other is by example: God, or some other biblical character, might serve as - to use the contemporary jargon - a role model. Both scriptural routes, if followed through religiously (the adverb is used in its metaphoric sense but with an eye to its origin), encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person, whether religious or not, would find - I can put it no more gently - obnoxious.

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed. Bishop Spong, by the way, is a nice example of a liberal bishop whose beliefs are so advanced as to be almost unrecognizable to the majority of those who call themselves Christians. A British counterpart is Richard Holloway, recently retired as Bishop of Edinburgh. Bishop Holloway even describes himself as a 'recovering Christian'. I had a public discussion with him in Edinburgh, which was one of the most stimulating and interesting encounters I have had.

THE OLD TESTAMENT

Begin in Genesis with the well-loved story of Noah, derived from the Babylonian myth of Uta-Napisthim and known from the older mythologies of several cultures. The legend of the animals going into the ark two by two is charming, but the moral of the story of Noah is appalling. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including children and also, for good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as well.

Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don't take the book of Genesis literally any more. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist's decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is 'morality flying by the seat of its pants', so is the other. In any case, despite the good intentions of the sophisticated theologian, a frighteningly large number of people still do take their scriptures, including the story of Noah, literally. According to Gallup, they include approximately 50 per cent of the US electorate. Also, no doubt, many of those Asian holy men who blamed the 2004 tsunami not on a plate tectonic shift but on human sins, ranging from drinking and dancing in bars to breaking some footling sabbath rule. Steeped in the story of Noah, and ignorant of all except biblical learning, who can blame them? Their whole education has led them to view natural disasters as bound up with human affairs, paybacks for human misdemeanours rather than anything so impersonal as plate tectonics. By the way, what presumptuous egocentricity to believe that earth-shaking events, on the scale at which a god (or a tectonic plate) might operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance!

When I interviewed for television the Reverend Michael Bray, a prominent American anti-abortion activist, I asked him why evangelical Christians were so obsessed with private sexual inclinations such as homosexuality, which didn't interfere with anybody else's life. His reply invoked something like self-defence. Innocent citizens are at risk of becoming collateral damage when God chooses to strike a town with a natural disaster because it houses sinners. In 2005, the fine city of New Orleans was catastrophically flooded in the aftermath of a hurricane, Katrina. The Reverend Pat Robertson, one of America's best-known televangelists and a former presidential candidate, was reported as blaming the hurricane on a lesbian comedian who happened to live in New Orleans.* You'd think an omnipotent God would adopt a slightly more targeted approach to zapping sinners: a judicious heart attack, perhaps, rather than the wholesale destruction of an entire city just because it happened to be the domicile of one lesbian comedian.

In November 2005, the citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania voted off their local school board the entire slate of fundamentalists who had brought the town notoriety, not to say ridicule, by attempting to enforce the teaching of 'intelligent design'. When Pat Robertson heard that the fundamentalists had been democratically defeated at the ballot, he offered a stern warning to Dover:

I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover, if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city, and don't wonder why he hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin, and I'm not saying they will. But if they do, just remember you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, then don't ask for his help, because he might not be there.

Pat Robertson would be harmless comedy, were he less typical of those who today hold power and influence in the United States. In the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Noah equivalent, chosen to be spared with his family because he was uniquely righteous, was Abraham's nephew Lot. Two male angels were sent to Sodom to warn Lot to leave the city before the brimstone arrived. Lot hospitably welcomed the angels into his house, whereupon all the men of Sodom gathered around and demanded that Lot should hand the angels over so that they could (what else?) sodomize them: 'Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them' (Genesis 19: 5).

Yes, 'know' has the Authorized Version's usual euphemistic meaning, which is very funny in the context. Lot's gallantry in refusing the demand suggests that God might have been onto something when he singled him out as the only good man in Sodom. But Lot's halo is tarnished by the terms of his refusal: 'I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof' (Genesis 19: 7-8).

Whatever else this strange story might mean, it surely tells us something about the respect accorded to women in this intensely religious culture. As it happened, Lot's bargaining away of his daughters' virginity proved unnecessary, for the angels succeeded in repelling the marauders by miraculously striking them blind. They then warned Lot to decamp immediately with his family and his animals, because the city was about to be destroyed. The whole household escaped, with the exception of Lot's unfortunate wife, whom the Lord turned into a pillar of salt because she committed the offence - comparatively mild, one might have thought - of looking over her shoulder at the fireworks display.

Lot's two daughters make a brief reappearance in the story. After their mother was turned into a pillar of salt, they lived with their father in a cave up a mountain. Starved of male company, they decided to make their father drunk and copulate with him. Lot was beyond noticing when his elder daughter arrived in his bed or when she left, but he was not too drunk to impregnate her. The next night the two daughters agreed it was the younger one's turn. Again Lot was too drunk to notice, and he impregnated her too (Genesis 19: 31-6). If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.

*It is unclear whether the story... is true. Whether true or not, it is widely believed, no doubt because it is entirely typical of utterances by evangelical clergy, including Robertson, on disasters such as Katrina. ... The website that says the Katrina story is untrue... also quotes Robertson as saying, of an earlier Gay Pride march in Orlando, Florida, 'I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you.'



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FROM CHAPTER EIGHT: What's wrong with religion? Why be so hostile?

In July 2005, London was the victim of a concerted suicide bomb attack: three bombs in the subway and one in a bus. Not as bad as the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, and certainly not as unexpected (indeed, London had been braced for just such an event ever since Blair volunteered us as unwilling side-kicks in Bush's invasion of Iraq), nevertheless the London explosions horrified Britain. The newspapers were filled with agonized appraisals of what drove four young men to blow themselves up and take a lot of innocent people with them. The murderers were British citizens, cricket-loving, well-mannered, just the sort of young men whose company one might have enjoyed.

Why did these cricket-loving young men do it? Unlike their Palestinian counterparts, or their kamikaze counterparts in Japan, or their Tamil Tiger counterparts in Sri Lanka, these human bombs had no expectation that their bereaved families would be lionized, looked after or supported on martyrs' pensions. On the contrary, their relatives in some cases had to go into hiding. One of the men wantonly widowed his pregnant wife and orphaned his toddler. The action of these four young men has been nothing short of a disaster not just for themselves and their victims, but for their families and for the whole Muslim community in Britain, which now faces a backlash. Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people. Once again, Sam Harris put the point with percipient bluntness, taking the example of the Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden (who had nothing to do with the London bombings, by the way). Why would anyone want to destroy the World Trade Center and everybody in it? To call bin Laden 'evil' is to evade our responsibility to give a proper answer to such an important question.

The answer to this question is obvious - if only because it has been patiently articulated ad nauseam by bin Laden himself. The answer is that men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran. Why did nineteen well-educated middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of humans so fully and satisfactorily explained. Why have we been so reluctant to accept this explanation?"

The respected journalist Muriel Gray, writing in the (Glasgow) Herald on 24 July 2005, made a similar point, in this case with reference to the London bombings.

Everyone is being blamed, from the obvious villainous duo of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, to the inaction of Muslim 'communities'. But it has never been clearer that there is only one place to lay the blame and it has ever been thus. The cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is of course religion itself, and if it seems ludicrous to have to state such an obvious reality, the fact is that the government and the media are doing a pretty good job of pretending that it isn't so.

Our Western politicians avoid mentioning the R word (religion), and instead characterize their battle as a war against 'terror', as though terror were a kind of spirit or force, with a will and a mind of its own. Or they characterize terrorists as motivated by pure 'evil'. But they are not motivated by evil. However misguided we may think them, they are motivated, like the Christian murderers of abortion doctors, by what they perceive to be righteousness, faithfully pursuing what their religion tells them. They are not psychotic; they are religious idealists who, by their own lights, are rational. They perceive their acts to be good, not because of some warped personal idiosyncrasy, and not because they have been possessed by Satan, but because they have been brought up, from the cradle, to have total and unquestioning faith.

quote:

Originally posted by GinaMarie:
Let's talk about the big question. I want to know, that is if you don't believe in God how to you think we all got to earth? How do you think earth got here? The planets? The galaxys? I you do believe in God I want your feed back too, but on how God was always there even before there was nothing. This is really all opinions so don't be closed to other's ideas. This is a very baffleing subject that needs to be talked about. -gina marie

quote:

That's an interesting thing about the Bible. In the Old Testament, it says that, but in the New Testament, Jesus says to turn the other cheek. But I just think that's because idealogies change over the millenia. The Old Testament was written ages before Jesus was born, so the Hebrew beliefs would have changed a lot. Besides, the Old Testament was written by non-Christians. So maybe that's the difference...

True. That and, Jesus Christ was fully God, fully MAN, meaning that he had opinions too. Maybe, in his heart, that is how he felt. I'm not questioning his wisdom, but Jesus was also human, so...maybe part of all he said had to do with his own beliefs, not directly from God. Who knows.

quote:

Incidentally even the bible says and "eye for an eye" doesnt it

That's an interesting thing about the Bible. In the Old Testament, it says that, but in the New Testament, Jesus says to turn the other cheek. But I just think that's because idealogies change over the millenia. The Old Testament was written ages before Jesus was born, so the Hebrew beliefs would have changed a lot. Besides, the Old Testament was written by non-Christians. So maybe that's the difference...

I think it is God and only God and He is the one who brought us here on earth for a purpose: to love one another and to spread goodwill to others.

BoMoWo, you need some serious world-religions knowledge.

quote:

There is one God the creator of all.

Evolution is a lie it has absolutely no solid evidence to back it's claims.

Bhudism is also a lie, if you knew anything about it you would understand exactly how stupid it is, and it worships one's own self.

Islam is a lie, study it out it is about killing anyone who doesn't believe in Islam.

Hinduism is also a lie, it is about making yourself a god and in it you worship the god's of anything you can think of basically.

And i resent each and every statement youve made . I hope for your sake that you were just trying to be sarcastic .

Yaah if i did believe in GOD then there probably is one GOD the creator of all .

Evolution is NOT a lie . And please make statements like a reasonable scientist at least .

And im not a big fan of religion myself . But i can say that Budhism is a beautiful religion . And besides its a matter of opinion . Making a statement like you dont like budhism makes more sense that budhism is a lie .

Incidentally even the bible says and "eye for an eye" doesnt it . The idea is not to take it literally . SOME muslims are more radical but blaming an entire civilization???

And please dont step into India and countries like India if thats what you think . In fact Hinduism is as democratic a religion as you can get . There are millions of GODS . a GOD for every virtue . You pick one and swear to stick by it .

How about this next time dont read a book on religion but read a book on the religious structure of India .See how hard it is to maintain peace in a country like this where every tenth person believes their way is the only way .

You know people say that guys who cut and drink and take drugs have taken the easy way out . But I think you have taken the easiest way

No I dont believe in GOD . And thats not because Im a science student or anything like that . In fact contrary to common belief - you have to be a very good science student so that you can differentiate between what is scientific and whats not .
Its not even that I dont beieve in something I cant see . I believe in little green men and ghosts and any other paranormal deal you can come up with .
So how come I dont believe in GOD . Is it because everybody else does ? Yaah thats the reason for my doing or not doing most of the things. Or maybe Im just too bullheaded to accept that I am answerable to someebody all the time . GOD is not my concsience , HE is not my life jacket and HE is most definitely not my oxygen . But then Why is not exactly the right question is it??

You should understand that this just means that I dont believe in GOD - yet . Anybody can convince me otherwise go ahead .And yaah there is something to evolution .