Noahs Ark housed Dinosaurs in KY Creation Museum

[radical matt]

^I come to this discussion with an appalling lack of scientific credentials so know upfront I'm not prepared nor do I care to debate anyone. I have a layman's question for you:

You calculated the age of the earth to be 10,000 years. The KY museum says 6,000. Thats a difference of 4,000 years so we can write that off to a rounding error. The evolution scientists estimate earth to be 14 billion years old. I think you'd agree that the delta here is far too great to explain as a math error.

The 14 billion year crowd employ carbon dating techniques on rocks and fossils.

Question: What dating technique did you use and why do you think yours is more accurate?

Ah, there are three problems with that post. ^_^

First, scientific CREDENTIALS mean next to nothing in reality, it is whether or not you have facts (and willingness to ask questions and learn ^_^) that's most important.


Second, I used no dating technique. I was like 14. ^_^ I simply got a calculator and read through the Bible, and tried to get a good estimate for age basing the number of years people lived before having their child, how many that child lived before having theirs, ect, until getting to a solid (from a historical point of view) reference point from which to add the numbers. This would extrapolate to the age of recorded human life. From there you add five days and that's that. Although if you do the "day to the Lord is as a thousand years", that would be adding 5,000, but...and when did I say I think (present tense) that mine is more accurate? I will say that I had some support, at the time, by a Christian textbook which referenced someone saying that the magnetic field around the Earth deteriorates slowly with time, with the conclusion that were the Earth more than about 20,000 years old (if one assumes this rate to be constant...note this is a common assumption of evolutionists and geoscientists as well, that things progress at essentially constant rates), the magnetic field would be great enough to destroy the Earth. Geological strata, however, indicate that the Earth's magnetic field has switched 180 degrees multiple times in its history (a pice of knowledge added to my studies about a year ago), though it's an essentially instant shift. That is, magnets point north, then south, than north again. There's no slow change over, it's an instant 180...well, as instant as things get in geology...


Finally dating methods. Carbon 14 dating methods are accurate to about 5,000 years, with a rough extention that raises that to 15,000. A problem with Carbon 14 dating is that it requires an assumption on the amount of Carbon originally in the animal being tested (that is, how much of verious Carbon isotopes were in the atmosphere at the time the animal lived.) See, there are different isotopes of Carbon. All stable Carbon has a set number of both protons in the nucleus and electrons in its electron shells, however, you can give or take some neutrons from the nucleus and you still have Carbon (the number of neutrons don't affect the element, and technically, neither do the number of electons, but for an atom to be neutral, it needs the same number of electrons as protons soas to neutralize the total charge.) One isotope of Carbon, I THINK it's Carbon 15 (this is off the top of my head, mind you, but the science is still correct) has...let's see, Carbon has hm...H, He, Li...Be, B, C, okay, six protons. That means that in Carbon 15, there are 15 - 6 = 9 neutrons. Carbon 15 is in the atmosphere. But see, Carbon 15 is slightly unstable, such that, over time, one neutron will be ejected from the neucleus and it will become Carbon 14, 6 protons and 8 neutrons in the nucleus.

Now then, here's where the dating comes in. Using the half-life as a guide...oh, half-life. A half-life is the time it takes for any radioactive material to have decayed such that half of it is now in the decayed form and only half of it is left in the undecayed, still radioactive form. What scientists do is make an assumption about how Carbon was in the atmosphere, specifically the ratio of Carbon 15 to Carbon 14, when the animal lived and, presumably, died. If they're good scientists, they attempt to use the geological stratum around the creature as a reference for this (though it's not perfect, rock layers do tend to preserve "pockets" of the atmosphere from the time they were formed.) Then they measure the amount of Carbon 15 still in the animal (since it's slightly radioactive, that is, the ejected neutrons, they can tell Carbon 15 apart from Carbon 14), and then calculate the number of half-lives that were needed to get to that number. Of course, the half-life for Carbon 15 is something on the lines of 5,000 years. This makes that dating method VERY accurate up to 5,000 years. The further back you go, however, the more room for error. I'm not sure the upper limit, but I'd think Carbon dating would begin to loose accuracy significantly after a few dozen to a few hundred thousand years, the cause for the increasing inaccuracy that the assumption crucial to the dating method, assuming the Carbon content/ratio in the atmosphere at the time of the animal being alive, becomes more iffy. If you assume the Carbon level was always the same, was greater than, or was less than what it actually was, this changes the "age" of the creature, and based on which way you make the error, can do so quite significantly (making something both younger and older than it actually was, respectively.)

There are other dating methods, but they're FAR less accurate. That life forms use Carbon to form the Carbon backbones of things such as DNA and fat and protiens makes it prevelanet in all cells of living organisms, after all, that's what they mean when they say we are "Carbon based" life, they mean the Carbon chains that other elements attatch to (it's because Carbon can hold four bonds/bond to four other things at the same time. This makes it a good "connector" for complex organic molocules. Some people have theorized some other thing such as Sillicon could possibly be another basis of life because it has this in common with Carbon based on its number of empty electron shells.) To the Human body (or other life forms), it doesn't really care if it's Carbon 14 or Carbon 15 that they have, either will be used to build organic molocules. The Carbon 15 decay is a neutron, and neutrons only interact gravitationally, not electrically or magnetically (via charge), so they don't tend to damage the molocule when they decay. Because of this, they are present in all life, that's right, you and me are both giving off neutrons from our Carbon 15 decaying all the time. Betcha didn't know that, eh? Or, at least, never thought of it that way. ^_^

So, how do you get to older things? You use dating methods with things that have longer half-lives, such as, say, Uranium. The problem is, life on Earth is Carbon based (and always has been, to our knowledge), not Uranium based. So when they find one of these other elements to use the other dating methods with, it tends to be a LOT more assuming going on, because they have to try and decide how much of these elements were in the atmosphere/food of the organism during its life. This tends to be more problematic than the Carbon method, and has resulted in some interesting errors (such as a LIVING shellfish being dated as being several BILLIONS [not millions, billions] of years old, something that should most obviously call into error the dating method.)

In fact, there was something said a few years ago about the "newest" oldest Carbon dated thing being around 10,000 years old...which at the time supported my 10,000 year calculated age of the Earth. I'm sure there are some older ones now, of course. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that dating methods that date things as millions, much less billions, of years old should be viewed as having wide margins of error, at best. And a 50% margin of error for something 2 billion years old is a margin of +/- 1 billion years easily, so this is quite significant, and the margins can be even wider than this, since they are at their core based on assumptions (most commonly that everything in history has occured at an approximately constant rate, something which Human history alone tends to indicate is untrue.)

Oh, and I should further point out a fourth error on your part, Carbon dating isn't what tends to give ages that old, it is other dating methods. They use the same premise, but don't tend to be nearly as accurate as Carbon dating. At least, up until a few years ago. They might have gotten some older stuff out of Carbon more reciently, but that I have no data on, so can't say yay or nay on.


Erm, and finally a fifth point of note. Evolution scientists estimate the Earth at 14 billion years old? That's a touch odd, I was thinking that Astronomy/Geological scientists had concluded the Earth was approximately 4.5 billion years old (or maybe that was just the first appearance of life on Earth...? I forget.)


Score! I was right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_earth

So yeah, that's about 3.5 times too big there. ^_^ But you did say you were coming into this with little to no scientific background on it, so it's an understandable error. It's all cool. ^_^


May I suggest you dig a little more into it? Too many people believe in things they know too little about. If you say that you're coming into this as a person of little scientific background, it might be beneficial to you to look into evolution and geology some more, otherwise you're simply believing it "on faith", are you not? Uhm, no insult intended, just as one scientist to potentially another, research what you believe, you never know when you may find you don't believe it anymore. ^_^ And I don't just say this to you, look at my own experience as an example. I once believed, without doubt, that God created life on this little planet about 10,000 years ago, shortly after creating the planet itself. While I still see that this IS technically possible if you bring into play some exotic things (such as a White Hole and Time Dilation), I no longer believe that it is unquestionably true. Indeed, if I did, I would not even be examining Evolution realistically. But I'm a scientist and philosopher, and what's more, I'm a genuinely curious individual. There are few things in life I feel I must take on faith, and in fact, there are plenty of people that already do to meet any quota on that which may exist.

So now, I'm looking at things from a truly open mind, one which sees both the posibility of the supernatural and of the natural as explanations, and even sees possibilities where both may coexist. After all, unless you at least allow for the possibility of all sides, and, indeed, ANYTHING to be true, you're cutting off the possible truth form your list. To be a true scientist, I should look at them all on their own merits and see which explanation is the most in tune with reality.


Anyway, maybe you were being sarcastic, but if you genuinely wanted an answer from someone that's a scientist, there is what I know. Keep in mind, I'm not a chemist, geologist, biologist, or evolutionist, I'm a physicist (it's official now after years of study, yay! ^_^), but that means I still have the rigourous training of a scientist and that I understand, rather intimately, the concepts involved in such things as radioactive decay (as well as the astronomical view of stelar/planetary formation, since astronomy is one of my favored areas of study), so what I've said on this should be at least enough to set you on off on the right foot if you really want to look into all this further.

See? I'm not the crazy fundamentalist religious nut you thought, right? ^_^

 

[1st love ron]

Still, if there is no god, there is no sin, and if there is no spirit and afterlife, than there's absolutely no reason to help others and one should step on others whenever they're between the person and getting pleasure and happiness

So, basically religion is a crutch to behave like a decent human being and live in constant fear. In other words, were it not for your beliefs you'd be a horrible and abusive person.

Well, those of us who don't believe in heaven and hell, sin, afterlife and all that malarkey don't go out and crush people that get in the way of our pleasure and happiness.

 

[Negasta]

I downloaded the CNN inset about this bullshit museum from onegoodmove.org and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry from the sheer stupidity exhibited by the cretins who run the place.

Ken Ham is a charlatan and how he could ever have been a science teacher is beyond me. The level of cognitive dissonance that must be going on in his mind must be incredible.

 

[theFallenGod]

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i2/africa.asp

the bible doesnt promote canabilism!!

Think the last supper.... not so much genesis...."take this bread for it is my body...."

 

[darcey]

Do they have Adam's dildo? Cain& Abel's condos? Why do people who "support" the Creator wish to limit that same Creator? Just give it up & admit that the Creator doesn't need us - we need the Creator!! I'm all for God, but am not necessary to God. Don't put limits on the Creator.

 

[radical matt]

So, basically religion is a crutch to behave like a decent human being and live in constant fear. In other words, were it not for your beliefs you'd be a horrible and abusive person.

Well, those of us who don't believe in heaven and hell, sin, afterlife and all that malarkey don't go out and crush people that get in the way of our pleasure and happiness.

Heh, I believe you quite misunderstand. If there is no god, there is no "responsibility" to do right. Further, why do we help other people? Why are we good and kind? In this day, you as a secularist can say that it's because we are philisophically advanced enough to see the sanctity, sacredness, and infinate value of life, and for humanitarian reasons, we should help other people.

...what you fail to realize is that ALL of those things derived from religion.

If other human being have souls/spirits that persist throughout eternity, then whatever good we do them will persist as well as an everlasting memory. It's sort of like comissioning a statue, it's a monument that forever has a record of you as an individual. By interacting with others, for better or for worse, we produce a chain of memories, a recognition of our actions. Were this not so, no matter what we did, no one would remember 100 to 1,000 years after we lived, so if you were alright with a few decades of shame being attached to your name for an action, so be it.

But why DO we want to help others? Compassion. We are told in the Bible that of all emotions, love is the greatest, and that of all things, showing compassion to our fellows is most important in life. The Golden Rule ("...treat your neighbor as yourself..." or simply, treat others as you'd like to be treated), and the story of the Good Samaritan (a man who was willing to help a religious/political rival in need, even when the hurt man's own fellows walked by without helping him) are direct exampls of this, and both of these came from the mouth of Jesus of Nazereth.

The Bible, religion, tells us that this is the highest calling. But what if it takes from our money and takes time we could be spending doing things that are more fun and pleasurable to us? Why are we sacrificing our limited time (we only get 60-120 years on this Earth as it is before the oblivion of death) and our hard earned money (which took us MORE of our limted time to get and which we need to finanace our pleasure and happiness) for someone else? Simple, it's because this "humanitarian" view says that we have more time, in fact, that we have an eternity in a perfect utopia after this life ends, a place where money and time have no meaning. And if we can help this person here, make their journey on Earth a little more barable, than they and we can be companions in the afterlife, in Heaven, and we'll all be skipping about on streets of gold and riding our favorite clouds through countryside and cosmos alike.

It is, after all, religion, not secularism, not evolution, that expresses this views. It is the hope of more time and a perfect world that comes after this one that lets us practice these good actions without regred for the money and time we put into them, after all, someday we'll be in a place with neither money nor time.


HOPE, not FEAR, hope that frees us to action, not fear that constrains us to it.


But what conclusions to evolution and secularism allow? And I mean the particularly stringent secularism that denies even the possibile existance of a spirit or soul, much less a god (that assumes that all there is is physical reality, three, maybe four dimensions of space, and linear time. None of which MY field, Physics, actually necessitates, and, in fact, there is growing evidence against this.) Here's what it says;


Life is not sacred, heh, Sacred? Nothing is sacred! It's all simply matter, atoms and molocules, and life is no different. Life is simply a collection of matter that behaves in a particulary way, a "controled series of chemical reactions", as my Biology professor put it. This means there is nothing inheriently special to life. It means that, if we had the technology, we could make an identical copy of you out of inanimate matter, it would have the same memories, same skills, same knowledge that you have.

Humans are no longer special either, no, we're simply another variety of animal. As such, we should behave like other animals, shouldn't we? And why not? We're not special, we are just one of many other organisms and species on this planet. In fact, life or death, we're not really going to make much of an impact.

What do animals do? They eat (preditors/omnivores kill prey to eat), they sleep, and they have sex.

There is no higher calling. Outside of protecthing their young, which not all animals do even, they couldn't care less what happens to others of their species, or even what happens to this planet. They exist to live and they live to breed. Once they've done that, they die, having fulfilled their evolutionary duty to pass on their genetics to the next generation.


...in fact, evolution is against homosexuals, did you know this? To a true evolutionist, our duty in life is to pass on our genes for the betterment of our race, especially so our best, brightest, most healthy, ect. Homosexuals do NOT pass on their genetics, thus they are an evolutionary "dead end" (at least in Jewdeism there's forgiveness, and in true Christianity, there is either forgiveness [in the more Conservative Christians] or no comdenation at all [Jesus himself never condemned homosexuality or homosexual relationships, and the Apostle Paul's condemnation is arguably only about ritual sexual "sacrifices" to pegan gods, namely "temple prostitution" which often involved teenage boys and young adult men as the prostitutes, often more than female prostitutes of any age.]) What I find rather odd is that no one ever realizes this...


Oh, but what about "humanitarianism"? Secularists say that Humans are "intelligent" life and can act "humanitarian". Oh really? This supposes that humans are different than animals, something that evolutions clearly tend to vohemently oppose. In fact, WHERE in "survival of the fittest" do you read in "mercy to the weak and suffering"? Evolution strongly suggests, if not out and out demands, that we step on the weak, trample on the suffering, whatever we can do to get ahead so that WE are the ones that pass on our genes.


Apply this to the broader sense of life and the result is simple; we should only care about ourselves, and possibly our offspring. We should only care about others insofar as they help us achieve our ends.



But wait, there's more.


There are no spirits, no souls, no afterlife. We get one shot at this. We aren't even sure we'll live through today, and we've got an apparent genetic cap of 120 as the oldest age we can reach. Then, the abyss of non-existance. Once we're gone, once we die, that's it. There is no immortality, neither physical nor physical. Even though it's inevitable, we should fear death with a passion unmatched, try everything to extend life as long as we can.

What's more, guess what? Unlike with the spiritual, you can leave no monuments. Build a statue? In about 5 billion years when the Sun dies, the Earth's surface (if not the planet itself) will be destroyed. Unless Humans leave the Earth and take your statue with you, it dies. Maybe instead, you'll seek imortality through science or philosophy or some other achievement? Your name will be know for thousands, billions of years, even. Even when Humans leave the Earth to escape its death.

...but for how long? Matter moves appart, and matter acretes. In time, the universe will slowly begin to die. Matter that moves together will form Black Holes, matter that moves apart will loose energy and slowly disintigrate. In the end, one of several things will happen based on Hubble's Variable:

The universe will begin to contract back in on itself. All the gravity of all those Black Holes, pulling into a massive "Big Crunch", effectively ending our universe, and most likely destroying the ships of the wondering colonies of Humanity that still remain, havning no longer a planet or, in fact, any stars (they've all been eaten by the Black Holes.)

OR

The universe will extend indefinately, either at a constant rate or an increasing one...but in doing so, entrophy will take its hold. The energy of the universe will tend to chaos, and in the end, even gravity will not be able to hold things together. They will dissolve into loose molocules, and eventually into disjointed energy which is spead thinner and thinner. The universe will suffere a "heat death", and in that cold expanse of nothingness, the decendents of Humanity will die, being unable to anymore secure a source of energy to power their ships.


...in either of these cases, it's highly unlikely that your monument, your name, your immortality, will survive. Only the first case allows for it, and it's rather iffy at best.



So how does this translate to life? Simple, there is nothing you can do to leave a truly lasting impression on the universe. Sorry to tell ya pal, but you're just THAT small. There is no greater good, and only a life filled with suffering and capped with death.

So what action should you take?

Well, you only have one life, there's no sin, and there's no sanctity of human life, which means no humanitarianism, to worry about. And you hate that Jesus guy anyway, so why are you doing the stuff he said to do? There are two clear options. There may be more, but these are what I see.

Option A) You live a life of passion and happiness, doing as little that you dislike as possible, and only doing "hard" things or helping other people if they help you in your road to happiness and pleasure. You also need to sleep around with some women, as many as you can, to ensure that your genes are passed on for the evolutionary good of the race. After all, that is the only duty you really have. With no sin and no afterlife to worry about, your actions, good or bad, are meaningless, in fact, there IS no good or bad. And what's more, no one will remember your actions, they truly are meaningless, so you can do whatever you want, no matter how "bad" it may be. As long as it lends to your happiness and pleasure and gives you a chance to spread the sperm around, that's all that matters.

Option B) You kill yourself. Recognizing that life is simply painful and filled with suffering, and realizing that you're going to have to work and suffer to even get the happiness and pleasure that you would otherwise seek, you choose to simply kill yourself. And why not? You're just an animal, a piece of meat. There is no Heaven or Hell, simply the void of non-existance. It's not like you'll be in this empty "state" of existance either, you simply "will not be." This is an attractive option, obviously. It prevents you from having to suffer, from having to see others suffer, and from having to deal with your own insignificance. And once again, actions don't matter, and life and death don't matter. All is insignificant, and all is meaningless. With that realization, and an understanding that a) death is inevitable, and b) you can't set up a permanent monument to your name, then there's really no reason to go through life. I mean, if you were born into the upper class and you don't have to work and all you have to do is eat, drink, sleep, and have sex and parties, okay, then Option A is better. If you're poor, lower class, or even middle class, then Option B is probably the best one for you, unelss you're middle-class but very intelligent or something that gives you an edge. Oh, don't forget to sleep with a girl before you kill yourself though, you still have an evolutionary duty to pass on your genes.




So I say again, I believe you quite misunderstand.

If there is a spiritual existance, doesn't even have to be a "god", per se, could be something like Hinduism's steps to Nirvana or Final Fantasy 7's Lifestream (similar concept, actually...), but if there is ANY form of spiritual existance, than there is HOPE. It isn't fear.

And if there is not, if the physical is all that exists (despite all the science that points to there needing to be something extraordinary for the sake of both the origin of the universe and the beginings of life), then there is nothing but dispair or emptiness of life and FEAR of death.


So you have it backwards, it is secularism that breeds fear, and spiritualism that leads to hope. Is it any wonder why, after a generation of suicides and promiscuous living, that there are so many becoming spiritualists in my generation? They aren't all becoming Christians, mind you, some are going to animistic or totemic beliefs, some to new age ones, some to pegan/Wiccan ones, some to Islam, Hinduism, ect. But people want something to believe. Their subconscious tells them that this life, if the secular-physical is all that exists, is empty and meaningless, useful only if you can have happiness and if you can't, you should kill yourself, and they want MORE. They want hope, so they're finding it themselves, against all people telling them they should abandon it.

...and to be quite honest, people that would steal something as precious as HOPE from other people, even if those hoping people are wrong and misguided, really pisses me off.

Opposing condemnation is one thing, but you should never oppose hope. Don't let the actions of some people against you lead you to blindly accept the words of the opposition. (You yourself didn't actually say anything that indicates you have proof of Evolution, rather, you attacked me, you attacked people that oppose evolution and HAVE hope, and then you tried making it sound like your a better person because you are perfectly willing to be a pervert, leacher, and rotten person. I hate to break it to you, but I can see through that thin veil, and after reading this, so can anyone else. ^_^)

Like I told smelter, research what you "believe". Science isn't about belief, it's about FACTS. Don't pervert MY field, science, with YOUR faith. I can have faith too, but science is better than that, and you're lowering MY thing to YOUR level.

I'm moderately incensed...


Uhm, for a show of hands, how many people actually agree with Evolution having REASEARCHED and READ about it yourself, and how many believe in it because you were taught it in school? Oh yeah, and how many believe in it just because it opposes Christianity?

...if you're going to support it, do it for the RIGHT reason. I know some Biologists and they are constantly pissed at how people "believe" evolution through "faith" when, to them (these Biologists) there is ample factual support, but people never even look at it, they decide whether the are going to agree as if deciding on a religion.



Oh yeah, I would like to finish this by saying that I don't want people going out and comitting suicide yet. ^_^ As far as my own life experiences have led me to believe, and apparently, those of a great many others, there is at least SOMETHING else going on. What that is, exactly, I can't say, God or Buddah, who knows. But the universe doesn't seem to be entirely capable of self-existance, and that's at least worthy of a little hope. ^_^




Oh yeah, and as for this:

In other words, were it not for your beliefs you'd be a horrible and abusive person.

Probably not. My mother raised me well, I'm an all around nice guy, through and through. Besides which, I presently believe that conscious is not entirely intrinsic to the physical brain (I've devised an experiment to test this, however it would require Star Trek transporter technology, which somewhat violates Quantum Mechanics' Uncertainty Principle, and at any rate is quite far beyond the reach of our technology anytime soon), which would indicate I have some preset constructs to my behavior, and they seem to press me to live with courage and mercy in life. Regardless of what I ultimately decide regarding evolution, those constructs will still exist, and baring a concentrated effort on my part to change them (as I changed my introverted tendencies somewhat and things like that), they would remain. As I said before, I'd more likely just kill myself to save myself the trouble. ^_^ But even if evolution is true, that doesn't mean that nothing spiritual exists...hope again finds a way...

Heh, indeed, I live in constant hope, not constant fear. ^_^ Maybe you simply misunderstand whatever it is that I believe? A God of free forgiveness and a ticket to utopia...what is there to fear in that? -boggle-

 

[radical matt]

They are creationists, They don't believe in logic or science.

Neither do scientists. A scientist is supposed to be ruled by rational, logic, and empiricism. They aren't supposed to "believe", something that requires an act if faith, in either logic or science.


And for what it's worth, I've run across a fair number of ver rational, logical, scientific creationists in my time. Given, they aren't the ones that make museams of this sort, they just go through life reconciling their beliefs with their science as best they can. -shrug-

 

[Nishin]

So, basically religion is a crutch to behave like a decent human being and live in constant fear. In other words, were it not for your beliefs you'd be a horrible and abusive person.

Well, those of us who don't believe in heaven and hell, sin, afterlife and all that malarkey don't go out and crush people that get in the way of our pleasure and happiness.

I agree with you here... I don't quite understand why many religious people are so persuaded they have a monopoly on good, morals or compassion...
I can only suspect it comes from some form of brainwashing that makes them believe everything non-religious is necessarily evil since only belief in and fear of God is the way to go... I mean that's what's taught to them... no?

If there is no god, there is no "responsibility" to do right.

How so? Why would responsibility only find its ground on fear or anticipation for a post-life status rather than maturity and common sense?
Besides, I don't find Christianity to be all that responsible when it teaches how one can rape and murder all he wants as long as he "genuinely" repents on his death-bed !?

If other human being have souls/spirits that persist throughout eternity, then whatever good we do them will persist as well as an everlasting memory.

How relevant/useful is this to living beings?

It's sort of like comissioning a statue, it's a monument that forever has a record of you as an individual. By interacting with others, for better or for worse, we produce a chain of memories, a recognition of our actions. Were this not so, no matter what we did, no one would remember 100 to 1,000 years after we lived, so if you were alright with a few decades of shame being attached to your name for an action, so be it.

Here too I fail to see the link with religion...

But why DO we want to help others? Compassion. We are told in the Bible that of all emotions, love is the greatest, and that of all things, showing compassion to our fellows is most important in life. The Golden Rule ("...treat your neighbor as yourself..." or simply, treat others as you'd like to be treated), and the story of the Good Samaritan (a man who was willing to help a religious/political rival in need, even when the hurt man's own fellows walked by without helping him) are direct exampls of this, and both of these came from the mouth of Jesus of Nazereth.

And before Jesus, love and compassion did not exist? Without the bible, those would not exist?

The Bible, religion, tells us that this is the highest calling. But what if it takes from our money and takes time we could be spending doing things that are more fun and pleasurable to us? Why are we sacrificing our limited time (we only get 60-120 years on this Earth as it is before the oblivion of death) and our hard earned money (which took us MORE of our limted time to get and which we need to finanace our pleasure and happiness) for someone else? Simple, it's because this "humanitarian" view says that we have more time, in fact, that we have an eternity in a perfect utopia after this life ends, a place where money and time have no meaning. And if we can help this person here, make their journey on Earth a little more barable, than they and we can be companions in the afterlife, in Heaven, and we'll all be skipping about on streets of gold and riding our favorite clouds through countryside and cosmos alike.
It is, after all, religion, not secularism, not evolution, that expresses this views. It is the hope of more time and a perfect world that comes after this one that lets us practice these good actions without regred for the money and time we put into them, after all, someday we'll be in a place with neither money nor time.

I am not a religious person, and I do give to charities... why?
Certainly not because I want to buy my space in heaven... just because I know life is unfair and I feel lucky for being born where I was born and in the conditions I was born in when other people didn't have that luck, and I want to share some of that luck to help make other people' lives a bit better... nothing to do with guilt or afterlife... nothing to do with religion.

There is no higher calling. Outside of protecthing their young, which not all animals do even, they couldn't care less what happens to others of their species, or even what happens to this planet. They exist to live and they live to breed. Once they've done that, they die, having fulfilled their evolutionary duty to pass on their genetics to the next generation.

That's a pretty reductive view on animals... when studies of different animals show they are able of feelings and actions we used to believe were unique to humans...

...in fact, evolution is against homosexuals, did you know this? To a true evolutionist, our duty in life is to pass on our genes for the betterment of our race, especially so our best, brightest, most healthy, ect. Homosexuals do NOT pass on their genetics thus they are an evolutionary "dead end" [...]

Homosexuals can very well pass on their genetics... homosexuality doesn't equate sterility.
Is Mary Cheney, even in her context, a dead end?

Oh, but what about "humanitarianism"? Secularists say that Humans are "intelligent" life and can act "humanitarian". Oh really? This supposes that humans are different than animals, something that evolutions clearly tend to vohemently oppose. In fact, WHERE in "survival of the fittest" do you read in "mercy to the weak and suffering"? Evolution strongly suggests, if not out and out demands, that we step on the weak, trample on the suffering, whatever we can do to get ahead so that WE are the ones that pass on our genes.

Here again, that's exactly what we do... need fresh fields to grow herbs to feed cows for our burgers? No problem, lot of space in south america... local populations? Local animal species? Who cares... need oil to power our big cars and factories? No problem, lot of oil in in the middle east... local populations? They're weak or terrorists, who cares... let's do it in the name of God btw...

Apply this to the broader sense of life and the result is simple; we should only care about ourselves, and possibly our offspring. We should only care about others insofar as they help us achieve our ends.

That is EXACTLY what we do !! And with the help of religion to justify it!

So how does this translate to life? Simple, there is nothing you can do to leave a truly lasting impression on the universe.

Who said that's what we (all) want to do?

Well, you only have one life, there's no sin, and there's no sanctity of human life, which means no humanitarianism, to worry about. And you hate that Jesus guy anyway, so why are you doing the stuff he said to do?

By that logic, someone who hates Jesus should do exactly the opposite of what Jesus supposedly said just because he hates him? If my worst ennemy said "one shouldn't kill" ... I should kill everyone I could because I hate him? I don't quite get it...
Most of what Jesus allegedly said is common sense to me...
You mentioned the "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" golden rule earlier and attribuated it to Jesus, it happens to be a rule I try to live by in my everyday life... but such exemple of ethic of reciprocity is certainly not Jesus' monopoly, or even a moral principle unique to religions, in fact it is universal and is found in almost all cultures and philosophies in a form or another... why?
Because it's common sense. You don't want to treat others badly because they might treat you the same. Simple observation would allow most people to see that as a truth, independantly of their beliefs.

There are two clear options. There may be more, but these are what I see.

There are many more options... life is not black or white

So I say again, I believe you quite misunderstand.

I believe you have a pretty manichaean vision of life...

Their subconscious tells them that this life, if the secular-physical is all that exists, is empty and meaningless, useful only if you can have happiness and if you can't, you should kill yourself, and they want MORE. They want hope, so they're finding it themselves, against all people telling them they should abandon it.

Err... my subconscious never told me to kill myself... Maybe because I'm not atheist ?? Wait, my father is a hardcore atheist and he never demonstrated suicidal tendencies either...
I agree that most people want to believe in something, some choose to believe in fairy tales, some choose to believe in materialism, some in spirituality, some in themselves, some in humanity... the question being why deny non religious people the ability to develop systems of morals and ethics based on their own observations rather than what's dictated to them?

And what is the status of that "need for a belief" anyway?
The fact that such desire or need exists in no way validates the existence of its content... it could very well be just something needed by some people' minds to keep some balance and fonctionate properly... sort of like the (well, inversely) mechanism that allows us to see full pictures when we actually have blind spots in our eyes because our brain reconstructs the imagery and tricks us by filling the blank spots...

Opposing condemnation is one thing, but you should never oppose hope. Don't let the actions of some people against you lead you to blindly accept the words of the opposition. (You yourself didn't actually say anything that indicates you have proof of Evolution, rather, you attacked me, you attacked people that oppose evolution and HAVE hope, and then you tried making it sound like your a better person because you are perfectly willing to be a pervert, leacher, and rotten person. I hate to break it to you, but I can see through that thin veil, and after reading this, so can anyone else. ^_^)

Really??? I didn't read such thing
All I read is a logical interpretation of your fallacious argument that implied that:

if there is no god, there is no sin, and if there is no spirit and afterlife, than there's absolutely no reason to help others and one should step on others whenever they're between the person and getting pleasure and happiness

Should?? How so? No reason to help others? How so?? This is not attacking you at all, this is challenging your logic which despite your attempt at explaining it above still remains a mystery.
There are very good reasons to help others or not step on others without the intervention of God or afterlife, actually it's even very practical, you might want people to help you in return when you need it yourself or you don't want others to step on you...

Uhm, for a show of hands, how many people actually agree with Evolution having REASEARCHED and READ about it yourself, and how many believe in it because you were taught it in school? Oh yeah, and how many believe in it just because it opposes Christianity?

I personally agree with evolution because it makes sense to me and seems the most accurate theory we came up with so far. And as far as I recall from my days at primary school it has always been presented as a theory, never as the one and only truth, unlike what these creationists want schools to do...

 

[radical matt]

Awesome! Nishin, though I agree with you on next to nothing, at least you're always good in a debate. ^_^

I agree with you here... I don't quite understand why many religious people are so persuaded they have a monopoly on good, morals or compassion...
I can only suspect it comes from some form of brainwashing that makes them believe everything non-religious is necessarily evil since only belief in and fear of God is the way to go... I mean that's what's taught to them... no?

Hm, guess this one wasn't addressed to me though...

How so? Why would responsibility only find its ground on fear or anticipation for a post-life status rather than maturity and common sense?
Besides, I don't find Christianity to be all that responsible when it teaches how one can rape and murder all he wants as long as he "genuinely" repents on his death-bed !?

Tell me, what through time have people cited as a reason to do good? Well, the "gods" told them to. Karma was a concept that developed later, but still has some basis in a spiritual "thing", some intangible thing that has a strength and consequences.

Maturity and "common sense"? What are these things? I guess I'm genuinely asking you because I'm not sure what type of maturity you're speaking of here (age, experience, wisdom...?) As far as common sense, what common sense says that you should do right when doing wrong is more beneficial to you? If you see a person in a burning building or a car, and you are wanted for some crime, then you can stop and help the person (doing what is "right"), but then get arrested when the cops arrive (sorta the Jack Sparrow rescueing Mrs. Swan in the first Pirates of the Caribean movie "One good deed isn't enough to pardon a man," "Aye, but it's apparently enough to condemn him."), or would it make more "sense" for you to simply leave the person to their grisly fate and saunter off, safely escaping the long arm of the law from catching you? Would not "common sense" dictate that you leave? Here, doing what's "right", showing mercy, is not in your best interest, and common sense would dictate you do quite the opposite, would it not? That is, if common sense has any "sense" of self-interest in your case. And there are times in life where doing what's "right" may not be popular or beneficial to you. In such cases, wouldn't "common sense" tell you to instead not do what is right?

How relevant/useful is this to living beings?

It makes a statement as to what effects your actions have. In such a concept as this, ripples of your current actions are seen to echo through eternity. Maybe that means nothing to you though, so...

Here too I fail to see the link with religion...

Here again I'm speaking of the consequences of actions. Actions with little or no consequence are easy to take, most people can live with no consequences to actions, and most people are alright with short term negative consequences, but if you have long term consequences, they make you think a little more.

Note that this isn't "fear" as many people would lable it, but rather consideration. Rash actions make sense if there are no consequences. It's when we think of what comes down the road (God or no God) that we have to slow down and think things through before acting. The realization here is that, once again, actions echo through eternity, so there's all the more reason to make them good ones. But again, maybe this means nothing to you, so please feel free to disregard.

And before Jesus, love and compassion did not exist? Without the bible, those would not exist?

Oh, they may have existed before and after the Bible and Jesus, but they would not exist AS THEY DO in our society without Jesus and the Bible.

It's easy, in the modern day, to say, "Well, of couse helping others is the right thing to do!" But you must realize that this was not always so. YOUR thoughts of what is "right" derive from your society, and your society derives what it believes is "right" from people, mostly philosophers, and THOSE people/philosophers derived what was "right" from the Bible and the words of Jesus. That is, if you live in the Western world or the areas of the world that were significantly influenced by Western thought.

...indeed, that's something that a lot of modern secularists fail to realize; their OWN views were derived from the religions they condemn, moreso still if they are of the "nurture, not nature" school of thought which says you are what you were taught and raised as with no inherent "nature".

So yes, they would exist, but not as they exist now. And, there's no way for us to look at an alternate reality/history to see just how different it would be. For all the evils that religion does and has done, it was and is responsible for what we consider "moral" now, and the Bible and Christianity were, if nothing else, tools for the spread of such beliefs.

Can such refined thoughts as charity and pitty be derived without religion? Maybe, maybe not, I can't say. Has it happened? Not in the Western world, and I don't think in the Eastern world either. There is no truly secular society I'm aware of existing anywhere in the world (one which has NO roots in religion whatsoever), so to say that a society devoid of religion and religious background can or cannot produce humane and "right" philosophy, and thus "morals", is entirely speculation. That no such society exists that has done so may be somewhat telling, though...but then again, maybe not. Still, none has.

I am not a religious person, and I do give to charities... why?
Certainly not because I want to buy my space in heaven... just because I know life is unfair and I feel lucky for being born where I was born and in the conditions I was born in when other people didn't have that luck, and I want to share some of that luck to help make other people' lives a bit better... nothing to do with guilt or afterlife... nothing to do with religion.

Are you sure? From where did your notions of "luck" and "misfortune" come into your mind? Where did your idea of "charity" come from? Were you walking one day, saw someone who looked down on their "luck", and just think out of the blue, "Say, why don't I give this person some of my hard earned money?"

...or was it more like you have heard of churches doing it all your life, maybe your parents or some friends or some people you respect gave money and their time for the good of others. And where did they get those ideas from? Their parents? Their society? Their church? And where did said parents/society/church get those ideas from?

That is to say, from where, in your own words, do you believe the concept of charity arose? We both know it wasn't an original thought TO YOU, it came before your time, and you didn't arrive at it independently either, you got it from someone. Where did they get it from? And where did that person get it from?

I guess my point here is that those ideas most likely DO derive from religion AT SOME POINT. Since there was no secular society from which we can trace these ideas, the most logical assumption is that at some point they were entangled with religion (and/or refined by it) in some way. To YOU, in the modern day, it has nothing to do with religion...but where did the idea come from in the past?

...I mean, it's sort of like saying that you speak English (I'm guessing you can speak it, right?) You may not have learned German (old High German), or Nordic, or Norman French, or that Indo-something from which these derived, you probably don't have a commanding knowledge of ancient Greek or Latin...yet you know English. You also don't know Old or Middle English, right? (You might, some linguists and students of ancient languages do, but most people don't since they're "dead" languages.)

...so you could say that you speek English now and there is no influence from German, Nordic, old Saxon, ect ect in the English that YOU speak. But...what's the reality? Yes there is. If it wasn't for those influences, modern English as you know and love (or hate) it would not exist, right?


Erm...you get that, right? It's the same with modern views of morality and ethics. They DO derive from religion at at least some point. And even if "religion" wasn't the origin of the thought/moray, you can bet it had something to do with the refinement of said morals and ethics. Also, since all regions of the world DO have religion (or did in the past), it is errevokably connected and intertwined with morals and ethics as we have them today. Modern day morals and ethics do NOT exist in the absense of the religious history that it took to get them to us. Don't mistake you not having religion NOW as these things never being influenced by it. After all, the English language you have NOW would not exist without its past roots, would it? You don't have to speak fluent Old English (ever read Beowulf?) to know modern English, yet had Old English not existed, you can bet that Modern English either would not exist or would be quite different than it is now.

That's a pretty reductive view on animals... when studies of different animals show they are able of feelings and actions we used to believe were unique to humans...

Mayhaps, but they don't tend to act on them in the way we do, nor do they (to our knowledge) show introspection and philisophical/scientific thinking and devolpment as we have.

Homosexuals can very well pass on their genetics... homosexuality doesn't equate sterility.
Is Mary Cheney, even in her context, a dead end?

They can, but not naturally (well, not without physically sleeping with someone of the opposite gender.) It's kinda like we can make tofu now which isn't really meat (and didn't involve the killing of animals) or synthetic fabrics so we don't have to kill cows/buffalo to make clothing, we have those things NOW, but we didn't ALWAYS. But yeah, I'll conceed this point to you, but I still believe that TRUE Christianity is more forgiving to homosexuality than Evolution is (note that many "organized" religon Christians simply tow the line and condemn homosexuality without actually looking at the Bible or Jesus' own words to see what the truth of it is. Hell, such people condemn masturbation as "Onanism". If you read the story of Onan, his sin was greed, he didn't want to provide a male heir for his deceased brother, so he slept with the brother's wife [as the law of the time dictated] but pulled out and jizzed on the ground. He didn't masturbate, he simply was being greedy and wanting all of their father's inheiratance for himself. Greed was his sin...the story itself doesn't even indicate any "manual stimulation" was used. But stupid people use that as an example without ever actually opening their own Bible to read the story. It's like a preacher dude I once knew told me, people need to know the Bible if they're going to be Christians, otherwise they'll be snared by people like the nut at Mt. Carmel [Waco back in the 90s] and/or do wrong things because someone in authority misquoted the Bible or took something out of context to convince them to do it.)

Here again, that's exactly what we do... need fresh fields to grow herbs to feed cows for our burgers? No problem, lot of space in south america... local populations? Local animal species? Who cares... need oil to power our big cars and factories? No problem, lot of oil in in the middle east... local populations? They're weak or terrorists, who cares... let's do it in the name of God btw...

Yes, you're right, we do do this. In the Modern Age, we do this and have secularism to thank for giving us the "right" to do so.

In the name of God? When has anyone said that we can go into the middle east because God told us we could? I hear this from a lot of far Left Liberals, but no one with reason actually says that's why we're there. Bush said we were going after WMDs, not that God had devinely delivered a stone tablet telling him to sent our forces there and dictating battle strategy and tactics (though such might have been useful, specially in the post-war aftermath we're in.)

In the name of God? Would you provide a source, please?

That is EXACTLY what we do !! And with the help of religion to justify it!

Actually, no. This is EXACTLY what we do because of a secular-atheistic view that we have no need to be concerned with the well being of others crossed with remanents of middle-ages thought that certain groups of people can be "benieth" other groups of people...a view which doesn't derive well from religion, though religion has always been used to support it (such as saying that Paul was in favor of slavery, though RIGHTLY saying that the Old Testament did indicate that certain groups of people [the ancient Hebrews] were better than others [the natives of the region of Canaan.])

In fact, it's secularism that can be used more readily than religion to justify it, and once again, how is religion being used to justify it? Which religion? Sources/quotes please? I would like to see you quote some actual people (not far right nut jobs) who have said that we should step on whoever we can to get what we want "in the NAAAAME of the LOARD!" (misspellings intentional, think southern Baptist accent.) That said, evolution and secularism lend, quite well, to the idea that not only we can, but that we should since it's in our best interest (once agian, doing what is "right" contradicts "common sense", as I said above.)

Who said that's what we (all) want to do?

Hm, point. You're right, some people don't care to leave a lasting mark on the universe, but a lot of people do (especially in their youth.) It tends to be a wish that most everyone has, but which fades as we get older and get caught up in life, along with the realization that we can't all be Jesuses/Ghandis/Einsteins and should be happy just living a "good life" rather than trying to change the world (though most of us still try to any way in our own little ways.)

By that logic, someone who hates Jesus should do exactly the opposite of what Jesus supposedly said just because he hates him? If my worst ennemy said "one shouldn't kill" ... I should kill everyone I could because I hate him? I don't quite get it...

Point to you again. ^_^ Though if you agree with the man, you can at least acknowledge that, while the religion that followed after him has floundered, at least he had the right idea at the time (what started out with the best of intentions...)

Most of what Jesus allegedly said is common sense to me...

Good. Now ask yourself WHY. As I said above, the English language has descende from a long line of languages, do you think your "common sense" has not derived from a long line of "common senses"? Are you prepared to say that at NO time was that line influenced by either religion or Jesus? Now be careful...you should know as well as I that such a statement would be false. Given, this doesn't mean that the idea originated or was influenced in positive ways by religion, but you should at least acknowledge that your idea of "common sense", what is "common sense to (you)", likely derives from the teachings of religion.

Again, I don't know where you're from or how you were raised, so I don't want to say it was Christianity necessarily (though that particular religion has touched essentially all parts of the world, for better or for worse.) Like if you lived and were raised in India, I might say that it was Hindu, or if you were Chinese, perhaps it was Bhuddism. But in any of those cases, it is STILL a religion that influenced your thoughts, and that's WHY what "Jesus allegedly said" IS "common sense" to you (after all, I think Bhudda had similar thoughts to those of Christ. Two men in different places and different times arriving at similar conclusions...I wonder if theirs derived from something else or if they were original thoughts from their own minds...of course, societies develop slowly over time, so ideas do to, but could they have done so as they did without religion as we know it from our past...?)

You mentioned the "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" golden rule earlier and attribuated it to Jesus, it happens to be a rule I try to live by in my everyday life... but such exemple of ethic of reciprocity is certainly not Jesus' monopoly, or even a moral principle unique to religions, in fact it is universal and is found in almost all cultures and philosophies in a form or another... why?
Because it's common sense. You don't want to treat others badly because they might treat you the same. Simple observation would allow most people to see that as a truth, independantly of their beliefs.

I say again, it's not ALWAYS common sense. In fact, if you can kill the person or otherwise dispose/blackmail them such that they cannot treat you "the same", than there's no reason to follow the golden rule. The rule has a parallel in the East and Middle East in the form of Karma...but that concept also derives from religion. That is not to say that religion has a monopoly on it, but it IS to say that it began (or was spread/refined by) religon, and had religon not existed, it's somewhat likely that you would NOT have that idea today.

You say it's found in almost all (Human) cultures and pholosophies, right? Are any of those cultures/philosophies in societies that do not now and have NEVER had a religion?

I know, if A then B doesn't necessitate that just because you have B now that A had to occur, but it isn't a stretch to say that this idea of, as you said, reciprocity didn't come from the religion of those regions, especially when you see that those religions tend to have the concept thoroughly intertwined with their core of beliefs. Which came first, the religion or the concept of karma? At this point in time, it's impossible to tell. What we can be 99% certain of, though, is that without religion, people probably wouldn't have the same understanding of the concept, and it may very well not be so wide spread or "universal".

Again, there's no purly secular nation that we can use as a historical benchmark here, so I guess this is something that we can only debate about. My position is that religion, if not the originator of the ideal, was at least a key agent in spreading it. Would you agree with that?

There are many more options... life is not black or white

Indeed, that's why I placed the qualifier on there. However, if there are other options which I do not see...perhaps you could present a few here? ^_^ After all, I'd rather something to do other than live in constant "sin" or kill myself.

I believe you have a pretty manichaean vision of life...

Definition, please? I'll probably look it up on Wiki after I post here, but a definition in your own words would be nice. ^_^

Err... my subconscious never told me to kill myself... Maybe because I'm not atheist ?? Wait, my father is a hardcore atheist and he never demonstrated suicidal tendencies either...

Well, that's good to know. ^_^ Though technically one can't know what their subconscious actually did or didn't tell them to do. ^_^ Well then, in lieu of you providing another view other than those two, I guess for the moment we'll assume your subconscious told you to do the happy/pleasure life...it does tend to be the popular favorite. ^_^

I agree that most people want to believe in something, some choose to believe in fairy tales, some choose to believe in materialism, some in spirituality, some in themselves, some in humanity... the question being why deny non religious people the ability to develop systems of morals and ethics based on their own observations rather than what's dictated to them?

Oh, there's no reason to deny them that, and I don't know of anyone that actively does so. At the moment the problem is that secularism as we know it, "non-religious people" (I actually rather dispise this term, I've know many an Atheist who is FAR more religious than I am...to me a religion is something you believe in that heavily influences all of your life, and "non-religious people", indeed, everyone alive, has some such belief, whether grounded in the spiritual or physical/secular.) But as I was saying, at the moment, secularism as we know it is in the "birthing throws (sp?)", coming out of the womb, so to speak, from a father named Science and a mother named Religion. All the current ideals of secularism have been passed to it by religion and social ethics, morals, and morays (which come from religion, in the USA, from Jewdeo-Christian religion), combined with a general disregard for all things spiritual and a tight clinging to science (which it would rather brestfeed from than its "mother", Religion.)

That is to say, what secularists now are proposing, a "religious-less"...again, bad terminology, a better term would be "non spiritual religion based" ethics system...well, the problem is, it IS based on spiritual religion based ethics, which have influenced philosophers for the last several centruies, and thus our current ethics and morals.

Once again, as you pointed out, that doesn't mean that spiritual religions have a monopoly on such ideas, but it should be noted that what secularism attempts to do is that the SAME morals that spiritual based religons have, and simply "reason" them out with some form of rational that can remove God/spiritual existance from the equation. Hm...let me see if I can think of an analogy...okay;

You understand what Carbon based life is, right? Suppose you took apart a bacterium and replaced all of its Carbon with something else, say, Silicon. You're trying to make Silicon based life...however, you aren't making a new lifeform "from scratch", rather, you're using an existing, CARBON based life form, and modifying its base such that it's something else which you prefer, in this case, Silicon. Provided the experiment works and the resulting life form is indeed alive and able to function, you have made a NEW life form, but it is essentially identical to the old one, only it can exist in a Silicon environment devoid of Carbon whereas the old life form could not.

...okay, kind of a cerebral analogy, but the next closest thing I could think of was ice-cream cake versus traditional cake, and I didn't think that one was as accurate for comparison purposes. ^_^


EDIT: Maybe another one would be like this, if you take an upper class, cultured young guy in a tux, take the tuxeduo off of him and you put it on a monkey, then you try to pass the monkey off as a young man of high society. Well, now he's got a different "base" (monkey, not strapping young adult male human), but it's still the exact same...well, "monkey suit". ^_^

And what is the status of that "need for a belief" anyway?
The fact that such desire or need exists in no way validates the existence of its content... it could very well be just something needed by some people' minds to keep some balance and fonctionate properly... sort of like the (well, inversely) mechanism that allows us to see full pictures when we actually have blind spots in our eyes because our brain reconstructs the imagery and tricks us by filling the blank spots...

Well, this depends on how you look at it. What if our "need" for a belief is actually a result of our consciousness sensing (through some type of sense other than our five physical senses) that something else exists, and our subconscious mind then trying to translate that sense to our conscious mind? The strongest reason I believe that spiritual things exist is a semi-sixth sense that I have when I'm in some places or doing some things. The best way I can describe it is a cold or warm feeling that permiates my being (it isn't limited to my skin touch receptors, so there is no mistake for that.) What could be the cause of such a feeling? Well, it could be nothing at all, it could be some odd feeling of my touch senses misinturpreted by my brain, there are lots of explanations. It could, however, also be a sense of something else which my five cardinal senses do not cover, a "sixth" sense, as it were.

Of course, many people claim such things, and you can formulate any number of reasons to explain it, such as something like I was raised to believe that I had such a sense, though that isn't true, and also doesn't explain dreams I have where I see the future. ^_^ Such things indicate to me that there may very well be "something" going on which isn't easily explainable by science (I'd like to see someone perform telekenisis someday, you know, just to see if I can spot the wires. ^_^) Wasn't something I was "made" to believe (and to my knowledge the "sense" came about of its own accord without any prodding from anyone), so for now it's simply a mystery to me. Maybe it's some of my cells reacting to the electro-magnetic field of the Earth in some areas and at times when I just happened to be doing some associated action which tripped the wires in my nervous system to produce such a result. ...but that seems a bit of a stretch to me. As for how trustworthy my report can be (since it's only a personal experience on my part), that just depends on your estimation of my character. Have I not shown myself to have at least some semblence of logic, rational, reason, science, and trustworthiness? If I have, than it should be given that my "experiences" are real (at least to me), and if there's an explanation entirely physical that explains it, so be it, and if not...

Really??? I didn't read such thing

Oh, you didn't see where he made an attack simultaneously stating his own viewpoint (saying that what some people genuinely believe is "malarkey"? I mean, that's not exactly the viewpoint of an open mind which, even if it believes that something is false, doesn't go out of its way to insult and belittle said something), followed by saying "those of us" (which I would think is inclusive of himself by using the word "us") and how they don't go out and "crush people" (I'm assuming he means here the Church/Christianity going out and "crushing people", not to be confused with what I talked about later about "survival of the fittest" and "stepping on people") who attept to "get in the way of our pleasure and happiness" (I guess the fault in my inturpretation of his words might be found here, maybe in happness he means sitting outside and watching clouds and looking for shapes in them [...man, I should do that again, now that I'm thinking about it, it's been a long time since I last did that...] and by pleasure he could mean savoring the taste of a delicious grape or crisp spring water...though I imagine he means more something along the lines of "doing whatever he wants to do" without the Church "getting in the way", which is how I inturpreted it.)

Maybe I'm just seeing things...?

All I read is a logical interpretation of your fallacious argument that implied that:

Well, as I told him, it may be a logical interpretation, but it isn't what I was saying. You aren't suggesting here that, not only can things be two sided (black and white) but that there may be cases (such as this one...?) where there is only ONE side (black/white/green, whichever is your favorite), and that that is what I meant regardless of what I ACTUALLY meant...are you? ^_^

Should?? How so? No reason to help others? How so?? This is not attacking you at all, this is challenging your logic which despite your attempt at explaining it above still remains a mystery.
There are very good reasons to help others or not step on others without the intervention of God or afterlife, actually it's even very practical, you might want people to help you in return when you need it yourself or you don't want others to step on you...

...didn't I say as much? Haven't I said that, by a truly secular belief founded expressly in Evolution, you should only HELP someone else IF (this being a reason) doing so will help you (either them helping you when you have need of it or you trusting, entirely on good faith, that they won't "step on you" when they next have the chance to do so.) The idea is that if they can't EVER hurt you OR help you, you have no need to help them, and, in fact, if hurting them will get you what you want, you should do it. Why give "as little as a penny a day" to a starving kid in Africa? They aren't ever going to be in a position to "step on you" nor will they be able to "help you in return". By a purly secular-evolutionary viewpoint, you have no reason to help them, and it's only expending your resources to do so in a venture that has a VERY low chance of bring returns to you.

On the other hand, if God and the afterlife exist, THEN the reason for helping becomes apparent; it's the "right" thing to do.

So yes, you stated my logic exactly.

God/afterlife/spiritualism: Helping is the right thing to do.
Secular-Evolutionism: Only help others if it gets you something in return.

So yeah, you said it exactly...you say you didn't understand my logic, but then you (somewhat clearly) put it into words. I'm...confused...?

I personally agree with evolution because it makes sense to me and seems the most accurate theory we came up with so far. And as far as I recall from my days at primary school it has always been presented as a theory, never as the one and only truth, unlike what these creationists want schools to do...

Alright, good, most people simply believe in it as faith.

Oh, and in the USA, Evolution IS presented as the one and only truth in both middle/high schools and in colleges. There is no debate. And it has come to be presented more as a Law than as a theory (that is, universaly accepted and unquestioned.) If nothing else, this bothers me tremendously...especially because often, the actual evidences of Evolution are NOT presented, rather the case is simply made that Evolution is true and that students are to agree with this. But then I was homeschooled, so maybe the do present it more in depth and my peers simply weren't taking notes on those days. ^_^

Oh, and for the record, I'm not sure about creationists but the Intelligent Design people simply wanted ID to be presented as "another option", but the Evolutionists fought back with a passion, insisting that Evoltion WAS the "one and only truth" and should be taught by itself. It was probably a good call on their part, but it counters you saying that it was not presented as the one and only truth. ^_^


Uhm, just out of curiosity, what DO you know of Evolution? That is, what proof/evidence for it convinces you that it is correct? I know far to many people who will tell me it's true (and they truly do believe this), but they don't actually have any evidence to support it, they "believe" it on "faith" because they were taught it was true.

I'm sorry, but that's not science at all, that's religion, pure and simple. It may wear the discuise of science, but if you believe something is true without even bothering to know the facts, you're believing just the same, and that makes it a belief (dare I say a "religious" one?), and not science. And as a scientist, such people tend to...well, I don't like people who blindly believe anything, but science is SUPPOSED to be about evidence and proof. And supposedly there's ample evidence and proof there, so there's absolutely no need to believe in it as a matter of faith at all. That some people do this boggles my mind...



Well, sorry for the long reply, there was a lot in there to go over. ^_^ If you want to rebuttle...maybe break it down into two or more posts? ^_^; And sorry that I spend so many words to reply to each of yours, I just want to be clear (if I cannot be concise), and I do so love a good debate. And if nothing else, you ARE much fun to debate with, Nishin. ^_^

 

[_AJ_]

OK matt

Q: why dont we kill whoever we want and treat those who are lower then us crap

A: it is no in our best interests to it is an evolutionary trait thousands of years ago humans realised that it is better to work together because you accomplish more "many hands make light work" and all that so it is better for your survival and mine if we work together than by ourselves

 

[radical matt]

OK matt

Q: why dont we kill whoever we want and treat those who are lower then us crap

A: it is no in our best interests to it is an evolutionary trait thousands of years ago humans realised that it is better to work together because you accomplish more "many hands make light work" and all that so it is better for your survival and mine if we work together than by ourselves

Exactly; "our best interests." There is no concern for the best interest of the other person, it's what matters to us, what is in OUR favor. This has a nasty flipside, if HURTING someone else is also in our best interest...

...need an example? Robery? Rape? Maybe something like...Iraq? These are examples of a person or group of people that see it in their favor to hurt another person or people, and so they do it. There is no God or no "right" reason for them not to do wrong, not to hurt others, so they hurt others. To them, it is in "their best interest" to hurt others, and so they hurt others.


Remember, most every coin has two sides. Some have three. ^_^

 

[_AJ_]

Exactly; "our best interests." There is no concern for the best interest of the other person, it's what matters to us, what is in OUR favor. This has a nasty flipside, if HURTING someone else is also in our best interest...

...need an example? Robery? Rape? Maybe something like...Iraq? These are examples of a person or group of people that see it in their favor to hurt another person or people, and so they do it. There is no God or no "right" reason for them not to do wrong, not to hurt others, so they hurt others. To them, it is in "their best interest" to hurt others, and so they hurt others.


Remember, most every coin has two sides. Some have three. ^_^

not true if it is just me and you and i kill you it hurts me as well if you actually follow these things which you dont appear to since you always use preconceived ideas

so lets start at the beginning

there are people they are nomadic and dont live together

then a later some of them move to a place where they can be closer so they can reproduce easier

over time they beging to form a tribe this is an advantage because they can protect themselves better and reproduce easier

it is advantageous for these people to have an emotional attachment to each other as it strengthens the tribes ability to fend off possible attacks it i have your back and you have mine and so on and so forth you feel safer and it is easier to fight off potential enemies

its a logical procession of events

 

[RandomAccess]

Exactly; "our best interests." There is no concern for the best interest of the other person, it's what matters to us, what is in OUR favor. This has a nasty flipside, if HURTING someone else is also in our best interest...

...need an example? Robery? Rape? Maybe something like...Iraq? These are examples of a person or group of people that see it in their favor to hurt another person or people, and so they do it. There is no God or no "right" reason for them not to do wrong, not to hurt others, so they hurt others. To them, it is in "their best interest" to hurt others, and so they hurt others.


Remember, most every coin has two sides. Some have three. ^_^

Only Atheists hurt others? Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists are all safe from each other because they believe in a higher power? Even Agnostics are okay, 'cause they're not sure one way or the other?

Hogwash.

Besides, "our best interests" sounds like an inclusive phrase to me. . . not exclusive, as you seem to believe.

 

[snapcat]

My compliments to those of you posting in this thread. You've raised the level of conversation through thought-provoking posts, that I'm sure take a good deal of time to prepare.

You've elevated the discussion, making this one of the more interesting threads going at the moment.

Well done!

 

[bike10]

Do they have the evoution of the Republican Party on display?

 

[smelter]

Do they have the evoution of the Republican Party on display?

They did but had to remove it .... it was scaring the children. The exhibit showed the Republicans starting out as humans and ending up as pond scum ...... very disturbing to young minds.

 

[radical matt]

not true if it is just me and you and i kill you it hurts me as well if you actually follow these things which you dont appear to since you always use preconceived ideas

Wait huh...? Okay, I don't really get this paragraph, maybe you could say it more clearly? I take it you're saying if me and you are the only people and you kill me, it hurts you in some way...which may not be true at all. If we're constantly opposed to each other or my living doesn't help you (and, indeed, only takes more resources that would otherwise go to you), then killing me might very well be beneficial to you, rather than harmful.

Follow what things which I don't appear to because I always use preconceived ideas? For the sake of benefit of the doubt...

--Define "preconceived ideas", please. I use my own, you seem to be the one using other people's.
--Note that you say "always use"...do you KNOW me? How many discussions or posts have you seen me post? Are you REALLY willing to say that I ALWAYS (a universal term meaning I NEVER do NOT) use ANYTHING? That'd be like me saying you ALWAYS write paragraphs that are difficult to understand. ^_^

so lets start at the beginning

there are people they are nomadic and dont live together

then a later some of them move to a place where they can be closer so they can reproduce easier

over time they beging to form a tribe this is an advantage because they can protect themselves better and reproduce easier

it is advantageous for these people to have an emotional attachment to each other as it strengthens the tribes ability to fend off possible attacks it i have your back and you have mine and so on and so forth you feel safer and it is easier to fight off potential enemies

its a logical procession of events

This seems logical...in fact, logic would, one would think, extend this to all humans (we'd keep adding to our "tribes" until we were all one tribe, all of humanity, as this would be most adventagous to us.) However, that is not the case. Humans group to a point, and then begin to segrigate themselves, usually on rather arbitrary bases (skin color, place of birth, ect.)

Why?

A lot of people place the blame on religion, but if that were true, than all people of the same religion would band together, and often this is not the case. So, what is it then? What is so powerful as to break down the chain of logic?

Whatever it is, people tend to have this drive to group together...to a point. There becomes a point where the group growing larger, for some reason, seems disadventagous. Perhaps the human mind can only reach to a certain number of contacts and then is unable to cope with greater amounts, who knows. But at some point this tends to occur, both in individual lives (most people have a certain number of close friends, but after that number is reached, they tend not to add many more, for instance.)

So while logic might suggest that more people is better, this isn't followed. And what happens? Well, some groups ally (they can be friends, but they don't want to "merge"), some decide on neutrality with respect to each other, and others fight each other instead. Some would suggest this is due to limited resources, but at present, the Earth really does have plenty to go around if we use them right.

Ultimately I don't know what it is, but it's clear that logic doesn't prevent people from fighting, even if it's illogical to do so.


And, I should also say, ONCE AGAIN, it's not ALWAYS adventagous to help people. In such situations you have to ignore logic and help them anyway, but what is it that tells you to do so? Logic won't tell you to ignore itself, so it must be something ELSE...and please, don't say common sense, since that would fall under the umbrela of logic (or logic under it) in such a case.

 

[RandomAccess]

^ All it takes to start a new Christian sect in America is a resentment and a Bible.

 

[_AJ_]

Wait huh...? Okay, I don't really get this paragraph, maybe you could say it more clearly? I take it you're saying if me and you are the only people and you kill me, it hurts you in some way...which may not be true at all. If we're constantly opposed to each other or my living doesn't help you (and, indeed, only takes more resources that would otherwise go to you), then killing me might very well be beneficial to you, rather than harmful.

Follow what things which I don't appear to because I always use preconceived ideas? For the sake of benefit of the doubt...

--Define "preconceived ideas", please. I use my own, you seem to be the one using other people's.
--Note that you say "always use"...do you KNOW me? How many discussions or posts have you seen me post? Are you REALLY willing to say that I ALWAYS (a universal term meaning I NEVER do NOT) use ANYTHING? That'd be like me saying you ALWAYS write paragraphs that are difficult to understand. ^_^




This seems logical...in fact, logic would, one would think, extend this to all humans (we'd keep adding to our "tribes" until we were all one tribe, all of humanity, as this would be most adventagous to us.) However, that is not the case. Humans group to a point, and then begin to segrigate themselves, usually on rather arbitrary bases (skin color, place of birth, ect.)

Why?

A lot of people place the blame on religion, but if that were true, than all people of the same religion would band together, and often this is not the case. So, what is it then? What is so powerful as to break down the chain of logic?

Whatever it is, people tend to have this drive to group together...to a point. There becomes a point where the group growing larger, for some reason, seems disadventagous. Perhaps the human mind can only reach to a certain number of contacts and then is unable to cope with greater amounts, who knows. But at some point this tends to occur, both in individual lives (most people have a certain number of close friends, but after that number is reached, they tend not to add many more, for instance.)

So while logic might suggest that more people is better, this isn't followed. And what happens? Well, some groups ally (they can be friends, but they don't want to "merge"), some decide on neutrality with respect to each other, and others fight each other instead. Some would suggest this is due to limited resources, but at present, the Earth really does have plenty to go around if we use them right.

Ultimately I don't know what it is, but it's clear that logic doesn't prevent people from fighting, even if it's illogical to do so.


And, I should also say, ONCE AGAIN, it's not ALWAYS adventagous to help people. In such situations you have to ignore logic and help them anyway, but what is it that tells you to do so? Logic won't tell you to ignore itself, so it must be something ELSE...and please, don't say common sense, since that would fall under the umbrela of logic (or logic under it) in such a case.

if you actually read my post you would see that while the situation if you think of it logically would not be adventagious to save the person but i already said that an emotional attachment would strengthen them thus this attachment while adventagous in many situations would be counter in a few situations but loving someone is better most of the time but in the situation where it is not you just cant switch it off like you seem to think should happen

oh and as for me using other peoples ideas I ONLY use MY ideas just because you think its someone else's idea and i am using it i thought of everything i wrote in the examples above by myself

just because you are unable to Comprehend it doesn't mean its wrong and if you can but just reject it off hand that is silly even though you like to say that you dont every post of yours is designed to try and tear down arguments and none of them really do you write alot of crap with no point

its all smoke and mirrors with you Get to the point

 

[radical matt]

Only Atheists hurt others? Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists are all safe from each other because they believe in a higher power? Even Agnostics are okay, 'cause they're not sure one way or the other?

Hogwash.

Besides, "our best interests" sounds like an inclusive phrase to me. . . not exclusive, as you seem to believe.

Nice straw man...does he have a heart? ^_^


People do hurt others, both religious people and non-religious ones...er, rather, both spiritual believers and people who believe that the physical is all that exists. In fact, a great many of histories nastiest conflicts are started by conflicts between religion. Well, sort of. Usually it's more that some people become high in the religion's leadership and then they, as Humans in positions of power tend to do, misuse their power. Kinda like people that start wars "for Freedom" when it's really for their own ends, or people calling for Jihad (Islam now) or Crusades (Catholicism 1,000 years ago) who did so more likely for their own ends than the good of their people/faith/God.

It's actually a very complicated mix of sociatal values, religious beliefs (which also influence sociatal values), and individuals' human nature.

It should be noted, however, that most major religions of the world tend to preach against violence and wars, some even suggest that even DEFENSIVE battles should be avoided. Note that not all religons do, however. I haven't figured out exactly where secularist idologies lay on the issue, though. If you follow the "survival of the fittest" policy, than that dictates your actions. If you decide the "humanitarian" approach is better, than that determines your policies. The first derives from Evolution, the second derives from quite a few religions and philisophical branches of thinking. Even among nations, the strongest usually does survive, though not always (fate sometimes has a hand in the rise and fall of nations, as do corrupt leaders. -shrug-)


Oh, and as for "our best interests". It's not inclusive, really. It's built of basic elements. Your best interest, and that of your family, has you group with other people, such as myself if it serves your interest. Then MY best interest becomes YOUR best interest too (as long as it doesn't conflict with any of your other "best" interests) because it will keep me working with you, and in turn, with YOUR best interest. But what if someone else's best interest conflicts with mine or yours?

Suppose we live in an oil dependent nation, like the USA. We want more oil, it is in our best interest to have more, and to have it cheaply (after all, then we have more money to buy other things we're in need of.) However, someone may live in Saudi Arabia where there is oil and desert, but not a whole lot else. It is in their best interest for oil to cost MORE so they can get more money from their export to buy imports that they need (food)/want (technology). There is then what we call a CONFLICT. Their best interest is not only not in line with ours, it is entirely opposite ours. Where we would like oil to cost LESS, they would like it to cost MORE.

So what do we do? We try to work to where we reach some middle ground. They want high oil prices, we want low oil prices, so we settle on mid-costing oil prices...or we go to war to take the oil by force (as some have suggested the USA did in Iraq.)


Another example, a drug addict needs money to buy weed and breaks into your house to steal your stuff to buy his stuff. It's in his "best interest" to take your stuff. On the other hand, it's your preference he NOT steal your stuff. Once again, we have a conflict, only this time, there isn't really a middle ground. I mean, you MIGHT be able to work out with him that he only steals half of your stuff, but more likely, one of the two of you is going to get hurt and the one who is least hurt gets to keep the stuff (or he may shoot you and then run off with just what he can carry, whichever.)


The point is, "_____'s best interest" is NOT an inclusive thing. It's inclusive of all people you are allied with, so long as their best interest is not opposed to yours. If it is, then helping them is not the prefered course of action. Helping those people in such times is...not logical. Though the guy that said emotion...well, emotion is known for not being logical, but are people so ruled by emotion? Not often. Most societies view mercy and overt kindness as a weakness, especially in males.

So yeah, it's not "all enclusive", at least, not in people's minds in OUR reality and on OUR little planet Earth. If we all worked together, there's no reason it shouldn't be, but Human nature tends to prevent that from happening for some reason.