Hmmm....now there's a pessimist if I ever heard one.

An intelligent mind would be at least curious.....

I mean....where's the logic in having a reason for life proven to you...and then feeling suicidal about it!!

 

Could you offer me an example of one of these rare cases please? Usually when people say something is a miracle, it's in the aftermath of a tragic event, such as a survivor trapped after an earthquake etc. Surely people recognize the double standard of saying things like "God didn't cause the earthquake, but God guided the rescue team". In the mean time thousands die horrible deaths and only a handful of people are found alive.

It pains me when entertainers, athletes and sports teams win competitions and the first thing they thank is god. It is such a cruel thing to say. To assume that god would take time out just so they can win a meaningless award, sports event, or give them the strength to train, while millions around the world are suffering, of whom's prayers he ignores.

 

Like I said in my post, I dont think God is in the habbit of interfering in the day to day goings on in the world as we know it and when he does nobody is realy in a position to notice it. I will rephrase that for clarity and say nobody "sees" it. There are many things that people hold up as Gods doing that in some cases may be accurate...but there is no way to prove or disprove thier assertion. They choose, through thier own faith to credit God with the event and thats good enough for them. God,being an omnipotent and omnipresent being has the capacity to watch a football game in New York while at the same time watching a flood in Bangladesh and a famine in Ethiopia. Frankly I suspect he prefers watching football but he had nothing directly to do with the headwind that screwed up the field goal attempt...that was just part of the natural machine.

 

Religion is man made...nobody's one religion is correct. There's muslim faith, Buddhism, Christianity, Catholic, and countless others. Who's to say your religion is right or wrong? Point is, I will not follow what people say and be lead by greed.

If there is a God, I wouldn't know until after I die. Instead of wasting my time questioning the afterlife and wondering if im angering or pleasing the unseen big boss, I will live my life the way I want, nobody else's and be content. Saw a movie and one of the lines hit home I happen to agree with, cept for one part.

"If there are Gods, I not know and I not care. I live, I love, I slay, I am content."

-Conan the Barbarian (2011)

 

Here lies another issue then, If god is an omnipotent and omnipresent being, and he is "all-loving", and does on occasion decide to leave the supernatural behind and poke reality. Why does he not step in to help more people? If he's responsible for life, surely he's responsible for all life, including infectious diseases such as malaria that causes a great deal of suffering around the world. Thus making him responsible for the deaths of millions each year.

With the ability to help everyone at no effort, surely the 'all loving' thing to do is step in, and stop children around the world from dying miserable painful deaths.

 

Have another question for ya to consider on subject of diseases

What's up with the STD's? Why do they exist? Is it truly punishment for doing the most natural action known to humanity? If it is, then why punish the innocents? Women who got raped by std infected men, babies being born with the mother's disease, spouses who contract the stds from cheating spouses or marrying a diseased SO without knowing one has it? That's a lot of collateral damage right there.

Other side of the equation; why are we only ones to have STDs? Why not animals too? (If there are animal stds I wouldn't know)

 

Diseases are spread through intercourse throughout the animal kingdom too. In fact some of the STDs which Humans contract actually come from animals. I'll leave it to your imagination on how they first spread to humans.

 

Like I said I wouldn't know. Nobody ever talks about it and I could research but im too buggered to do so

Edit. Well one thing they do say is Africans fucked the chimps, got stds then spread it to us. Just another typical racist reasoning and I got this from christians

Anyway unfortunately we all know bestiality does exists in all races and forms

 

I think aids was invented in the lab run by the same people who think the population of the earth should be only 500,000.

 

consciousness cannot exist before there is anything capable of being conscious of.

Complex things evolve from less complex things. A creator therefore cannot exist before creation.

 

Aids actually ties in with the last couple of posts on the topic of STDs in the animal kingdom that have been passed onto humans. In this case via chimpanzees in the African Congo some time in the early 20th century.

 

I once contracted a nasty case of gonorrhea from this dog I fucked. :neutral:

No wonder the bitch never returned my calls. :wall:

 

As far as you know.

 

Waitaminnit. First of all it is a She. How could God be a man? Ridiculous. Does this look like a world planned by a man? Secondly, what's this crap about kids getting hurt? God is looking after all these galaxies and black holes and red giant stars and white dwarfs and He/She is going to worry about a few kids getting their asses beaten up? Or getting killed? On this mini-planet Earth? If He/She did that He/She would miss the Archie Bunker show for sure.

It is clear that God doesn't give a shit about morality because in some corners of this Earth there is an abundance of it while in other corners there is none. Same God created both corners. Morality is something we invented so we could blame certain people who don't care to follow our rules. I say you can have immorality and a fully functioning God with less operating glitches than Windows 7.

 

I think you would have to go back to the Bible and think about the story about Job. As much chaos and hell that was rained upon Job, Job kept believing and praising God, and Satan was not able to win to make Job turn away from his faith.

I believe that is what is going on now. Satan is the one that creates all the chaos in the world, and it is God's way of finding out who are the true believers and who are not. It all has to come down to the greatest gift ever given to us, which angels were not given, free will.

 

Incubus, there is no such thing as time before creation

so the concept of before has no meaning prior to creation. Time is a function of change. The only way we can talk about it is in terms of things changing. If everything is frozen there is no way to discuss time. If there is nothing there is no way to discuss time. The word "before" has no meaning if we are talking about a state in which creation has not begun.

 

ElC, order-chaos is the normal state of the world

There appears to be order (law of gravity, laws of electromagnetic attraction/repulsion, etc.) at the same time there appears to be chaos in that we don't have resources to predict what's next a few thousand light years from here. In one direction a star. In another direction empty space. Satan is a creation of humans to give a rudimentary explanation of what we perceive as chaos, which may be order because we are not sharp enough to see the order in our perceived chaos. It seems to me true believers are people who haven't got the energy, brains, or time to spend figuring out what's really going on. If they can pin all phenomena on two opposing forces, Satan and God, say, problem solved and they can go back to doing something else.

 

Thats actualy a good question. For the sake of this argument we will take our examples from the Biblical God since thats the one I am most familiar with and it is also likely to be the one that most of the residents here are most interested in either proving or disproving.

According to the bible, the cause of the human condition as we know it with flood, famine, desease, war, suffering and so forth all originates from the fallen state of man. Humans rebelled against the order that God established and the result was that he took his hands off his creation and allowed nature itself to take over. He cut us off from direct fellowship with himself and effectively turned his back on us just as man did to him. The results being changing weather patterns, the formation of malevolent micro organisms and a whole host of other things, all of which have placed man in a less than ideal environment. Man has also done a great deal to drift farther and farther away from God. We have created all manner of various activities and practises that fly in the face of everything God represents. The result is that we have also cut ourselves off from God.

As for "all loving" that is true. He established methods through a variety of people that would help humans repair thier individual relationships with God but these methods were far from perfect and God knew it so he sent his son to make the sacrafice for humanity all at once so that we could dispense with all the frankly nonsensical sacrifices and rituals and get on with the business of sorting ourselves out and making an effort to repair our relationship with him.

As for stepping in and giving the phisical world an occasional poke, he used to do that. The history of the Jewish people describes many times in which God gets involved directly with the lives of both individuals and the entire Jewish people. The history also displays the response that the Jews had which was to initialy be amazed and awed by these displays but to very quickly either ignor these events or forget them and slide back into being what they were to begin with. In this God demonstrated mans ability to forget what has been done and mans desire to constantly and consistantly demand signs and wonders in order to maintain thier faith rather than to simply believe and have faith. It demonstrated that signs and wonders dont change anything. People tend to think of God as a cosmic gum ball machine where we should just be able to put in a dime and get candy any time of the day or night. It doesnt work that way.

If you look at the suffering that goes on around the world every day, how much of it can be traced directly back to man? Many people who attack religion point to things like the crusades and say "see, God is evil!." God never endorsed the crusades or anything else even remotely like them. They were the creation of greedy humans who used the illiteracy of the people and thier position as "religious leaders" to manipulate people to do things that God would never have endorsed but somehow its his fault anyway. Humans have successfuly created almost all of thier own suffering and thats just the way it is.

A friend of mine quoted a bible verse once...And added something on the end that makes alot of sense of you think about it for a while. "With faith the size of a grain of mustard seed you could say to this mountain 'be removed and cast into the sea' and it would be done." To which he added "But dont be supprised of God hands you a shovel instead."

 

I had a bad tooth ache last night and could not go to sleep.

So I prayed to God to relieve it and then took two oxycontins...

The ache was gone this morning

Thanks be to God...

 

If people want to believe in whatever God they choose, it's their business, their right.

My problem comes when they try to force that stuff on others.