<p>Kira is God</p>
<p>That’s funny how the tea party was originially “libertarian.”</p>
<p>The original tea party in Boston against the British was motivated by new taxes.</p>
<p>Of course, under President Obama, close to 95% of Americans will recieve a larger refund check/ are paying less annual income taxes than last year.</p>
<p>It’s amazing what the media will make people believe.</p>
<p>/thread hijacking</p>
<p>Why can’t people just decide what they think is fair and stand for it? Wait, nevermind. Lol… I was going to rant about how people are mindless and only have the capacity to think “I’m giving up too much money to the government. Lower taxes!” Lower taxes? How low is fair? But I instantly realized that the same brainless idiots would probably vote to abolish taxes altogether if I asked them to specify how low…</p>
<p>No. Why would I believe in a god? I see no evidence of one.</p>
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+1</p>
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<p>I doubt there is a preponderance of people anywhere very concerned with theology. I would not say the same about religion or faith.</p>
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<p>You’re citing one country with a population of about 20 million. I was citing an entire continent.</p>
<p>Sermon this past Sunday at my church about The Bible (includes a clip in the middle of the sermon where one of my pastors defending the Bible and why he believes it to be true): </p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://www.newspring.cc/series/punctuation]NewSpring”>Page Not Found | NewSpring.cc]NewSpring</a> Church | Series<a href=“Go%20to%20Week%204:%20The%20Word%20Of%20God%20video,%20should%20be%20the%20video%20up%20when%20the%20page%20loads,%20skip%20to%20around%2032%20minutes%20into%20the%20service%20if%20you%20don’t%20want%20to%20watch%20the%20worship%20part”>/url</a></p>
<p>Funnily enough, Australia is also an entire continent.</p>
<p>And I was trying to use a Western country quite similar to our own - and it doesn’t get much closer than Australia, perhaps with the exception of Canada.</p>
<p>Who cares what is going on in Africa. They are still going through their own dark ages and genocides. Most countries can’t keep a President for longer than a week (okay, year).</p>
<p>You’d turn to religion too if you lived in that hell hole, were born with AIDS, and had no power to determine your own future. They believe in witch doctors and mystic medicine too. I remember a news story this year where some dude “cursed” a village so that their manhoods would shrink. Although obviously impossible, after a few days the village men believed it was happening and slaughtered countless people from village B. That’s Africa for you.</p>
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<p>Religion is an outstanding divider. People start wars and kill each other because of it. America is here because people found it intolerable to live on the same continent with people of a slightly different religion. Also because some people wanted to make money growing tobacco.</p>
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<p>True - religious leaders promote such moral stances as not letting gays serve in the military and not giving students information about birth control. Thank God for them!</p>
<p>^^Don’t forget that america is also here through the slaughtering of its native inhabitants, justified by religious reasons.</p>
<p>Just remember what I said a few pages ago</p>
<p>A lot of these killings/ crimes in the name of God are done first, then justified by God, not vice versa.</p>
<p>It’s</p>
<p>commit warcrimes/ intolerance/ bigotry/ oppression/ disobedience
----------> then justify your actions via God</p>
<p>not
God commands you to do A/ B/ C /D
-----------> hence you obey by killing people of different religion</p>
<p>Important difference ---- people really just follow their bigoted/ greedy/ malevolent impulses first then blame God’s will. Without ‘God’s will’ or organized religion, it would still happen.</p>
<p>But if their actions were the result of bigotry/greed/malevolence stemming from religious beliefs/morals/traditions, without organized religion, it would not still happen.</p>
<p>^^ exactly, almost every war ever fought has stemmed from differences in religion. Who’s right and who’s wrong. With zealous religious people there is no half-way, no compromise.</p>
<p>Yes, if there wasn’t organized religion there would still be some people who will find a way to hate and oppress because they’re just horrible people. But there wouldn’t be nearly as many people following behind them.
Do you think there would be as many terrorists as there are now if what they did wasn’t their god’s word?
Do you think slavery would have been acceptable if it wasn’t condoned in the bible?
And a list like that could go on and on.</p>
<p>Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. What people don’t seem to realize is that the idea of strict and sanitized rules of war is a fairly new idea. Even a few hundred years ago, the kind of thing we now condemn as terrorism would simply not be considered that bad. Attacking civilians uninvolved in a war? Every major European power sponsored privateers, and it wasn’t until 1860 that doing so was banned.</p>
<p>And of course slavery would have been acceptable if it wasn’t condoned in the bible. Again, the idea that people shouldn’t have slaves is newer than you think; nearly every ancient culture (including the most democratic Greeks) had slaves.</p>
<p>Correlation doesn’t prove causation, but look at the trends in religiosity. Only recently has it been in the direction of non-religiousness, just like recently there has been a trend in restricting warfare. I guess I’m trying to understand what point you were making, amarkov? Just because past civilizations had slaves, just as they also had religions, doesn’t mean we would have still condoned slavery without Christian biblical justifications.</p>
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<p>No. That is one of the most sophomoric expressions of our times. It simply isn’t true, or close to true. </p>
<p>Religion is a tool. People have used it to manipulate people other people to do things - just like every human construct - but, in fact, it has rarely been the cause or reason for “almost every war”. </p>
<p>Most wars have been fought over tangible things like territory, power, and wealth. Religion has been used to rally people to fight for these things (see: the Crusades), but so have many other excuses (i.e. States Rights, Economic Equality, Political Representation, Ethnic Superiority, “Freedom & Democracy”, etc).</p>
<p>I definitely posted somewhere earlier in this thread a list of the top mass murderers amongst world leaders in history and only like 1 out of the top 20 were religious in any way, and the vast majority were ANTI-RELIGIOUS communists.</p>
<p>True, we might not have condoned slavery without people referring to the Bible to justify it. But what you have to realize is that the people who opposed slavery also referred to the Bible to justify it. Remove the Bible and you can’t say that God supports slavery, sure, but you can’t say that God opposes it either. So what provides the impetus to push to end slavery? Abstract moral concepts just don’t grip people’s minds as much as “the omnipotent ruler of the universe says this”.</p>
<p>“You’d turn to religion too if you lived in that hell hole, were born with AIDS, and had no power to determine your own future.”</p>
<p>Perhaps that does not make religion less true, but more so. God is with the poor and the suffering.</p>
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<p>My Rabbi told me this story once, of this guy who was trapped in some area with a flood coming in.</p>
<p>His neighbors offered him a ride out of the area, but the guy refused, saying that God would save him.</p>
<p>A boat came when the waters were higher, and still he remained, saying God would protect him.</p>
<p>And then a helicopter came and still he refused, and he then drowned.</p>
<p>After, he asked God why he didn’t save him. God said, “I don’t understand. I sent you your neighbors, a boat, and a helicopter to rescue you, and you refused.”</p>
<p>People turning to religion only in the worst situations often have the worst interpretation of what religion actually is. It isn’t some last-hope lifeline that you hold onto because you’re scared of other possibilities without religion to the point that you are scared of any change at all. </p>
<p>It is akin to people suddenly “praying to God” that they pass a test or have a good first date when they previously had no religion in their lives whatsoever.</p>
<p>It doesn’t mean anything.</p>
<p>Yes. I believe that human beings are special. I don’t how else to justify this if there isn’t a God. If I didn’t believe in God, I would have to admit that the matter that makes up the rock in front of my home is just as important as the matter that I am made up of. But I think there is something special to human beings. Call me crazy. I don’t mind. But really, if there was no god, people would have to grow comfortable with the idea that humans aren’t any more special than animals, plants, or rocks. This is a disconcerting thought. It goes against everything I as a human am compelled to believe.</p>