<p>faith is not science, science is not faith</p>
<p>the bible contradicts itself because it was written by dozens of different people</p>
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<p>then you know nothing, most of the old testament pre-dates ancient greece</p>
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<p>you’re either a ■■■■■ or stupid, read this again, you just said God isn’t real.</p>
<p>LogicWarrior, I didn’t say God isn’t real. Atheists say that when people hear God speak to them that they must be hallucinating and must be crazy. So my question was if a person dreams at night and sees and hears things that are not physically in the bedroom with them, does that mean they are crazy? People will accept dreams as being a normal part of life but can’t comprehend how someone can talk to God.</p>
<p>^ Except that you didn’t say “not physically in the bedroom”, you said “Is dreaming of things that are not real mean that you are crazy?”.</p>
<p>There is a difference.</p>
<p>lol ill let you continue to my job for me…ive said all that i can say…</p>
<p>there’s nothing mean or bigoted about being right. sorry!</p>
<p>Actually I want apologize to justinmeche, my last post was overly-critical of your wording. You could have easily meant or implied something different and I read it out of context.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that man’s system of religion is causing a lot of separation in the world. I think most religions try to satisfy the human need of having a relationship with our creator and being in tune with the spiritual world. We have gotten away from having a direct relationship with God and are relying on systems of doctrines, rules, and religious services. And man often uses his religion to exalt himself and his ideals above others rather than using it to glorify God and to bring people together. So it is not surprising that so much unbelief exists in this world. Even the disciples that walked with Jesus struggled with belief in him and his teachings. This is not an easy road to travel like people want it to be and for that reason many give up.</p>
<p>and go to hell and burn for eternity? Do you really believe that? Does that make you feel good?</p>
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<p>It doesn’t matter why the Bible contradicts itself, but the fact that it does shows that it’s not perfect. I don’t see how people can put so much faith in a document that’s obviously flawed.</p>
<p>People who dream are not crazy because they realize that what is happening is just that, a dream. It’s when people take the leap to say that beings are actually talking to them in their dreams or someone is contacting them, such as you with talking to god, that they become crazy.</p>
<p>See, when people talk to other people in dreams, when they wake up they immediately realize it was not real. People who “talk to god” on the other hand believe what has happened as fully real and they are speaking to an actual being, which is when it crosses the line into crazy town.</p>
<p>Hell was not created by God as a torture chamber for people that sin. Hell is a spiritual realm that was created by those spiritual beings that chose to separate themselves from God. Hell is separated from the orderly realm of God and therefore is characterized by chaos and darkness. When humans choose to separate themselves from God their soul will descend into hell (a lower state of spiritual consciousness). It’s simple cause and effect.</p>
<p>Ugh. my own beliefs aside…you can find that anywhere. im sure cornell has a great program for the religious</p>
<p>I personally view much of the bible as metaphor and allegory. I dont focus too much on the details but more on the central doctrine of Christianity, which revolves around the connection between man and God through Christ and what this implies for humanity.</p>
<p>Im not too concerned about whether or not there really were individuals named Adam and Eve in a garden some time in the past. I focus on the message of humanitys fall from grace and the possibility of distance that free will creates between humanity and God. In fact, I feel this story is very relevant to our conversation. It basically says that because we can choose to believe or not believe, those who choose not to believe will distance themselves from God. Believers will take this obvious fact to reinforce their faith in the bible because they run on the assumption that it is correct. Atheists simply view it as a falsified document because they run on the assumption that it is falsified.</p>
<p>That brings me to my next point. I dont think you can disprove the existence of a god with logic or science, which is why so many people who have been drilled with science for half their lives get frustrated and belligerent during conversations. To these people, science equates to ultimate truth. However, these same people fail to realize that science inherently avoids supernatural explanations of the natural world. In fact, if you read about its beginnings, you will understand that the circle of early sciences simply agreed not to use any divine explanations in their experiments. In sum, Im saying that you cant explain the supernatural with natural means. Now, scientifically, that makes a claim very weak because an attempt to explain everything with something rarely works in nature. But philosophically, its a perfectly logical way to view the world.</p>
<p>As for reality and perception, the scientific literature explains that dreams and reality are indistinguishable. When you are dreaming the chemicals in your brain cause you to truly believe that what you perceive is reality. Someone here claimed that the reason we do not consider people crazy when they have dreams is because we can wake up and ordain it as not real. The problem with this argument is that it is still based on perception of the majority. If the majority claimed that this reality is not real then does that make people who believe this is reality insane? I view reality as relative. Therefore, if the perception of an afterlife exists, then these religious actions would be rational.</p>
<p>Thats just my 2 cents.</p>
<p>so wrong people make incorrect ideas about reality suddenly correct? what?</p>
<p>you are missing the point - it has nothing to do with science. it has to do with reason, rationality and knowledge. science avoids the supernatural because there is NO SUCH THING. anything that “exists” has some consequence of existing. you can detect it or at least you can detect it indirectly through peripheral means. the perception of an afterlife by billions of deluded people does not make it an actual thing. it makes it a perception by billions of deluded, uninformed and indoctrinated people. its just plain SAD. period.</p>
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<p>You’re certainly right that science, laws that govern nature, can’t be applied to the supernatural (I believe I said that in a previous post). But the reason scientists get irked is when people of faith then try to use science to prove their beliefs. Such as taking an article in a Geo Journal that described the splintering of tree roots via underground water sources and manipulating it to prove that the Great Flood really happened, and claiming we now have proof. Or Intelligent Design/Creationism, they are trying to warp science to fit their religion, which as you said isn’t valid: supernatural beings can’t be explained via natural order. It also shows that these people aren’t strong enough in their beliefs alone, so they need further “evidence” to prove what they are believing is real. </p>
<p>Listen, if you want to believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, that we walked with dinosaurs, etc, fine! This is a free country, believe whatever you want to, I certainly have no right to claim your religion as "wrong:. But when you try and shove this same view on others, i.e change science books to teach creationism, something that has 0 scientific evidence and a clear religious subtext, in a science classroom, then I have a problem. </p>
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<p>Ummm…what!!! Show me this scientific paper that says that dreams and reality are indistinguishable. Especially considering that the New England Journal of Medicine recently published a report showing the difference in alpha and delta brain wave activity when awake vs asleep (Ill try to find the article and volume and add it later so you can read it yourself). This showed that the brain itself understood when it was sleeping, though this is largely subconscious, one way you can “tell” is that in dreams your sense of touch is severely downgraded, so that, say, if you’re having a nightmare and you’re stabbed, you don’t feel it like if you were actually stabbed, that’s a safety mechanism your brain has while sleeping to prevent you from going into dream-induced shock. So I don’t know where you got that fact, if at all.</p>
<p>smallz, you are part of the problem whether you like it or not. you do, as an intelligent person, have the right to tell somebody that their absurd beliefs are “wrong”. you’ve been tricked by them and their proponents into thinking that you don’t have that right.</p>
<p>for any real change, first you’ve got to GET MAD. otherwise, you’re just allowing them to continue to perpetuate their ignorance until they’ve restricted you’re freedom to think that they are ****ing nothing other than silly.</p>
<p>treesuss, do you have any ideas about how life was created and what our purpose here on Earth is. Do you believe that we came about by some cosmic accident and that our lives are just random cosmic events?</p>
<p><em>sigh</em> My ignore-treesuss-and-he’ll-go-away strategy has failed.
treesuss, do you really think anyone is going to change their beliefs just because some person on the internet told them they were wrong? Yes, you have every right to call them silly, but you’re not going to change anything that way.</p>
<p>Yes, getting mad will help.<br>
Religious person “Praise to the Lord… oh noes someone is MAD so I think I’ll renounce my beliefs entirely”</p>
<p>we may be an accident, maybe not.</p>
<p>but one thing is for sure - the archaic concepts that people came up with in a time where we had literally NO knowledge about our surroundings, planet and even sun are most certainly NOT right.</p>
<p>our purpose? we have no purpose. purpose is an illusion. we live, we die and we are forgetten. likely, we will have no real impact. if we kill each other off because we think our outdated, ignorant beliefs have more value than others then we may actually end up having very little impact on this universe as a species on the whole. if we quit this ******** and work together for a more enlightened and progressive society then we will get off this little rock and go see what we can find. maybe we’ll find nothing but maybe we’ll be able to harness the power of our home star (Type II Civilization) or home galaxy (Type III) and possibly create wormholes and explore the VAST unknown.</p>
<p>LACK OF KNOWLEDGE should not scare people into believing things that have been repudiated by millions of pieces of evidence. it should be embraced and we should move forward with it in mind. too bad that it does - simply because religion and oppression in its name are self-reinforcing concepts that serve to detach the species from reality. (not to mention offer us false hopes about something more when we die - which there verifiably is NOT)</p>
<p>if you read my other posts - you can see that ive said this all before in this very thread.</p>
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<p>This is the problem: people want (in fact need) to know that life is somehow pre-determined, that there exists a kind of fate. That’s why people choose religion: to know an all-powerful GOD is guiding them through life. people don’t like to think they’re alone: that they are responsible for their lives, and that everything is planned out nicely, even the “bad stuff”.</p>
<p>That is ultimately why people believe in conspiracy theories: they want to feel it was pre-determined. It’s terrifying to think that 20 terrorists can randomly steal planes, crash them into buildings, and kill thousands of people. But if the government planned it, if it was all carefully orchestrated, then it’s ok. People don’t like to think a crazy gunman can shoot a president 10 stories up, but if it was all-along controlled by the CIA, there is a level of comfort. The world is scary and dangerous place, and the public wants to believe that it is out of their hands: it’s gods bidding, or it’s government planning. They don’t like randomness.</p>
<p>Which brings me to justinmeche statement. If you knew anything about evolution, you would know that is anything but chance. It’s ironic, because evolution is more about pre-determination and fate, something the religious thrive on, but because they don’t understand it, it’s shunned.</p>
<p>let me also counter that some people believe conspiracy theories because they are actually right (U.S. Govt overthrowing south american regimes, the federal reserve and private bankers and the NWO to some extent, etc, etc). whether or not the ultimate conclusions are correct or of any value - intelligent and thought provoking discourse about certain facts of certain situations should never be simply “discarded” as ‘wacky conspiracy theories’. most of them are at least PARTIALLY (caps for emphasis because sometimes its very very littel) true and certainly worth discussion. certainly, they are worth more discussion than the existence of an afterlife, which we can verifiably deal with and discredit. when you die, nothing happens. get over it and start living your life. don’t be a slave to the thought police, or you’ll become one and only serve to walk our species further down the path to destruction.</p>