Religious/Evolutionary Debate Thread

[Chrysaor]

I was including the Crusaders in the Holy Roman Empire. Still there's a distinct difference between religion and empires that make them their facade. Yeah, it's common now, but that's because religion and culture are separate, in the past, when religions were "starting" that wasn't so much the case.

 

[Sarevok]

after doing some extensive research here's what I came up with on Noah's flood
I don't think Noah's flood covered the whole Earth, here are some reasons:
1. "earth" in the bible also means ground, land, country according to its Hebrew word "adamah" and meaning which is what the original manuscript was written in
so that makes me believe that the flood was only a part of the land where Noah was living
2. if it covered the whole earth Noah we need to gather every living creature on the planet and determine their sexes, he would need male and females fleas, ants, worms, bees etc...the insect species alone is about 300,000+
then on top of that he needs to travel to the Antarctic and gather polar bears,penguins etc.., then he would have to gather all the birds, finally he would have to breed them so they wouldn't become extinct, in other words its impossible
3.Genesis 7:20: Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered, 15 cubits=25-30 ft, a cubit back then wasn't an exact measurment, so if the flood was worldwide it would never cover the whole earth only rising 25-30 ft, in Hebrew mountains can also mean hills which I think it does in that verse since a hill isn't that tall and it would take more than 25-30 ft of water to cover a mountain
4.the races-there were only 8 people aboard the ark, noah, his wife, his 3 sons and their wives, so where would the other races come from if every person died except Noah and his family, plus that means incest and would go against one of God's commandments
5. Genesis 8:11-And the dove came in to him in the evening;and,lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from the earth, the Hebrew word for "pluckt off" is taraph, which means "recently torn off, i.e. fresh". This is important because it shows that the olive leaf, or branch, was plucked off of a tree and not picked up off the ground or floating waters, for it takes a long time to grow an olive tree to the stature whereby a branch can be plucked from it, so where in the hell would this tree be growing if the whole earth was flooded?
when the scriptures in Genesis pertaining to the flood say "all", "every", and "earth" it has to be in reference to only a small part of the land, in other words God told him to gather "every" animal in that part of the land, and "all" living creatures died in that part of the land
do the research yourself and prove me wrong, I'm all ears
BTW dinosaurs are mentioned in the bible, found in Job, this explains it better than I can:
http://www.creationists.org/dinosaurs.html

 

[GoAt]

rukee, if that lutheran was right about those with handicaps....


guess your wife is screwed.



heh sorry.... couldnt resist

 

[darth_weasel]

that's one bull**** thing about religion. there can only be one correct way. yet within christianity for example, there are hundreds of different "ways", different interperetations, people following the word to different levels. i mean, how many christians specifically refrain from eating meat on a friday? if there are a hundred different ways to live within a religion due to interperetation on how literal the holy book of that religion was, according to that faith 99 of those ways are going to hell.

im not even going to render an opinion on god, because i have no beef with anyone having a belief in a god, more just the hypocrasy that comes with following a religion. faith should be a personal thing, because like i said, at the end of day if there is a god and an ultimate judgement on wether you've lived the one correct way to live, 99% of religious people are going to hell.

 

[Chrysaor]

That's good research Sarevok. I think my biggest curiousity is, why do almost all cultures around the globe have flood tales in their mythology? I think you're spot on with Noah, but people in North America and Australia seemed removed from the middle east, and it's weird that they would have similar stories. Someone I found once said flood mythologies originate from people having dreams while they have to pee.

 

[GoAt]

faith should be a personal thing

we have a winner!


why must people go to church?

i thought that organized religion was a bad thing.

(and dont pull that crap about my place of worship is not organized etc)
IF YOU GO TO A DAMNED CHURCH ON SET DAYS ITS ORGANIZED

 

[GoAt]

Someone I found once said flood mythologies originate from people having dreams while they have to pee.

this is true to an extent. while some may dream of floods others dream of actualy taking a piss or trying (like me) while i dont piss myself in the process, i do act out in my dream what i need to do in real life then wonder why i still feel the urge to pee

 

[GoAt]

Sarevok brings a good point.


we all know that plants need CO2 to survive. 40day/nights would suffocate those plants that must live on the surface and kill them. and any plants that still had any green to it would just be a soggy mess

 

[QUALTHWAR]

You still make religion out to be some sort of control mechanism. Sometimes it appears that way, but it's really just as important as everything else in the indigenous persons world, not a separate belief.

I don't take the god I believe in, nor the god that eastern mystics believe in, to mean "supernatural". It's just a way of explaining aspects of nature. Super indicates that there is another consciousness on another world of some sort which comes down to ours to effect things.

I’m a way, you’re right, I do think of the bible as a control mechanism. The consolidated stories seem to be told to guide and inform people. Like when you’re told the story about crying wolf. You have the commandments that give definite rules. Well, maybe not all that ‘definite.’ Thou shall not kill. Kill what? Kill anything? Does that include plants and animals? People would starve to death.

 

[QUALTHWAR]

Let me ask you this: let’s say there was a race of people that had a one billion-year head start on us. Heck, even a thousand-, or a million-year head start. Let’s keep it at a billion for argument sake. We both probably feel that we’ve come a long way in approximately 100 years since we first learned to fly to traveling in outer space. And it’s a safe bet that we’ve saved a lot of lives since penicillin was discovered not that long ago.

Can you imagine what the future holds for us if we consider the strides we’ve made in such a short period of time? What will we have in 100 years from now? We have cloned animals. We’ve only recently finished mapping our genes. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for science. Where will we be in 1000 years, 2000, 500,000, a million. Where will we be in a thousand million years from now?

I think it’s entirely possible that we are the products of alien intervention. I’ve watched shows that tell about the complexity of DNA and how that’s a big problem for evolutionists. It’s not that DNA couldn’t evolve given enough time, but I think it was the timeframe related to earth that bothered some people. This made me wonder if DNA had an opportunity to evolve somewhere else, a longer opportunity and then earth was seeded with this DNA.

I can think of at least two ways that this could happen: we know when asteroids hit planets that they can blast chunks of material out into space. And we’ve found organisms that are frozen for eons and by all rights should be dead, but when thawed, they come back to life. So if an asteroid hit an old planet with established DNA and hunks of rock with DNA were thrown into space, it’s possible something could survive. This surviving rocky life could have hit the planet during the early formation of the earth when space debris was everywhere. We now have the DNA seeds of life to start our planet.

The other way seems to be direct alien intervention by intelligent life. We have beings who have lived far longer than we have, and they come to earth with the seeds of life. Why? I don’t know. Maybe their history is foggy and they are curious as to how they might have evolved. Maybe they return to check up on us and that’s why people claim to see spaceships, and have had encounters. Maybe it’s just an experiment by a curious alien species. Perhaps they aren’t too worried that we’ll gain enough knowledge to threaten them since they have such a head start on us. Maybe they are learning from us, even though we think they should have all the answers. When you think about, we are pretty much a random species, so maybe these aliens can’t really know our outcome in advance.

If we accept this alien intervention as a possibility, then it’s also possible that some of the bible stories could be true and not metaphors. Maybe the red sea actually parted, but maybe it was aliens who made it happen. Maybe people do have miraculous recoveries after being sick, but maybe it’s because of aliens.

I watched a show where a priest talked about Ezekiel’s account of something from the sky that could easily be interpreted as a spacecraft. The priest was convinced that Ezekiel had an encounter with a spaceship. He talked about the individual verses in Ezekiel’s account and how this could not be a worldly (not godly) thing. He said it described a machine; it clearly described a machine. Other people commented as well and basically confirmed what the priest was saying and gave numerous reasons why.

Today, if we see a spaceship, we probably aren’t going to call it or the beings stepping out from it god. But long along, they had less knowledge and to them, a craft or a being that did unearthly things must have appeared as a god to them.

 

[QUALTHWAR]

That's good research Sarevok. I think my biggest curiousity is, why do almost all cultures around the globe have flood tales in their mythology? I think you're spot on with Noah, but people in North America and Australia seemed removed from the middle east, and it's weird that they would have similar stories. Someone I found once said flood mythologies originate from people having dreams while they have to pee.

I remember hearing that god destroyed the world by flood, but the next time it will be by fire. Years ago, that’s all these people know. The elements governed their lives. It doesn't surprise me to hear of flood accounts destroying the world since it was one of their major elements. Any it doesn’t surprise me that they said the next time it will be by fire since that’s another major element. It doesn’t surprise me because it’s man describing earthly things, not godly things.

You want a godly thing? And the lord floating high above the ground and held out its hand. A blue ray of light shown from its hand and it swooped the ray across the ground. People, villages, plants, everything vanished as the ray passed by. Then there was nothing. Now that’s a godly story.

 

[QUALTHWAR]

Sarevok brings a good point.


we all know that plants need CO2 to survive. 40day/nights would suffocate those plants that must live on the surface and kill them. and any plants that still had any green to it would just be a soggy mess

If the earth was completely covered with water for 40 days, the trees would have died. However, right after the rains subsided and a little bit of land started to show on the freezing cold mountain tops, an olive tree quickly grew in no time in these freezing conditions. It happens all the time.

 

[GoAt]

If the earth was completely covered with water for 40 days, the trees would have died. However, right after the rains subsided and a little bit of land started to show on the freezing cold mountain tops, an olive tree quickly grew in no time in these freezing conditions. It happens all the time.

that and if the waters covered the ENTIRE earth (earth being everything land) then the waters would have frozen as they would have to raise to an altitude of 30,000 feet above regular sea level.

the pressure alone should be enough to destroy anything at 0ft. sea level and obliterate anything greater than 80,000 ft.

plus with that much water all pushing down on to a central point (the earths core) the earth would collapse in on itself

 

[QUALTHWAR]

BTW dinosaurs are mentioned in the bible, found in Job, this explains it better than I can:
http://www.creationists.org/dinosaurs.html

Uhhh, to say that’s a dinosaur is probably wrong. I’d say it’s open to interpretation. I didn’t hear about a tale as large as a cedar tree, but one that moved like a cedar tree. Maybe the tale swayed back and forth and was a little bushy.

How about this: the bird moved like the wind. Well, the wind is our environment, and our environment covers the entire world and includes the air that’s miles up above the earth. Therefore, the bird was as large as the environment.

If I were going to describe a huge lumbering beast, I think I’d use some cubit measurements. The beast stood 20 cubits tall and 35 cubits long. Heck, cedar trees are all different sizes. It only demonstrates what many of us have said all along, that the bible is ambiguous, and open to interpretation.

Now that I think about it, doesn’t ‘ambiguous and open to interpretation’ remind you of something else? It reminds me of horoscopes. They are written in such a way that people read into them whatever they want. If they did get specific, people would say, “hey, nobody killed my boss today like my horoscope said. This stuff is bogus.” If you word stuff just right, it allows people to read into it whatever they want, just like the bible. This would explain all the different interpretations.

 

[Imagofer]

WHere is this all leading too?

 

[darth_weasel]

WHere is this all leading too?

for me, all of this is leading to, believe in god or a god if you want and i'll respect you just the same. but following the organised religions is bull****.

surely faith, if anything, is what you believe, not what you're told by others believe?

if there is a god, at the end of the day (life), the worst you can say to god on judgement day in your defense is you lived your life according to how you though he would want it.

 

[GoAt]

surely faith, if anything, is what you believe, not what you're told by others believe?

give the man a prize!

 

[Cat Fuzz]

give the man a prize!

I'll second that. :tup:

 

[Imagofer]

 

[Zlal]

I went to a church today to attend my grandad's memorial service, and liked what Father David, who had beena good friend of my grandad, had to say.

He basically said that it does not matter if you haev belief, or faith. It doesn't mean a thing if you believe and trust in God and jesus or not. In the end, all that matters is that you are a good person, and lead a good life.
He refrained from referring to the bible and christianity too much, probably because my grandad wasn't exactly a religious man. He didn't need to though, he only referenced the bible as a guideline and a example.

I think that is what the bible and christianity, in fact, all religion, should be taken as. A example, and a guide. It doesn't matter if you don't want to believe in something, thats not important. Whats important is that you lead a good life. Perhaps faith is just another way of doing this. People focus their devotion to different things in different ways. However, how many "bad" pople truely have faith in something? Is it possible to do wrong and still be devoted? Can you be evil and yet not have sinned? You can think bad things, but as long as you don't do something, it's ok. When do you cross the line?

At the end of the day, people get along just fine without religion. It's not key to life, it's not something we need to survive. If, through word of mouth and situation, Christianity had not taken off, would it matter? If religion was not a concept, would it matter? You can think of life without religion, as it is occurs and nothing happens about it. There is no ill effect of not having faith in a higher being.

I'm not really sure what I'm trying to get at... I'm tired and it's been a long day. However, today has further confirmed by believe in that god does not exist. That does not mean I have contempt for it though. It is my own choice, and at the end of the day, that is the important thing.9