Religion. The evolution, creation and everything in between megathread

[Zarkov]

That does sum it up. A family from Zimbabwe used to work on my dads farm. They had been forced from their farm at gunpoint, and were now very poor and down, they were very religious. The daughter was mega hot, so I agreed to go with them to church one day and watch her sing (which may I add, was the biggest mistake of my life).

The crap they rambled on about was incredible. At one stage the guy on the stage said something like- "they may have more money than us, but it will be us laughing when we are welcomed into the gates of heaven and they all go to hell".
 
To which the poor Zimbabwian dad shout 'hear hear' or some bs. God it was a freakfest. Bunch of losers trying to gain strength in the belief that someone cares about them and will help them in life.

The family has since moved to the UK because they thought god wanted them to. I still keep in touch with the hot daughter, she tells me life over there has been total crap, they have been forced to move houses FOUR TIMES, and her dad has a crap job and is taking medication for depression while scraping by.

They are super religious, and god treats them like shit. What an asshole.

And he treats you like royalty.

Life is full of contradictions.

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

spacemonket whyyyyyyyyy resurect hte thread lol

I didn't, Arnifix did.

[frog.]

religion, a way to control scared, insecure , weak minded people through Gods word, actually his word out of the mouths of human prophets.  So is it still his word?

but why and by whom were the three main religions christianity, islam, judaism created to control the masses.

surely there must be some evidence that shows this. maybe it is in the bible itself.

[Menial]

but why and by whom were the three main religions christianity, islam, judaism created to control the masses.

surely there must be some evidence that shows this. maybe it is in the bible itself.

that is more like writing a Doctorit paper tbh.  need alot of researching.


Well I will choose a particualar branch of christianity to lol at for the meantime. Let me preface by saying I have an uncle who is a minister of this denomination, needless to say I haven't discussed the following with him.

The Anglican church, imho created by a king who wanted to remarry, except that the Catholic Pope would not condone divorce. Answer - Reform church with the King as head of the church, allow remarriage.
Read the difining act of the Chuch of England - the 39 articles, the first section The catholic faith Is pretty fucken simular to the Roman Catholic doctorine.
TBH the chuch of England is just a watered down version of catholocism.

Presuming that the Roman Catholic church, being the oldest and strongest form of christianity practised, and that all other protestant forms of christianity have branched of it at some form of time, you must wonder - for what reason have they split?  Do they no longer share the core values of the faith? Has they bible's interpretation changed in any way?


I would say that I typically believe in the prophets teachings per se, but not in his existance.
I don't believe in him, but I fear him.

[robbyx]

I just finished reading a book about buddism, some pretty cool stuff
it tells you to question all gods and to believe what ever you want,
except live by buddas law, which mainly is just be cool to each other.
BUT theres a catch.... no sex, no drink.... pretty much no fun at all
why the hell dont any gods want anyone to have fun.

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

Christians encourage drinking, lol, they even give you wine every week

[BerG]

they even give you wine every week

Its so they can drown their sorrows.

Its also to make them drunk so they believe whats being said.

[robbyx]

the morman church...now thats a whacky religon...
a dude guys into a barn, comes out a bit later and says guess what,
i have just been talking to god and he told me to start another religon,
he gave me some tablets with his teachings for this cool new religon, but i lost them,
oh by the way....he said its cool if i have seven wives..AND THEY BELIEVED HIM.

[laurasaur]

mormonism is pretty whacked lol
i dont see how the wives dont get jealous
and do they ever have husband-wife-wife.. sex?

[BerG]

Yeah whats with that weird show with the guy and three wives?

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

Yeah whats with that weird show with the guy and three wives?

Big Love.

I had a dream about that show, I was watching it, and the wives starting making out.

But then i woke up

[laurasaur]

fuck i love that show

[Hazard]

Big Love.

I had a dream about that show, I was watching it, and the wives starting making out.

But then i woke up

Go back to sleep and then come back and tell us what happened please.
Also, if you could find a way to record your dream it would be an added bonus

[Zarkov]

Wondering how the monkey's dreams turn out is a big mistake imo.

[Hazard]

I agree, it's risky business..... but there is a chance that it could be great. Also, he might include some of the chicks from Desperate Housewives....

[BerG]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060920/sc_nm/ethiopia_fossil_dc_1

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopian scientists unveiled on Wednesday a 3.3 million-year-old fossil of a girl, which they believe is the most complete skeleton ever found.
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The fossil including an entire skull, torso, shoulder blade and various limbs was discovered at Dikaka, some 400 kms northeast of the capital Addis Ababa near the Awash river in the Rift Valley.

"The finding is the most complete hominid skeleton ever found in the world," Zeresenay Alemseged, head of the Paleoanthropological Research Team, told a news conference.

He said the fossil was older than the 3.2 million year old remains of "Lucy" discovered in 1974, and described by scientists as one of the world's greatest archaeological finds.

"The new bones belong to a three year old girl who lived 3.3 million years ago -- 150,000 years before Lucy," Zeresenay said.

"Evidence indicates that she probably died in a flood from the nearby Awash river," he added.

The fossil has been named "Selam," which means peace in Ethiopia's official Amharic language.

Zeresenay said she belonged to the Australopithecus afarnesis species, which includes Lucy, and is thought to be an ancestor to modern humans.

"We now have for the first time the hard evidence for a clear picture of what early child human ancestors looked like," he added.

Over the last 50 years, Ethiopia has been a hotbed for archaeological discoveries.

The discovery of Lucy -- an almost complete hominid skeleton -- was a landmark in the search for the origins of humanity.

While a hominid skull thought to be between 200,000-500,000 years old was found in January, in a discovery one scientist said could fill the gap in the search for the origins of the human race.

On the shores of what was formerly a lake in 1967, two Homo sapiens skulls dating back 195,000 years were unearthed. The find pushed back the known date of mankind, suggesting that modern man and his older precursor existed side by side.

[Arnifix]

I want this book!

Some quotes:

More than 50% of Americans have a “negative” or “highly negative” view of people who don’t believe in God. 70% think it important for presidential candidates to be “strongly religious.”

“A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying.”

44% of Americans think Jesus Christ will return in the next 50 years. (22% are “certain” that he will, another 22% think he “probably” will.)

“According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.”

Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution (and two-thirds of these believe evolution was “guided by God”). 53% are actually creationists.

“Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.”

87% of Americans say they “never doubt the existence of God.”

“Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces, but a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80% of Katrina survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.”

28% of Americans believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. 49% believe that it is the “inspired word” of God.

“We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).”

80% of Americans expect to be called before God on Judgment Day to answer for their sins. 90% believe in heaven. 77% rate their chances of going to heaven as “excellent” or “good.”

“In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise. Western secularists, liberals, and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: they don’t know what is like to really believe in God.”

65% of Americans believe in the literal existence of Satan. 73% believe in Hell.

“It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity.”

83% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. (11% disbelieve. 6% don’t know.)

“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.”

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

lol at americans

[BerG]

Nice facts arny.

[Black Heart]

63% of my penis is crucifix shaped

[Menial]

pics or it didn't happen

[Fragin]

In the spirit of this thread i now present a 2253 word post...... :bounce:
(Edit: Had to split it into two  :cussing: )


THE GOD DELUSION
by Richard Dawkins

FROM CHAPTER 7: The "Good" Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist

There are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten Commandments, which are the subject of such bitter contention in the culture wars of America's boondocks. The other is by example: God, or some other biblical character, might serve as - to use the contemporary jargon - a role model. Both scriptural routes, if followed through religiously (the adverb is used in its metaphoric sense but with an eye to its origin), encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person, whether religious or not, would find - I can put it no more gently - obnoxious.

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed. Bishop Spong, by the way, is a nice example of a liberal bishop whose beliefs are so advanced as to be almost unrecognizable to the majority of those who call themselves Christians. A British counterpart is Richard Holloway, recently retired as Bishop of Edinburgh. Bishop Holloway even describes himself as a 'recovering Christian'. I had a public discussion with him in Edinburgh, which was one of the most stimulating and interesting encounters I have had.

THE OLD TESTAMENT

Begin in Genesis with the well-loved story of Noah, derived from the Babylonian myth of Uta-Napisthim and known from the older mythologies of several cultures. The legend of the animals going into the ark two by two is charming, but the moral of the story of Noah is appalling. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including children and also, for good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as well.

Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don't take the book of Genesis literally any more. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist's decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is 'morality flying by the seat of its pants', so is the other. In any case, despite the good intentions of the sophisticated theologian, a frighteningly large number of people still do take their scriptures, including the story of Noah, literally. According to Gallup, they include approximately 50 per cent of the US electorate. Also, no doubt, many of those Asian holy men who blamed the 2004 tsunami not on a plate tectonic shift but on human sins, ranging from drinking and dancing in bars to breaking some footling sabbath rule. Steeped in the story of Noah, and ignorant of all except biblical learning, who can blame them? Their whole education has led them to view natural disasters as bound up with human affairs, paybacks for human misdemeanours rather than anything so impersonal as plate tectonics. By the way, what presumptuous egocentricity to believe that earth-shaking events, on the scale at which a god (or a tectonic plate) might operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance!

When I interviewed for television the Reverend Michael Bray, a prominent American anti-abortion activist, I asked him why evangelical Christians were so obsessed with private sexual inclinations such as homosexuality, which didn't interfere with anybody else's life. His reply invoked something like self-defence. Innocent citizens are at risk of becoming collateral damage when God chooses to strike a town with a natural disaster because it houses sinners. In 2005, the fine city of New Orleans was catastrophically flooded in the aftermath of a hurricane, Katrina. The Reverend Pat Robertson, one of America's best-known televangelists and a former presidential candidate, was reported as blaming the hurricane on a lesbian comedian who happened to live in New Orleans.* You'd think an omnipotent God would adopt a slightly more targeted approach to zapping sinners: a judicious heart attack, perhaps, rather than the wholesale destruction of an entire city just because it happened to be the domicile of one lesbian comedian.

In November 2005, the citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania voted off their local school board the entire slate of fundamentalists who had brought the town notoriety, not to say ridicule, by attempting to enforce the teaching of 'intelligent design'. When Pat Robertson heard that the fundamentalists had been democratically defeated at the ballot, he offered a stern warning to Dover:

I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover, if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city, and don't wonder why he hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin, and I'm not saying they will. But if they do, just remember you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, then don't ask for his help, because he might not be there.

Pat Robertson would be harmless comedy, were he less typical of those who today hold power and influence in the United States. In the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Noah equivalent, chosen to be spared with his family because he was uniquely righteous, was Abraham's nephew Lot. Two male angels were sent to Sodom to warn Lot to leave the city before the brimstone arrived. Lot hospitably welcomed the angels into his house, whereupon all the men of Sodom gathered around and demanded that Lot should hand the angels over so that they could (what else?) sodomize them: 'Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them' (Genesis 19: 5).

Yes, 'know' has the Authorized Version's usual euphemistic meaning, which is very funny in the context. Lot's gallantry in refusing the demand suggests that God might have been onto something when he singled him out as the only good man in Sodom. But Lot's halo is tarnished by the terms of his refusal: 'I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof' (Genesis 19: 7-8).

Whatever else this strange story might mean, it surely tells us something about the respect accorded to women in this intensely religious culture. As it happened, Lot's bargaining away of his daughters' virginity proved unnecessary, for the angels succeeded in repelling the marauders by miraculously striking them blind. They then warned Lot to decamp immediately with his family and his animals, because the city was about to be destroyed. The whole household escaped, with the exception of Lot's unfortunate wife, whom the Lord turned into a pillar of salt because she committed the offence - comparatively mild, one might have thought - of looking over her shoulder at the fireworks display.

Lot's two daughters make a brief reappearance in the story. After their mother was turned into a pillar of salt, they lived with their father in a cave up a mountain. Starved of male company, they decided to make their father drunk and copulate with him. Lot was beyond noticing when his elder daughter arrived in his bed or when she left, but he was not too drunk to impregnate her. The next night the two daughters agreed it was the younger one's turn. Again Lot was too drunk to notice, and he impregnated her too (Genesis 19: 31-6). If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.

*It is unclear whether the story, which originated at http://datelinehollywood.com/archives/ 2005/09/05/robertson-blames-hurricane-on-choice-of-ellen-deneres-to-hostemmys/ is true. Whether true or not, it is widely believed, no doubt because it is entirely typical of utterances by evangelical clergy, including Robertson, on disasters such as Katrina. See, for example, http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/9/emw281940.htm. The website that says the Katrina story is untrue (http://www.snopes.com/katrina/ satire/robertson.asp) also quotes Robertson as saying, of an earlier Gay Pride march in Orlando, Florida, 'I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you.'

[Fragin]

FROM CHAPTER EIGHT: What's wrong with religion? Why be so hostile?

In July 2005, London was the victim of a concerted suicide bomb attack: three bombs in the subway and one in a bus. Not as bad as the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, and certainly not as unexpected (indeed, London had been braced for just such an event ever since Blair volunteered us as unwilling side-kicks in Bush's invasion of Iraq), nevertheless the London explosions horrified Britain. The newspapers were filled with agonized appraisals of what drove four young men to blow themselves up and take a lot of innocent people with them. The murderers were British citizens, cricket-loving, well-mannered, just the sort of young men whose company one might have enjoyed.

Why did these cricket-loving young men do it? Unlike their Palestinian counterparts, or their kamikaze counterparts in Japan, or their Tamil Tiger counterparts in Sri Lanka, these human bombs had no expectation that their bereaved families would be lionized, looked after or supported on martyrs' pensions. On the contrary, their relatives in some cases had to go into hiding. One of the men wantonly widowed his pregnant wife and orphaned his toddler. The action of these four young men has been nothing short of a disaster not just for themselves and their victims, but for their families and for the whole Muslim community in Britain, which now faces a backlash. Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people. Once again, Sam Harris put the point with percipient bluntness, taking the example of the Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden (who had nothing to do with the London bombings, by the way). Why would anyone want to destroy the World Trade Center and everybody in it? To call bin Laden 'evil' is to evade our responsibility to give a proper answer to such an important question.

The answer to this question is obvious - if only because it has been patiently articulated ad nauseam by bin Laden himself. The answer is that men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran. Why did nineteen well-educated middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of humans so fully and satisfactorily explained. Why have we been so reluctant to accept this explanation?"

The respected journalist Muriel Gray, writing in the (Glasgow) Herald on 24 July 2005, made a similar point, in this case with reference to the London bombings.

Everyone is being blamed, from the obvious villainous duo of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, to the inaction of Muslim 'communities'. But it has never been clearer that there is only one place to lay the blame and it has ever been thus. The cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is of course religion itself, and if it seems ludicrous to have to state such an obvious reality, the fact is that the government and the media are doing a pretty good job of pretending that it isn't so.

Our Western politicians avoid mentioning the R word (religion), and instead characterize their battle as a war against 'terror', as though terror were a kind of spirit or force, with a will and a mind of its own. Or they characterize terrorists as motivated by pure 'evil'. But they are not motivated by evil. However misguided we may think them, they are motivated, like the Christian murderers of abortion doctors, by what they perceive to be righteousness, faithfully pursuing what their religion tells them. They are not psychotic; they are religious idealists who, by their own lights, are rational. They perceive their acts to be good, not because of some warped personal idiosyncrasy, and not because they have been possessed by Satan, but because they have been brought up, from the cradle, to have total and unquestioning faith.

[Black Heart]

nice posts fragin.

[Simon_NZ]

THREAD REVIVE!

LETS ROCK!