:’( thats horrible.
Perhaps they forgot that Jesus’ reason for having issues with the pharisees was cause they were Religious pricks that were being legalistic asshats.
I’m pretty sure that If Jesus was to just inconspicuously drop in to a church service one day, more than a few churches would want him gone.
pardon my rant. it is sad to see all the harm some people are doing.:facepalm:
wow. I am sorry that this is what most of your guys’ experience with Christians has been.
tell Lee that I (as a Christian) don’t think any less of him for his choice and that I’m sorry that that is the kind of people he has had the misfortune of meeting. not that it’ll mean much coming from a fourmite or anything. 
I typed wrong. I meant to write some Christians (and, if you’ll read my entire post, you’ll see that I wasn’t talking about all Christians and I know other Christians don’t consider Jesus to be the founder of Christianity but some Christians do) but not all Christians, so I beg forgiveness.
However, the problem I have with Christianity (and, yes, the majority of Christians that I’ve ever run into that I tell that I’m an atheist) is the command to be “spread the word” which many take as a command to “spread the word even to people that don’t want to hear it”.
I have had Christian after Christian after Christian many hundreds of times over try to “save” me or to “educate” me “on God’s word” that I’ve taken to not reveal that I’m atheist as it almost always leads to an argument. For example, here’s one that I had about 9 months ago:
Them: “So, I just told my pastor that I would be coming to Sunday mass. Would you like to come?”
Me: “Nah, but thanks.”
Them: “Oh, it’ll be fun.”
Me: “Nah.”
Them: “Okay, if you come to my church, I’ll come to yours.”
Me: “I don’t go to church.”
Them: “…what? Why?”
Me: “I’m an atheist.”
Them: “…”
Me: “I don’t believe in God.”
Them: “That’s terrible!”
And that’s when the argument started. If they had simply said, “Okay” after I told them that I was an atheist, that would’ve been the end, but they started saying that what I believed and didn’t believe was “terrible” and I naturally took offense.
Hello everybody !
Checking this forum, i couldn’t help but see that my country was mentionned… Well, for all its faults, the french Republic still has this little thing that changes everything : Church is separated from the State. No one here would try to make you feel guilty about being an atheist (or a believer, for that matter) danielsangeo, as per our Constitution religion is considered strictly private. Which is pretty neat when you need to fight things like scientology, or extremists.
@SassyRobot :
Don’t be fooled by definitions, for if they seem set in stone, the things they describe are born in history. Christian church didn’t start as a full-blown religion. And any religion can degenerate into a cult. Nothing is pure and everything changes.
Then why even be christian? I’m an atheist and I attribute the same attention to my buddhist teachings, the bible, and Fables/Mother Goose. All of those have great teachings/stories of morality, but why the hell would you make a religion out of them? Just read them, appreciate the teachings, and be done with it.
@ the cult/religion thing, it’s worth noting that all religions start out as cults; allow me to clarify…
Any belief system that introduces a new set of beliefs & customs will appear faddish, unconventional and dangerous to the status quo. Humans are inherently conservative (small “c”, not big “c”!!) and most are at least marginally resistant to change.
Christianity started out with 12 blokes, led by a charismatic man who had them do (for the time) unconventional things. Assuming you take the bible’s word for it, he also had them pretty devoted to a set of principles and an entity (god). Now consider how most of the disciples ended up (According to Christian tradition):
Original Twelve picked by Jesus:
Replacement picked by the surviving eleven:
I presume 12 out of 13 died not because they were jolly nice people, but because they were out there, spreading the word and making ripples in the pond. Even the most cursory reading of the bible would reveal Peter to be something of a zealot and there’s little reason to think that the other disciples were any more moderate in their attitude; if they were they wouldn’t have been killed in such exciting and inventive ways. It’s also worth noting that Romans crucified slaves, pirates and enemies of the state. So clearly at least 6 of them may have been engaged in activities that were socially unacceptable.
By way of balance, consider any of the “ancient” religions, i.e. the ones that Christianity and its brothers supplanted;
I don’t know about you, but in my book, that’s irony.
I’mma go back a few pages and answer this:
I don’t really see what your point is there. As people have already said, you can’t use will in this situation.
Thing is, scientists are insanely close to making an artificial cell - man-made life. The parts are complicated, sure, but the fact that it can be done just using different chemicals in different environments (rather than putting pieces together manually) makes it pretty clear that it could happen by chance: hell, considering the right conditions persisted for a few million years it was unlikely that it wouldn’t happen.
My point is that these things happened by chance. That first cell was created because of the chemicals and the environmental conditions of the time, and it just so happened that it had the quirk of being able to reproduce. So it went ahead and did that: it’s just how it happened to form, there’s no intervention there, just the right kind of conditions and pure, beautiful, chaos.
Sorry, but atheists do not go around telling people that they’re going to suffer in agony for all eternity because they don’t believe precisely as atheists believe. Yes, I’ve been told that, because I didn’t believe exactly as they believe, I was going to “burn” and that they wanted to “save” me from that fate. Atheists do not go knocking on doors telling others about the “good news”. Atheists do not try to get laws passed telling religious people what they can and can’t do in accordance with their lack of belief in deities.
Do you honestly believe that atheists are just coming out of the blue with this; that these sorts of Christians are blameless; that they didn’t do anything to bring about the “wrath of the atheist”? I mean, seriously. Things don’t happen in a vaccuum. Actions have consequences.
And don’t even try the “Not all Christians do this” canard. There is absolutely zero pushback I see from the “not all Christians do this” crowd that they might as well be tacitly approving these actions.
That being said, I don’t hate any religious person for being religious. In fact, I go one step further. I actually ascribe to a Christian teaching: By their fruits, you shall know them.
And I’ve seen enough actions over the years to keep me in supply of fruitcake for the rest of my life.
I think the main thrust of the argument against this, Soup, is that “chance” is a loaded word. It becomes synonymous with “accident”. The conditions on pre-biotic Earth were such, as you said, that it’s unlikely that it WOULDN’T have happened (like mold growing on bread doesn’t happen accidentally). But, the formation of life happened by chance (not by accident) and, after that life formed, the continual changes of the Earth dictated how this life would evolve over millions and billions of years until, eventually, a sufficiently evolved life form creates a video game modification that brings us together to yack about what happened eons ago. :retard:
Chance, n.
How is that a loaded word? Also, I’m not seeing where this whole “accident” argument came from. I don’t think I used the word even once.
Oh, you didn’t. However, I’ve been in many discussions over this and “chance” somehow becomes “accident” almost always (that there is nothing BUT randomness always and that nothing can affect anything else). And it’s just silly. So I wanted to nip it in the bud before it happened here. 
Really now, from what I wrote I would have thought you’d be able to guess I know at least some of my shit.
Don’t get me wrong. I know you know some shit.
It is others that don’t seem to know it. They make blatant assumptions about things and assume that you’re saying something other than what you’re saying. I am not saying that YOU are going to change “chance” into “accident”, but as it happens, the term, through no fault of those that know their shit, becomes insane randomness (a dog could spontaneously become a headcrab if things were truly as random as some of these people claim).
And what THEY do is silly, not what YOU do.
I apologize for any misunderstanding. I haven’t had my caffeine yet this morning…
All is forgiven now I understand.
That was the point I was trying to make.
And as ijgs mentioned, every religion started out as a cult, so I don’t get the whole point of the “Scientology should be treated as a cult and not a religion” comments, I don’t like scientology either but it’s a little strange to say something like that.
I think by now we can say that we should’ve stayed with the six gods, instead of just one because ever since we chose for one God, people are complaining about it.
Life coming into existence has even been recorded.
There’s a special kind of yoghurt from Sweden I believe, that has a certain type of bacteria in it, that didn’t exist at all before… something.
Can’t quite remember the details, but something along those lines.
Soup, my dear fellow, I’m going to have to correct you when you say:
it should really be:
1 in 10,000,000 chances occur at a rate of about 40,000 per second on this planet, if not more frequently (taking every living creature’s procreation into account). “Chance” and “luck” are observed to have happened every day; people die, people are born, accidents are had and avoided and so on. What happens is:
Luck & chance are mere human rationalisations of ongoing chaos, NOT influencing factors on that chaos. Events either happen or do not happen, there really isn’t any grey area (oh, and insurance is a massive con as a result!).
You’re misunderstanding me there, ijgs. Like I said, chance is just probability of an event: I didn’t say luck, or fortune or any other personified influence was involved.
I disagree that chance/probability is a feeble attempt at rationalising chaos: I think it rationalises it pretty damn well. It’s a model we use to predict the likelihood of events in the chaos that is the universe, nothing more, nothing less. It can’t be feeble or strong: like mathematics, it just is.
To be honest, I don’t see what you were actually objecting to in my post.
The human model of luck/probability matches it, but not well. It simply substitutes millions of minute influences that we can’t begin to calculate (or don’t care enough to) with a simple mathematical expression to predict certain outcomes. While we may describe them as occurring by chance, we simply don’t have the time, want to put in the effort, or simply can’t with our current technology define when and where these events will occur.
My point is that whatever happens, there’s a probability for it. You have a probability for your racehorse to win. However, all of it’s molecules could vibrate in the same direction, sending into the sky at 500m/s: this isn’t accounted for because the chance is so minute.
The probability model works the majority of the time, and that’s what it aims for. If we could define when and where events will occur, it wouldn’t be probability.
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