Define "God."
It's an open question. I've heard the arguments on both sides. None of them is worth a bucket of warm spit.
Office of Religious Freedom Closes March 31
- Thread starter tay
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Yes, your honour.
A bucket of warm spit... Why did you have to put that image in my head?
Are you adpoting Ang's question?
The answer is "If this alleged god created the universe, it necessarily lies outside the universe. Thus, nothing about it can be known."
Tell you one thing for certain sure. If, as I have been assured by multitudes of earnest folk, god really, really, really wants me to believe in it, why don't it offer some evidence of its existence?
Because I'm an angel. Just not a very nice angel.
I 'realized' it when reality stubbornly refused to show that any kind of loving, benevolent god(s) who gave a damn existed. I chose to cast off the shackles of religious dogma instead of burying my head in the sand, too afraid to seriously question my personal beliefs.
I wish I could type 100 words per minute.
Pass the tequila and I'll take your bet. Seriously, believe or faith are a choice. Many choose not to believe.
ahem God Damn it. cough cough.
So you need tequila to believe there is no floor under your feet? Why couldn't you just will yourself to believe it without tequila?
Reality.
In our solar system or more general space?
I think it would be foolish to believe we have the only habitable planet with all those millions of suns out there.
What I have a problem believing in, with the whole God thing, is to think we are that important in the universe. You would have to be a little retarded to believe God would send this message, through telepathy, to only one, Of one given race of humans. Umm, Ya right, sounds very limited for a "all powerful all glorious God". Who the fu€k is dumb enough to fall for that? No ones wondering why the Chines never got the memo? Oh wait, god never got arround to it? Works for someone with a IQ below 100. The rest of us are like, can't be to hard to fool those idiots on April first :lol:
The tequila thing was a joke. If I had a chemical imbalance I might, but I don't. I used to subscribe to religion or faith in god, but I made a choice not to. It is a choice, otherwise God (made up or real) wouldn't give man free will.
That's one way to look at it, but there are scientifically legitimate arguments against murder too. Any group whose members don't know that killing each other off is not a good way to resolve disputes will not survive long. There are solid reasons rooted in evolutionary biology for the universal condemnation of murder in all societies. But note what that really means. Murder really means killing members of the group you belong to. Killing members of other groups is war, and you can be a hero if you're good at that. All societies have always accepted the premise that there are circumstances in which it is permissible, even laudable, to kill other people, with the possible exception of tiny fringe groups like Quakers. The moral argument, if it's not a blanket condemnation like the Quaker position, can only be about defining those circumstances.
Or perhaps you accept it on the basis of evidence that society is better for than being alone in the world.
No, that's not what I said, or even implied. You're really reaching here, trying to justify your claims about faith. Certainly the members of any society would have to believe it's worth preserving or it would soon cease to exist, but that's got nothing to do with faith, that's a practical matter of survival. You need to be careful how you use a word like faith, it has layers of meaning and it's easy to be led astray into fallacious reasoning by mixing them. I could say I have complete faith that the sun will rise in the morning, for instance, or more correctly that the part of the planet I'm on will rotate towards it, but since it's done so every morning of my life so far, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to believe, there's solid evidence for it and no reason to think it won't keep on happening. That's not the kind of faith you're talking about.