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US
Edited Date/Time
10/24/2014 5:10pm
Been watching a lot of shows lately and have fought with this my whole life and by no means is this a stab at Christianity because in the good old US of A its propriety to one to assume thats what I am talking about it. But how can, in any religion, a man who does no wrong, who lives a life of good of deeds and fulfillment without needing jesus/whatever else be weak?
How does that make him a bad person?
Why should one be condemned to hell for it?
Why should one who does so much good in life be tormented for not believing in a god during his life, why doing so much good?
Religion is so messed up to me, all of it but, I love hearing other peoples thoughts on, " Why such a person, who does so much good in life, is bad for not believing in whatever"?
How does that make him a bad person?
Why should one be condemned to hell for it?
Why should one who does so much good in life be tormented for not believing in a god during his life, why doing so much good?
Religion is so messed up to me, all of it but, I love hearing other peoples thoughts on, " Why such a person, who does so much good in life, is bad for not believing in whatever"?
If you follow the commandments laid out in the Bible, you're generally on track with what you'd consider a "good person". So for a starting point, if you're looking for a set of rules to follow, that's a good place to start even if you don't believe.
Part of believing in the Bible and God is faith. So if you don't have faith or if your mind is closed to the idea of believing in what the Bible says, then there probably isn't much good in debating what the Bible says about going to hell and how good behavior doesn't get you to heaven in and of itself.
I am a Christian. . . probably not a very good one, but if you're wondering for reference's sake, that's the side.
Out of curiosity, what drives your conscience? What makes you decide that something is good or something is bad?
And then I went back to church and started the whole process of getting my focus off other Christians. Meaning its hard to not get offended by people at chruch, and even find a church that is not dry or into silly stuff.
When you pray Romans 10:9-10 and do what it says, you enter into a spiritual relationship that is sometimes demanding. You start to see that some people are working out a lot of stuff in their life, and some of these things are hard to let go of. But God is always there to forgive when you mess up.
Everyone's relationship with God is defferent. You have the Bible, which is like a life manual, but God will speak to each person differently through it, because each person has individual gifts and talents that God will use to bless them and their family through.
you can live your life as a good person with no religious affiliation. you can also live you life as a good christian
and make bad decisions (by choice, ignorance, or circumstance) and do things which are viewed as being a bad
person but can be forgiven and still be a good christian. (as I understand it)
TM
The Shop
Christians goals are to do as the Bible says and that is to spread God's word to non believers. The Bible does explicitly define what hell is like, and rather than "fabricating" what it is, we're simply trying to spell what the consequences are if you're not saved, as we believe it. Simply because you don't believe it doesn't mean that we're cultists or that we're fabricating it out of thin air.
Do you ever think, what if there is life after death? You clearly believe there isn't but there's a chance you're wrong right? If it isn't real and you do believe, you've lost nothing for an eternity after life, but if it is real, and you don't believe, you're going to be pretty sorry for holding on to your belief of nothing.
I'm just trying to get your point of view. Not trying to stir crap up.
And lets be honest. A person who is down and out (maybe even living on the street, or can't afford enough to eat) and gives something away to another person who suffering, will get rewarded by God. I don't know if there's a specific verse on this, but God recognized when the widow dropped only a half of a penny in the offering plate, and said she truly gave all she had. He also talked about the rich Pharisee who was in church praying and said "Lord, I thank you that I'm not like that sinner over there." and the sinner prayed "Lord, have mercy on me a sinner." The Bible says, the sinner went away forgiven. The Pharisee did a lot of "good things" in his society, but he was prideful and arrogant.
Don't take our word for it, or watch some weird show, or read some vague thread on vital. Pray and ask God for yourself, He will answer you.
Sorry for posting a video, but it saves me a lot of typing, and I think it is a good answer to it:
https://youtu.be/K-TDxcsNIlo
First, God does not condemn anyone to hell. People condemn themselves to hell by refusing to acknowledge God. I do not personally believe in a literal flaming hell. I am aware that Scripture does seem to imply flames, but I believe that is hyperbole intended to convey just how much torment and anguish a soul will experience living forever without God. God is not condemning anyone - He is simply giving them their wish to be left alone. In fact, the classic Christian view is that God sent his one and only son, the only perfect man to ever live, as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of all humans so that anyone placing their faith in that atoning sacrifice may enjoy God's presence forever.
I'm unaware of any man that "does no wrong." I have heard of men that felt they could do no wrong, which will always lead to pride & idolatry of self.
I personally believe that if one truly seeks God, one will find God - God knows those who truly hunger and thirst to be made right before Him.
Religion is messed up. I agree. Religion is all about man trying to earn his way to God through good works, complicated rituals, etc. The truth is so simple that people cannot grasp it without help. The truth is so simple that a child can understand it. Here is the truth. “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life." Jesus of Nazareth, circa AD 32.
So no, one is not a "bad person" for having no faith in God. He might be a fine person, but in a way, he has the same disease we all suffer from - sin.
Good topic btw, it seems like one of the few religious topics that actually can create a good and civilized discussion
You do believe in the concept of time, right? People have been worshiping some deity or another since long before Jesus. How do you think culture will look 1,000 years from now? Who knows.
[url]https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-people-believe-in-God-s[/url]
If you have an open mind, I would suggest reading J. Warner Wallace's Cold-Case Christianity. When you finish, tell me if you still think Christians "make all kinds of crap up from thin air."
If you choose not to educate yourself about why Christians believe what they believe, then trying to have a rational discussion about those beliefs is rather useless.
How does that make him a bad person?
That lack of a belief certainly does not make anyone a bad person. If a christian tells you that you are going to hell because you don't believe in a god, ask for evidence to show that statement is true. If you come out as an atheist, you will be asking that question quite a bit, and you will see the same answers repeatedly. They have no evidence of that claim. There is not a single shred of it that can be objectively verified. Any alleged evidence is contained in the bible and in poorly constructed apologist philosophical nonsense.
Why should one be condemned to hell for it?
You will start to notice people making excuses for god, simply so they can maintain their moral integrity. See Harry's response. "God wouldn't condemn you to hell, you are doing that to yourself." It's a built in guilt trip that is a foundational property of religion. Learn the arguments and rebuttals because you'll hear christians say the same thing repeatedly. The argument from morality is a great place to start with this question, and Harry's response brings up a few questions of their own. First of all, saying that your moral standard doesn't matter to god isn't an answer to the question. You are asking, specifically, if that person believes that a person that doesn't believe in go should be sent to hell. It's a moral question. Is sending somebody to hell for not believing a fitting punishment? Ask about the fact that by Christian law, you could go around killing and raping people your entire life and if you give yourself to jesus just before you die, you go to heaven. Is that a morally just scenario? Is it true? What is the method you go about determining truth? Christians love to act like they have some monopoly on morality, but if you understand religion and ask the right questions, you will find that they are morally compromised. This is not to say that they are bad people, just that they generally don't have a clear and honest view on morality.
Why should one who does so much good in life be tormented for not believing in a god during his life, why doing so much good?
Christianity specifically, is a carrot and stick scenario. God is the stick and jesus is the carrot. It's designed that way to keep people from questioning. "All you have to do is love jesus and god won't condemn you to hell." Gee, Thanks. The fact of the matter is there is no way to verify any of those claims. Understanding how the bible was written gives lots of evidence for this, as well. It all points to being a man made phenomenon that was used in ancient times to offer an explanation for how the world works, and it failed. Religion is a failed science in essence.
A few random:
- Know the definition of Atheism. It is not the claim that no gods exist, it is the rejection of the claim that a god does exist. This is an important distinction because somebody might say " How do you know god didn't just create the universe and now he simply doesn't interact with our reality?" The answer is you don't know that, there is no way you could know that. However, there is no reason to believe that is the truth. When it comes to specific gods, like the christian god, the religion makes claims about how god allegedly effects reality. That means it can be tested. Prayer and miracles have been tested, and the results show that it's roughly a coin flip model. In terms of the tolerances that science uses to claim truth, this is not even in the same universe, and can be rejected as an unproven claim. Also, atheism/theism is a position on belief, not knowledge. Gnosticism and agnosticism are positions on knowledge. So for the example above, you could be an agnostic atheist...you don't know if that type of god exists, but you don't believe that it does (you aren't convinced.) It is also possible to be a gnostic atheist, as twisted as that sounds. I suppose it would involve a bit of delusion.
-Faith is completely useless. The definition of faith is the belief in something, despite the lack of evidence. Religious people love to say things like "it takes more faith to be an atheist." No, it doesn't. Form your beliefs based on evidence that can be objectively verified as being real. This means forming beliefs based on the best evidence that is currently available. If no evidence exists, withhold belief until a claim does have evidence to support. The null hypothesis. Every position is tentative, even knowledge. There are different levels of certainty.
- Logical structures are key. Every existing theist claim thus far is riddled with logical fallacies.
- Be as intellectually honest as possible and know the arguments. Once you recognize the problems with religion, it's much easier to recognize the fact that they are largely playing a dishonest semantic game, whether they realize it or not.
A few resources:
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/
http://talkorigins.org/
Science Saved my Soul. Very deep stuff there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6w2M50_Xdk
The Atheist Experience is a big one. Matt Dilahunty and Tracie Harris are pretty awesome. They tackle the moral issues with theology quite often, and long with all of the other inconsistencies with religion. A few of my favorites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYf96iXK5x0 The moral argument. Caller around 10 min or so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lwX8p8jpzs Faith.
Great show, but also check out Matt Dilahunty and why secular morality is superior.
AntiCitizenX
This guy addresses apologetics specifically, but it's useful because apologetic arguments filter down to pretty much all christians. They all use one form or another of apologetic arguments.
http://www.youtube.com/user/AntiCitizenX/videos
Part one, on through the series breaks it down pretty awesomely.
Why I'm no longer a Christian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOmSYHzeoNA&list=PLF2E743D9CFBB2145&ind…
Pit Row
Several billion years ago, a molecular cloud--a Nebula--of almost pure hydrogen (in the general area where our star was to be) sat, relatively motionless. It did not contain sufficient gravitational mass to coalesce and even if it did, it would merely be a star system with some gaseous planets. No heavier elements existed within the nebula to allow rocky, silicon, carbon, iron planets to form.
Several light years away, existed a super-massive star. Probably many hundreds, if not thousands of times our current star's mass. It was one of the fore-mothers of our section of the galaxy. She probably only lived a few million years, as she--being a super giant--burned through her fuel at a hyper-rapid pace. This was around 4.6 billion years ago and her life came to an abrupt and fortunate end. So large was she, that her collapse was to form the largest type of explosion in the universe--second only to the Big Bang.
That explosion is called a supernova and it caused a shock wave of heavier elements (formed during its collapse) to blast out towards our stellar nursery consisting of simple hydrogen atoms. That shock wave caused the nebula to compress just enough for its very weak gravity to begin to have an affect on all the matter within the cloud. Included in that blast were the rare elements that made our existence possible: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, nickel, silicon, calcium and dozens more. The guts of that super giant, cast out during the death of our grandmother star, have been recycled into the bodies of every living creature that ever existed on the Earth.
I've heard it aptly said that, when you gain a true understanding of the terrible beauty of the cosmos and all the celestial transactions that came before us, you truly don't need myths, legends and made up religions. What could possibly compare to the fact that the stars had to die so that we could live. We are literally star children, the elements of creation, formed in the most awesome of serendipitous events.
As the Solar Nebula began to collapse on its own gravity the process accelerated again and again. It could no longer be stopped and would continue its inexorable course to form a new star. As we see with an ice skater pulling her hands in while spinning, as the cloud collapsed it began to rotate more rapidly in the maelstrom of creation. Downward and downward into the core, the gas continued to fall.
There wasn't really a "star" in the center yet, only a relatively dense blob of gas that was beginning to collapse under its weight, forming a sphere at the center of the disk of gas. As more gas collapsed into the cloud, the gravity increased as well. In a series of cascading effects that drew more gas, increased gravity, drawing more gas, again and again, the core of the prenatal system began to form.
The cloud became a ball of swirling gas and liquid of great density, many times that of planets Jupiter or Saturn. From there, more and more gas was pulled into this beast of a sphere, swallowing each bit like a hungry giant. Surrounding the giant was massive haze of even more gas and a disk containing hundreds of glowing balls--the planets were taking shape as well. The process continued to accelerate. Trillions and trillions of tons of gas continued collapsing into the enormous celestial body. And the critical moment was nearly at hand.
Atoms began to collapse. The proto-star began to shimmer from the compression of all the weight of the atoms rubbing violently against one another causing heat and photons to be expelled in the process. It was likely thousands of degrees, not yet hot enough to be a star, though nearly there. Our unborn star system finally had a source of light and limited warmth.
Still, trillions and trillions of tons of gas kept collapsing into the center of the proto-star-system and feeding the nascent Sun. And the process accelerated and accelerated, again and again; and the gravity grew and grew and more gas collapsed and fell inward until a critical point was reached when the stars mass and gravity could not be kept at bay by simple friction and the mass of the star collapsed inward on its own weight, compressing itself to a fraction of its original size.
The atoms in the star suddenly burst, began to fuse together and form helium. Nuclear fusion had begun. Trillions of watts of energy were now emanating from the Sun. In a final collapse and explosion, a shock wave cast off from the star, scattered the inner gas outward into the system and sucked everything nearby into the glowing Sun.
The Solar System was officially born. Swirling around that young Sun were likely hundreds of proto-planets orbiting at all levels in regular and irregular orbits. They were small but growing, gobbling up massive amounts of debris, gas and other planetoids.
As time went on, the gravity of the growing planets began to grow and attract themselves to the others and they, again, collided and grew substantially. Each planet grew quickly as they collided with each other. While we had a star, the system was still in its infancy and was changing rapidly with passage of just a few million years.
Roughly 150 million kilometers from the new star was a red hot body, a planet less than half our current Earth's mass. It orbited the Sun fairly rapidly and it was spinning so fast that its equator bulged outward. It, too, was sucking up stellar debris, gas and asteroids. It was the stellar-fetus of what would one day be our home.
While the planet, itself, already had lots of water locked in its red-hot body, it was nonetheless being pummeled by comets and meteorites that contained massive amounts of water. It was purely magma, no solid matter anywhere on or under its surface. As it grew, its spin began to slow. Slowly but surely, that planet crept outward, away from the star. It was a toxic ball, boiling and billowing noxious fumes from within its turbulent core, glowing red hot in the cold of space.
At some point, as the proto-Earth drifted toward its current orbit, a stellar body on an irregular orbit careened toward the infantile planet. Likely the size of Mars, it smashed into the Earth at many thousands of miles per hour. It hit the Earth at just the right angle, causing some of the planet's lighter crust to be blasted into space, while its dense core melted into the planet, re-igniting its surface, and liquifying its crust for millions of years.
Within a few hundred thousand years, the debris in orbit around the young Earth (within the Roche Limit) was pulled back to the surface and the matter outside of the Limit coalesced into a relatively light body that became our Moon. It orbited at only 25,000 KM (or so) and rotated around the Earth rapidly. To this very day it creeps away from the Earth several inches each year and will one day leave it altogether.
Three fortunate gifts were bequeathed to our Earth by this apocalyptic collision: our Moon, our disproportionately large metal core (the joining of two planets' hearts) and our thinner crust (due to much of it being blasted into space during the collision). And what gifts they were! Our moon acted to stabilize our planet's spin by negating the gravitational molestations of our sister planets. Our larger metal core produced a more powerful magnetic field protecting us from solar radiation. Lastly our thinner crust permitted tectonic plates and periodic (and extreme) vulcanism whose contributions to our existence has always been more boom boon than bane.
Still the Earth gobbled up stellar matter and grew and grew. Not quite the size of planet we call home today, the Earth was quickly approaching her final size. The hot atmosphere was extraordinarily dense, many hundreds of time thicker than our current atmosphere. It contained mostly evaporated water that had been boiled away when the rogue planet struck the Earth along with a large amount of CO2, ammonia and methane.
And slowly and surely, the Earth began to cool. The temperature dropped and dropped until, finally, it dipped below a critical point. In a flash, the trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of water in the atmosphere began to rain from the sky. It's likely that it rained for millions of years as the water condensed into streams of rain that would make a hurricane today look like picnic weather. As it struck partially molten surface of the planet, it re-evaporated back into the air. Over and over, and slowly and surely, the water caused the surface to finally solidify and accept the deluge from the sky.
As the young moon was so close, its gravity ripped and kneaded the Earth, causing more vulcanism to spew magma and water to the surface while comets—rich in water and organic material—bombarded the crust daily, increasing the size of the oceans and the overall mass of the planet. While the amount of water was massive, it is likely the Earth's surface had about half its current volume (roughly 650 million cubic kilometers of water).
There was almost no oxygen in the atmosphere, just a combination of deadly gasses that could never support life as we know it. The Earth's waters were no better, containing a toxic slurry of hot liquid, and all manner of caustic chemicals, organic molecules and giga tons of iron, making the waters an alien shade of jade green.
And slowly the bombardment lessened, and the Moon crept away from the Earth. The planet had no mountains as there were no tectonic plates yet. The surface was just a few miles thick. Churning and boiling underneath the crust was hot magma, still many thousands of degrees. Tempests of oceans ripped across the surface. The planet had no visible land masses, just a mile deep planetary ocean, green like algae but containing only the smallest pre-eminent particles of life.
But there were still no land masses. The Earth was an ocean world, miles deep with water. Over the next hundred million years, the size of the Earth and amount of water reached, relatively, what we have today. As the rocky surface under the oceans solidified, the gravitational forces of the Moon and the Sun, combined with the roiling heat within the Earth's core, broke apart the rocky crust into plates that began to shift and move about in chaotic patterns.
These plates crashed into one another. As they did, they created peaks. Volcanoes also began to create small protrusions out of the oceanic surface. And more and more the massive forces of the crust cause land masses to grow and grow, until finally, the oceans parted and made way for land masses, containing cooled dirt, constantly eroded by the planet's weather.
Whether delivered by a comet, an alien force, by a powerful deity or (most likely) by natural forces near fumaroles at the ocean depths, organic materials began to form self-replicating strands of proteins. These proteins would one day evolve into every life form on Earth. Within a few hundred million years, the proteins in the oceans grew in complexity. Hundreds of millions of years later, those proteins would grow into distinct organisms.
One of those organisms began to use sunlight to convert CO2 into carbon, releasing toxic Oxygen that it cast off into the oceans around it. None of this Oxygen made it into the atmosphere yet. It was percolating through the waters, oxidizing the green iron, turning it brown, and causing it to settle on the ocean floor in thick layers that we--one day millions of years later--would dig up to build our cities and our industries.
The blue oceans now teemed with life and the atmosphere began to turn clear and blue with oxygen flooding out of the oceans. Later still, the variety of organisms would explode, likely caused by the presence of oxygen in the waters, fights for food and the emergence of sensory organs (eyes, ears and olfactory). These organs created competition amongst each other, allowing attacks and defenses, speeding up evolution in what we now know of as the Cambrian Explosion.
Upward and onward, the organisms crept out from the oceans and on to land. First plants. Then bugs. Then amphibian-like creatures that would become reptiles, mammals and dinosaurs, birds and other distinct animals. Wave after wave of extinction would bring about the rise of massive reptiles and then wipe them from the surface making room for mammals to take their place as the dominant species on the planet.
Sweat glands--leaking salty water and lactose onto eggs as an anti-biotic and moisturizer, later provided nutrients to newly hatched proto-mammals who licked it from their mother's belly as food and water--continued to mutate until they formed the very device that gave mammals their greatest success mechanism: Mammary glands (and the root name of our class: Mammals†). They provided nutrition and fostered the maternal bond of protection and education that further drove the success of our clade. Let there be no doubt that females--the mother mammals to us all--with their unique self-sacrifice and emotional attachment to their young, made every possible leap in our evolution the success that it was. And those mammals' caring mothers created a pack instinct that spread out to all her descendants.
The emotional bond fostered by mammary glands permitted emotional bonds beyond nutrition, beyond mother. The nascent "love", created between breast and mouth, infant and mother, was the emotional spark that drove mammals to form all of the paternal bonds, sibling bonds and social bonds that we see in so many in our class to this day. Those profound instincts followed a group of early simians as they took to the trees, diversifying and growing as they spread.
The profound familial bonds created connections in simians that lasted for life. Parents taught children how to survive. Children cared for parents as they aged. Not quite love yet, though not all that dissimilar, simians' connections to each other formed the strongest communities known in the mammal world. This trait survives in us to this very day.
Millions of years later, a troop of highly developed simian-mammals . . . Ape-Humans . . . would leave the trees on the steppes of Africa. Because of desertification, caused by the newly occurring Ice Ages, those apes would be forced to hunt other animals for foods. They would be forced to create tools for hunting because they were relatively weak. They would branch out and continue diversifying, killing, growing, evolving. The use of tools created an even greater need for tools and those that developed the best tools lived and those that didn't, died. These are called "auto-catalytic" traits: that is, like a feedback loop, each one made the next step possible, inevitable, and easier. Each step sped up evolution and development of our society. Those that were smarter bred, while those who weren't passed into the obscurity of the ages.
And on and on this trend went for several hundred thousand years. Eventually vocal sounds were associated with items and the technology of language arrived and granted a troop of early humans mastery over its world. They could now pass on massive amounts of knowledge to their young that other troops had to physically show, giving one a massive advantage, and cursing the other to extermination. This gave the tribe a powerful lever against everything on Earth.
And still, the self-breeding continued. Those that could make sounds and attach them to logical concepts, bred more. Those that could not, were killed off. Onward and upward humanity went, adding new tool to new tool over and over. Mastery of bones and sharp rocks. Mastery of clothing. Mastery of fire (EUREKA!). Partnership with canines. Animal husbandry. Fields were sowed. Invention of the wheel. Cities rose. Civilization spread. Technology advanced. Bronze tools. Iron tools. Mechanics. Industrial era. Electricity. Atomic weapons. Computers. Genetics. Space travel. Singularity. And the future.
The story of where we came from to the very place in time where we are is one of such utterly grotesque beauty that the very least we can do is sit and marvel at our fortune, not just the fortune for humanity's existence, but the exponentially infinitesimal odds against each of our existence. The precise sperm, out of hundreds of millions, fertilized your mother's egg. A slight shift in position, a delay of the moment, and someone else--perhaps no one else--would have existed to read this very word. 1 in 200,000,000 is a good guess (and that's just the odds of your father's sperms at that moment; each sperm lasting a few days multiplied by the number of days your parents were together and mating before your birth). Multiply that by all the matings of all the creatures that ever came before you since the dawn of time. Ponder that for a moment and consider your--your species'--good fortune. There aren't enough zeros that could fit on this page to show the "XXX to 1" chances of your very existence today. Surely reason to celebrate!
And one day it will all end. The Sun will burn itself out. Long before that, the Milky Way will have collided with Andromeda, unleashing several billion years worth of star formation. Even after our Sun dies, the child galaxy of the Andromeda-Milky Way mating, containing likely over a trillion stars, will create new stars, planets and--hopefully--a few intelligent beings to look up into the night sky and point at our ancient star, wondering about all the possibilities throughout the cosmos.
With luck we--or our evolutionary descendants, looking and acting nothing like us--will be there to witness it. Later still, should there be no escape, all of the possible collisions that can happen will have. Throughout the Universe, all the possible stars will have been formed and begin to die. The lights will twinkle out. First the giant stars, then the medium stars, then the red dwarfs--living around a trillion years as they burn slowly. Then the collapsed stars will shrink away. Eons later, even the black holes will evaporate into space, because--contrary to myth--some energy does escape them, but ever so slowly. Eventually, through the trickle of Hawking Radiation, the singularities evaporate away into nothing.
Then, hundreds of trillions of years later, even the atoms will slowly (as they do now) disintegrate into their entropic particles of energy. Trillions and trillions of years later, the energy contained in the universe will be so spread out as to be utterly unreachable and the universe in which we live will effectively cease to exist, as time--which is measured by movement of matter relative to other matter--will have no way of being measured. And that will be the end of this universe that we call home.
But that won't be for an unimaginably long period of time, quintillions, even nonillions of years into the future (Quintillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000; Nonillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). So far beyond our time will that be, that this--the first 15 billion years of the Universe during the Stelliferous Era*--will be as to that time, what the first moments of the universe are to us now. It bears only pondering when conveying just how long time will be. For now, all that matters is where we came from and where we are going.
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†Yes, men, you can take pride that our class was named after boobies. Cause for celebration, I guess!
*Stelliferous Era: The period of the Universe when new stars will be formed, live, shine and die. +/- a trillion years.
_________________________________________________________________
EDIT
I have been asked about reading or viewing materials that have contributed to this post. As many of you know, I am -- regrettably -- not a scientist. My education extends to chemistry and computer sciences. I am passionate on a level that I will attest compares to many religious people who become overwhelmed with emotion at singing their songs and chanting their prayers. I'm moved by the fortune we've experienced and by the infinitesimal odds of our existence. And yet, we're here and must appreciate our short existence and learn as much about the cosmos as possible while we live. So, while I will never be a scientist, I will spend the rest of my life reading and spreading the good news of science, rational thinking, evolution and cosmology.
Many of the things I read are specifically intended for laymen such as myself, so if you're the smart guy in the room who can visualize this stuff in the form of music or mathematics, then count your blessings. I need pictures and charts to fully understand these things.
[url]https://www.quora.com/How-do-atheists-explain-how-the-world-was-created…]
Me...? I have faith in that there is "some thing" for me/us/some of us, after we pass on from this earthly plane. What "exactly" that is or who......? I dont know..... I havnt decided yet. ...still many things for me to learn.
I do have this question though........for some of the hard core NON believers....... What happened 2,014 years ago that we count time by it?
Frankly, Im tired of reading these "Why be Religious?" threads.
I don't know if there is life after death. Only dead people know that. I cant bring myself to weigh the consequences of believing or not believing because I cant force myself to believe. It's not like I have a choice. Your God gave me that ability to rationalize.
Like I told S.Loyer, you can fool the humans into thinking you're a believer so they will accept you, but your God, by your own definition, would sniff me out as a faker. I don't have the necessary control over my mind to suspend disbelief. And certainly not to the extent that it would fool your God.
Is a Pedophile Priest considered a Atheist?
What did the early Humans (Cavemen) believe in? and where did they go after death for believing in it?
Same as Children, are they condemned because they had no mind of their own?
A deity as "a being with powers greater than those of ordinary humans, but who interacts with humans, positively or negatively, in ways that carry humans to new levels of consciousness beyond the grounded preoccupations of ordinary life."
So do drugs and Manipulative people Rev Jim Jones comes to mind.
"Historically, natural phenomena whose causes were not well understood, such as lightning and catastrophes such as earthquakes and floods, were attributed to deities. They were thought to be able to work supernatural miracles and to be the authorities and controllers of various aspects of human life (such as birth or an afterlife). Some deities were asserted to be the directors of time and fate itself, the givers of human law and morality, the ultimate judges of human worth and behavior, or designers of the Universe, instead of being a natural result of the laws of physics."
What do I believe? Does't matter. I live a good life and do right by others. I help people that need it and when they don't (buy their dinner without them knowing). Good things happen to all along with bad things...Did we bring on the bad things by believing in something anti Christ or doing something we knew was wrong? most is cause and effect but to believe Jesus reached down and hexed us is a bit far fetched.
I actually asked the question wrong by asking for only "hard core no believers" for their take on it to see if anyone would discount that someone named Jesus ever existed.
I have a buddy that thinks all religions are BS and he and I go round and round about it......basically me just pushing buttons and watching him work himself up over it!
" We have the current counting due to history and influence of the church".
Didnt it start when Jesus was about 30? and wasnt it started by a monk (Denis the little)?
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