Choosing a faith

This is exactly what I meant by the religious trying to appropriating science.It's a core facet of the ToE that mutation is random and selection is specific; ie it is not guided and can't be. Evolution is not pointing to something.But if it did it would have, as Darwin said, 'an inordinately fondness of beetles. He thought that there were far more species of beetles than anything else - the most successful of all organisms. In fact the most successful organisms on the planet and the ones that will be here when we're all long gone are micro-organisms. It's pure hubris to think that we're the pinnacle of evolution, not say factually wrong - we're just a branch off from apes.Stick to your Bible and quit trying to find confirmation in science that you don't understand.
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First, because I'm rational I can't totally rule out something we might call a god (because we have no other words) creating the universe - which is a far more impressive creation life here on earth. The current estimate of solar systems with planets is 10 to the 24 - 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Why did your god make it that big if we are supposed to be the only purpose? Why didn't he just poof us into existence all at once like the bible? Why go to this extent?But I also know that we are accumulating evidence that indicates that the philosophical argument that there can't be something from nothing (hence "god") could be wrong; the universe may indeed spring from nothing.Second, life is quite likely to be an emergent property of the chemistry on our planet. Even if this god thing created its universe of 10 to the 24 star systems with planets, life here is more likely to be a bi-product, not an end product. If we are the intended outcome why the excess universe?Third. We know the mechanism that produced us humans is a natural process. No gods required. We don't know yet how life itself started but one day we might.Fourth. No supernatural entity or intervention has ever been found anywhere.Fifth. Nothing above says anything at all about your personal beliefs. There is no reason whatsoever to believe in any of the personal gods and religions that mankind has invented. I reject your Christian beliefs as totally irrational.So please return to the point I was actually making about non-equivalence.Although I can't rule out a deistic, non-interventionist kind of god that started something from nothing 13.7bn years ago I regard its probability as virtually zero. But more importantly, it's also irrelevant to our lives here. Such a thing is essentially unknowable and has no bearing on our lives so it's of academic interest only.As for theistic beliefs - religion - it's all made up nonsense. Primitive thinking; inherited beliefs from ancient times.So please, don't pretend that we differ only on the "degree of plausibility", I regard the plausibility of a deistic god as all but zero and also irrelevant and your particular god as total make-believe.
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There is no equivalence.

Edited by Tangle, .

You may well disagree, but your disagreement is irrational - there is no equivalence in the two positions and I suspect you know it, you're not a stupid guy, just deluded.

I'm on holiday at the moment, having a day in Cork, Ireland. Instead of the usual tourist things, I took a walk around the older parts of the city that haven't been redeveloped for 200 years.Ireland has always been a poor country and it can be seen in these parts even though most of the worst slum areas were cleared in the 1800s the houses that replaced them still look poor so god knows what it was like before. Most of the emigration to the US left Ireland from Cobh harbour here.The conditions people lived in then must have been horrendous but in the middle of all the squalor was the church in all its power. There's an enormous infrastructure of religious power; the massive St Fin Barre's Cathedral, St Stephen's Church, St Nicholas Church, Holy Trinity Church the Scottish Presbyterian Church(!), the Red Abbey, Capuchins Friary, numerous smaller (but still large) churches with their support buildings - the Episcopal residences of the Bishop of Ireland, the Deanery, the Organist's houses, and a stack more in a very small area.It's a terrible statement - immense wealth and power surrounded by poverty and starvation. Yet it was the poor that paid for and built these insane monuments to stupidity.Religious institutions preach godliness and claim the moral high ground but behaved like wealthy overlords. It made me feel sick and angry. Religion is not a meme, it's an industry and a con and we're still falling for it.

Who are you to speak for God? Well yes, of course mandidit, but they believed a lot more fervently than you do in the bible and Jesus. They gave, you don’t. I’m talking about the real history of your religion, not some of your made up nonsense. What real people actually did in the name of your god. And in the recent past too, not a thousand years ago. Get yourself a passport and visit ‘old Europe’ and see it for yourself. You wouldn’t recognise your religion just a couple of hundred years ago. Same belief, different apologetics.​Nobody reads passed ‘I believe that…’ We know it’s followed by a load of nonsense.

As far as this argument goes, you’ve already agreed with me that regardless of the odds, you think a deistic God irrelevant. A god that takes no interest in us IS irrelevant. (He’s definitely more interested in his stars and miscellaneous cosmic bodies than us. Perhaps we’re an oops! moment?)So we’re left with the odds of you being born into the right religion.According to wiki there are about 10,000 religions, I don’t know whether that includes all the dead and unknown ones. I don’t like those odds, might as well be a painted-faced heathen.Of course being a member of only one of the 30,000 Christian variants of those 10,000 probably reduces the odds further - certainly the Catholics think so. Not a Catholic? Sorry, no Golden Gates for you.
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I’ll be ok though, I’m baptised Catholic. Couldn’t make this nonsense up could you?

Depends when and where you were born. Up to the age of fast transport, say 200 ago you had the religion of your parents - that’s pretty much 100%. Find yourself born tomorrow in a village in the Atlas Mountains and you’re a Muslim.You’re looking at this through the lens of a modern day Western Christian. It’s a very myopic view. But even so, the % of the population that pick a totally different religion than their parents will be very small. Even after the disgusting missionary works. I love it when you guys tell me what god thinks and wants. You realise that that is a relevant as telling me that god only likes Cadbury’s chocolate? You haven’t the first clue what even your god wants, let alone Visnu.But anyway, I’m going with what the various popes have told us: you can’t get into heaven unless you’re baptised Catholic. Sorry. There you go again, speaking on behalf of god. Isn’t that blasphemy or something? You’re speaking for yourself, what you want to be true; that’s not what all Christians believe is it?

More myopia.

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A 2011 Gallup survey reports, "Three in 10 Americans interpret the Bible literally, saying it is the actual word of God. That is similar to what Gallup has measured over the last two decades, but down from the 1970s and 1980s. A 49% plurality of Americans say the Bible is the inspired word of God but that it should not be taken literally, consistently the most common view in Gallup's nearly 40-year history of this question. Another 17% consider the Bible an ancient book of stories recorded by man."[9]

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Biblical literalism - WikipediaBut of course up to the scientific revolution practically everyone believed in the literal truth of the bible. It was, after all, the word of god, not to be second-guessed by man - even GDR.It seems to me that science is revealing more about the 'truth' of the bible than the believers.

Not if you want me to read it. The conscience thing is hilarious, it's the get-out-of-hell-card for everything.It was used in the West to prevent Catholics leaving the church by the million when contraception became available. Contraception of all forms except the so called "rhythm method" is banned by the Catholics church on pain of mortal sin and everlasting hell. But Western Catholics universally refused to listen and used it anyway. So they decided it could be a matter of conscience and gave up.But only in the West. The missionaries in Africa continue with their mortal sin line even through the AIDS epidemic which in Africa was carried mostly through heterosexual sex. Consequently millions have died and both Pope Francis an Benedict refuse to drop the line there.

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In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Latin, “Human Life”), which reemphasized the Church’s constant teaching that it is always intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new human beings from coming into existence.

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Contraception is “any action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act [sexual intercourse], or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible” (Humanae Vitae 14). This includes sterilization, condoms and other barrier methods, spermicides, coitus interruptus (withdrawal method), the Pill, and all other such methods.

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The Historic Christian Teaching
Few realize that up until 1930, all Protestant denominations agreed with the Catholic Church’s teaching condemning contraception as sinful. At its 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican church, swayed by growing social pressure, announced that contraception would be allowed in some circumstances. Soon the Anglican church completely caved in, allowing contraception across the board. Since then, all other Protestant denominations have followed suit. Today, the Catholic Church alone proclaims the historic Christian position on contraception.

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On baptism, it has always been taught that unless you were baptised Catholic you could not be saved. It was the subject of a papal declaration - spoken infallibly (you couldn't make this crap up...)

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Pope Eugene IV in the Bull Cantate Domino (1441), using the same terms as St Fulgentius, taught in an infallible definition: “The Most Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and preaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews, heretics, and schismatics can ever be partakers of eternal life, but that they are to go into the eternal fire ‘which was prepared for the devil and his angels’ (Mt 25:41) unless before death they are joined with her.”

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During the 20th century they've been backtracking as the doctrine was showing their particular made-up god to be an even bigger bastard than the bible makes him out to be - condemning almost all of humanity to hell seems a bit over the top so.

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“Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation” (LG 16).

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Slippery creatures believers. And of course that line was not spoken from the pulpit for many years and probably still isn't in the evangelical parts of the world. Most Catholics still believe that you need to be a Catholic to get to heaven, because that's what they tell the untutored laity.Catholics, like all believers, adapt their beliefs to suit the times and culture they live in. You are a great example with your nice, inoffensive, Anglicanism. You would not believe what you believe now 100 years ago, yet nothing new about your religion has been found since the bibles were written. It's all made up then changed as necessary.

Absolutely true.There have always been a few intellectuals arguing the toss about biblical issues - so long as they lived in jurisdictions and in times that didn't get you burnt alive for doing it.But the people were illiterate and the bible was not trusted in the hands of the laity. In England only latin bibles existed and those that tried to translate it for the people were burnt. The people got their knowledge of the bible from the pulpit and what they got was fire and damnation. A Guide to Bible Translations and Their Surprisingly Murderous History | HistoryExtraStuff like Noah's Ark and the Flood were being preached in ordinary churches and in bible classes back in the 60s when I was being forced fed the stuff.

The book hasn’t changed, nor has its meaning. It’s God’s word, how could it?What’s changed is US. Or at least some of us. You try to put the words into your context as a 21st century, liberal Westerner. To do that you really mustn’t read further than the sermon on the mount otherwise you’re in a lot of trouble.

It's not without problems of course, the main one being that Jesus never said any of it.

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The five discourses in the Gospel of Matthew are: the Sermon on the Mount (5-7), the discourse on discipleship (10), the discourse of parables (13), the discourse on the community of faith (18), and the discourse on future events (24-25).[4] However, like all or most of the other "discourses" in Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount should not be seen as an actual speech by Jesus of Nazareth but as a literary construct by the Gospel writer using material drawn from various places in his sources,[5] i.e., Q (the non-Markan source he shared with Luke), Mark, and his own unique sources or sources (M).

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Sermon on the Mount - WikipediaJesus had speech writers. They were so good that Jesus didn't actually need to give the speeches. Somebody - literally god know who - made them up decades after the probably fictitious Jesus had died.

Edited by Tangle, .

Edited by Tangle, .

You're continuing with this wrong-headed equivalence. You're just fooling yourself by picking out extreme views that you want to believe and claiming that they're as good as other ideas that have evidence and concensus. All views and opinion are not equal.

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Most scholars believe the [Matthew] gospel was composed between AD 80 and 90, with a range of possibility between AD 70 to 110; a pre-70 date remains a minority view.[11][12] The work does not identify its author, and the early tradition attributing it to the apostle Matthew is rejected by modern scholars.[13][14] He was probably a male Jew, standing on the margin between traditional and non-traditional Jewish values, and familiar with technical legal aspects of scripture being debated in his time.[15] Writing in a polished Semitic "synagogue Greek", he drew on the Gospel of Mark as a source, plus the hypothetical collection of sayings known as the Q source (material shared with Luke but not with Mark) and material unique to his own community, called the M source or "Special Matthew".[16][17]

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Gospel of Matthew - Wikipedia

Once again the church's preachings to its congregation is different from the scholarly stuff in the seminaries and universities.I was taught the bible as though it was written by Jesus's actual apostles. Of course Mark and Luke aren't apostles but us kids didn't notice. Without exception both children and adults would have just assumed that it was all eye witness testimony.I bet they maintain the deception even now. When I mention that no one actually knows who the authors were to everyday Christians they don't believe me - let alone that they could not have been eye witnesses.It's all part of the scam - keep them ignorant, sell the message.

It will never come up will it? The historicity of your book is never critically discussed inside the the religion with the laity.Try asking a few of your congregation, see what they say.