No, I don't. I think it is because God gave us a soul. No other animal in this creation is as inquisitive as the human animal. I think that is because God created us in His image and that image is an inquisitive soul, in part.
Why would an omniscient god need to be inquisitive?
I think this is another philosophical BS argument.
No it isn't. To make it more cartoonishly simple, it is the difference between deciding that you will have to follow a set of instructions and complete the project of someone else to their specifications, or deciding to work on your own project.
And if my aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, etc. are not competing with your aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, etc. then my genes still stand a better chance at survival. This is not an unprecedented concept within the animal kingdom.
It's an ignorant parody of what isn't actually going on in the real world, one often promoted by creationists on behalf of their conspiracy theory.
I don't agree. I think God's creation is magnificent. It is a delicate balance between planned and random. People naturally seem to bristle at rules regarding our behavior. For some strange reason people seem to think that if God was real He would lets us do whatever we want. We don't let our children do whatever they want. Mostly because we are trying to protect them from injury and hurt. God's rules for us are the same.
In the case of your god's rules, the main threat of hurt appears to be the threatened actions of the god.
Religious organizations create their own rules for their own benefit. Sometimes those rules correspond to what God has said. More often than not, they don't.
Here we could have been, discussing the apparent beauty of the universe, but you seem to have turned it back to a petty consideration of the selfish christian obsession with the behaviours of one species of primate on just one planet in one solar system. It doesn't matter that the Andromeda galaxy is going to collide with our galaxy in 4 billion years, or that newborn babies have such brilliant adaptive strategies for making their parents look after them, as long as we know in keen detail the creepy interest the god has in which apes have sex with which other apes, and in what circumstances, or whether the god is happy with any ape that might bow down to a statue.
See why a universe created by your god could not be beautiful? It would be a petty one.
I do not expect Stephen to give me any useful information about a God whose existence he denies.
That was the useful information
Hawking is also speculating about the time just before the Big Bang.
That is specifically what he said was not possible!
He says nothing existed and then, quite sudden, everything existed. But because Hawkings said it, you accept it as a fact.
His name was Hawking, and it depends what you mean by suddenly. And I don't accept it as a matter of his authority.
When a Christian says the same thing you reject it as fantasy because a Christian is will to say that God did it.
Yes, that sounds like a fantasy to me, but worse, it is an assertion of magic in a case where we have a proper explanation for how it really happened.
We, at least in this point in history, are far more concerned about the accumulation of wealth than anything else.
That seems to be the standard christian answer to dwindling god belief, a strawman argument: we worship money instead. Well, I can't complain about living in poverty, obviously I have access to the internet and the basic necessities of life. But this characterisation, which springs up so often from christians has even led to people thinking the only meaning of the word materialism is the collection of money and material goods. I don't think I have done any kind of replacing of god worship with mammon worship, I hope to collect experiences that enrich my life as an African ape trying to make sense of the other apes and the universe as a whole, but I am a materialist in the sense of matter being the only thing that is real, and of course that has to extend nowdays to other things we know are real that you wouldn't call matter, but that is the principle nonetheless.
Which is why I say a depraved person might reach up and catch the hand of christianity, but he could reach a little further to the stars, and therefore not have to entertain the depravity of christianity.
And there could be an argument made for even economic materialism still being more morally defensible than christianity anyway.
I haven't found any lose threads.
No, you conceal them on the inside of your coat.
Because scripture is what God has given to us so that we can know who He is and understand what He sees as right and wrong. As you well know, scripture is by no means interpreted the same by every person who reads it. The Bible is not intended to contain absolute certain knowledge about God. It provides us direction to find God. But God wants a relationship with us so once you have found God one starts to rely more on prayer and less on printed words to develop that relationship.
I guess it was time for another statement from the meme. You had been telling me what
you think for far too long there.
Tough line to walk. We have to be careful who we call enemy. A person who is actively trying to kill me or my family, I can defend myself and family with deadly force. An enemy persecuting me for my faith, that person I treat with love and respect. There are certain sexual sins that God does not tolerate. Adultery and homosexuality are not acceptable to God.
Your god is not acceptable to me then. I have friends who are gay. Any god that denies that their love for one another, expressed however they feel they want to, is a petty god worthy of condemnation for its hatred. That should be our collective enemy, the god of hating what it made.
Regardless of what is politically correct, there are certain truths within God's law that will not change.
No, because religions have no correction mechanisms.
Sorry you feel that way. I am a man of faith and believe that God exists and that He is just and loving in ways I do not fully comprehend. Believing in God does not make one illogical, but it does form a different foundation upon which reason is based.
I cannot respect faith as a basis for anything. When you talk as the meme, it looks to me like you are the kind of person whom I should very strongly distrust. When you talk as yourself, that beer you suggested sounds welcome. I think you are a clear case of the under title of Christopher Hitchens' book, 'How religion poisons everything'.
What caused the Big Bang?
There is no such thing. It is not a valid concept. You need a different word than cause. Uncaused is just as bad, because that denies that there could be mechanistic reasons relating to the properties of space-time, which of course we cannot know, because any event where matter and energy arise from borrowing from the process of inflation means there was nothing 'left from last time' (another impossible concept).
But
you still have an uncaused cause, apparently. Your god can do anything you want to invent. It can do magic and just exist 'outside space-time' (another invalid concept if your god is capable of interacting with matter and energy). Any accusations made by the religious attacking Big Bang cosmology as uncaused are just bald hypocrisy.
God will not force you to be with Him if you don't wish it. God is not choosing you to burn, He chose you to be saved. If you reject that invitation then that is on your head, not God's. Yes, that is honestly how I see it. We each must make a choice and GOd honors that choice. God's justice will perfectly allow for those who never heard the Gospel.
At least in a brutal totalitarian regime the people can escape by dying. But not even that is possible in your brutal totalitarian regime, which celebrates as its central theme the killing of a human.
What I am saying is that God created everyting and knows how it works in ways that we do not. He can use His creation in ways that we cannot. I believe that God uses His creation is ways that we will learn to understand as time progresses.
I don't think you will be allowed to believe that last part. Isn't the seeking of the knowledge of man a bad thing, and isn't the original attempt to seek knowledge the whole basis of your compulsory but impossible mission of repairing your 'relationship with god'? Judeo-christianity is one big celebration of ignorance.
And all science can conclude is this is how something works. That is it. It cannot say that a God was not required nor can it say that God does not exist, it can only ever say this is the way something works. People, human hearts, at guilty of taking the next step to proclaim that because something works like this, God does not exist. Human pride, not sicence rejects God.
Another celebration of ignorance. Thank goodness the god has grown that Tree of Knowledge well out of our reach now, eh?
We are free to make any choice that is available to us. God has stated what is acceptable to Him and what is not. That does not make Him totalitarian, it makes Him just. You know the rules and cannot claim other wise. The speed limit is 65. You can go 85 but when the cop pulls you over, you cannot claim that either you didn't know what the law was or that the law doesn't apply to you because you do not agree with it.
How many ways are there to god?
You have certainly drawin your own conclusions based on what YOU think good and evil should be.
Yes, and I have used my conscience to do that. And you should be saying that my conscience is god-given. So you are telling me that I should not trust this 'divine gift'.
Stuart
