What was the cause of "The Big Bang"?

Just a hunch. Like I said, the answers are all there.

 

3rd rate poetry. but if you wanna base your life on it and believe in holy ghosts, be my guest.

 

Say what?

Torturing and killing somebody when there were other methods available is "compassion"?

Now comes the "you think you know better than God?" argument.

 

Basing my life on it suits me very well. I don't feel bitter and angry, therefore I don't have the desire to criticize and put down everyone and everything that doesn't agree with me. I admit I did once feel that way toward practically everyone and everything in the world, but my faith has opened the door to a better life that is much more than I could have ever imagined. I wish you the same peace and happiness I have found.

 

Man tortured and killed Jesus Christ, not God. Once again, God allowed man to choose. That was the sacrifice Jesus made for you and I. Jesus showed compassion for us, he also showed compassion towards those who persecuted Him. He could have put an end to His suffering and destroyed them all, yet he didn't - out of compassion for all of us. Unfortunately you lack the ability to understand. If I could give it to you I would, but it is up to you to open yourself to the Word of God and seek the answers for yourself.

 

Although I do not necessarily believe in God as portrayed in general terms, I do believe the bible is a good book to mold one's life after.

I don't get why you, martin, and you, Rex, choose to label people who lead their lives based on the Bible and their faith as stupid.

To me, christians who base their lives on their faith and the Bible are doing the world a lot of good. The core values they have are good for the rest of society.

Now people who take the words of the Bible word for word as fact... That's a different story...... Adam ate the apple, the world was literally created in 7 days by our current definition of days, etc etc... To me, such stories are fictional and simply meant to teach moral lessons, indoctrinate followers, instill values, etc etc...... "the moral of the story"

 

my guess is that i have reminded you guys roughly 15 times that i am not calling the christians stupid, but christianity. no kidding i have repeated that at least 10 times.

 

Furthermore, I would hold that Jesus comes to save all, and the grounds for condemnation biblically is simply unbelief. A minor beef with your post is that we are no longer judged by our ability to keep those commandments if we are in Christ.

Christians should not be convinced that atheists and agnostics and hell, the rest of the world are evil. They are just spiritually dead and in need of life. Martin, instead of saying Christianity is stupid and you might as well worship squirrels just say you don't know whether or not there is a God and leave it at that. You antagonize a lot of people with your militant unbelief.

People need answers for why they are here, and in many cases, people need to find out their true identity in the midst of a world that leaves a lot of people beat up at the end of the day. The reality is that God is real, extremely real to billions of people and has done miracles in many lives. I refuse to believe that when I hear the testimony of Christians who had been saved from iniquity, drugs and promiscuity in their lives that they just hallucinated a way out of their lifestyle. How does that make any more sense than my explanation?

There's only two extremists on this board and that is who they are mutually exclusive to.

 

i have a friend like red. he doesnt often take the hardline view, because he like to think of himself as reasonable. that is one way to do things, but i like to take one side, and destroy the other. i see no value in avoiding the extreme. especially because the middle is sort of arbitrary place sort of decided upon by the extremes. for example in politics, i think the reality of the way things should be might even be closer to anarcho capitalism than i advocate. so maybe the middle ground of non extreme that happens to be right is the one between me and a crazed anarcho capitalist, who would virtually abolish all forms of government. i find that in politics, both sides are so terribly wrong bout virtually everything, that in between them is just a barren land of bad ideas and wishy-washyness. republicans are absolutely abyssmal, and democrats are a total embarassment. libertarian atheists are on the right track, but people are too tied to either extreme or meandering around the middle ground to take a different path.

right, but scientists dont put absolute faith in their theories. we have models we use to help us think of things, and theories, but we can change, and we never claimed what we knew before as a fact. christians claim their knowledge to be infallible and god-given. even though millions of people inevitably have a different message from their version of god.

right, but consider how many trappings of religion you have to believe, and how many more irrational ideas you have to swallow to be part of the major world religions. nobody disputes that you cannot disprove the existence of god. you also cannot prove that a purple monkey in the center of mars is pulling levers like the wizard of oz and running things. we just cannot draw any conclusions because we cannot prove a negative. so we must admit to ourselves that all our conclusions are made up. you cant just say something and consider it true because you cannot prove it isnt.

as well as an incredibly destructive murderous evil purpose such that i personally have seen thousands of people slaughtered in the name of religion.

in my mind, anyone who accepts anythings supernatural as true is an extremist and delusional. there is no middle ground. either you are rational or you are not. either you accept the world as it is, or you dont. either you believe what is apparent and true, or you believe mystical magic and lies. there is no position of moderation.