While its true that religion influences culture, to a great extent the opposite is true as well.
Absolutely. Look at Christianity. Over a thousand years of torture rape and murder and then the Enlightenment wrought a cultural change that morphed Christianity into something which as practiced today is legal in decent societies. Practicing real Christianity would get you locked up for life or put to death in any decent modern society...assuming you consider a society that still has the death penalty in spite of its proven ineffectiveness to be "decent".
Islam and Judaism are the same. There are decent muslim societies and barbaric anachronisms like Saudi Arabia. There's only one Jewish nation and it's a barbaric nazi shithole. I'm putting that one up to a lack of a statistically valid number of data points.
There are people who say they are a religion, and there are people who take that religion very seriously.
Right. In the first category are most "religious" people. In the second category are things like Fred Phelps and similar ilk.
People in the first category, while mostly harmless in and of themselves are the primary enabling force behind the second.
The first category has to go for us to ever be able to forge a decent just society. Without them gone ( by education, not doucheicide ) the second category will always drag us all down...and generally burn us alive as that's kind of their thing.
Dont believe me? during the downward spiral of the USA EVERY SINGLE president has been a Christian!
You seem to be trying to make a joke, but it's fairly accurate. In the early days of the country, none of the Presidents were Christians. Lincoln invented the idea of preaching biblical nonsense to lure in the bottom of the barrel.
Reagan perfected the idea and dragged the absolute worst of the worst our country has to offer out of the boonies where they'd previously been content to laze about welfare leeching off of the productive members of our society and told them that it was their right to piss in the face of every ideal this country was ostensibly founded upon.
This is why we're in our current situation. Social, economic, and military.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have believing that nonsense in spite of all facts opposing it and no facts supporting it as a fundamental tenet of their faith.
That failure is known as "faith" in the religious sense.
It is a critical aspect since they have nothing else to offer and had someone not long ago incorporated that meme as an essential aspect (well, plus murdering anybody who didn't agree) they all would have died out long ago.
American fundie Christians take that failure of basic critical thinking skills as the only important thing in the whole nonsensical book of fairy tales.
I'm not sure if your question was merely rhetorical, or if you are a {troll|idiot}.
In fact Nazis disdained Christianity as a Jewish sect propagating, as they saw it, "weakness".
If you are too lazy to learn anything about the topic, please have at least the bare level of decency not to bald facedly lie through your teeth about basic historical facts.
The Nazis were *extremely* explicit Christians. It was a fundamental part of their philosophy which they were zealous at pushing on the populace. This is obvious and backed up be every single relevant fact bar none.
Please stop lying to aid and abet the reputation of Nazis. It's really disgusting.
So are you really attempting to compare organized religion to Nazi Germany?
You do know the Nazis were *very* explicitly Christian, right? You know the holocaust was an explicitly Christian event following step by step the script written by Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism and with the explicit official support of the Catholic Church, right?
Nazi Germany was just another one of the evils of organized religion. pretending otherwise just makes you look ignorant or dishonest.
How can you have two objects moving away from each other at greater than the speed of light, whilst maintaining special relativity?
You can have two widely separated objects in an expanding universe. As the universe is expanding everywhere, the farther apart two objects are the faster they are receding from each other. If they are far enough apart, the separation between them is increasing at a greater rate than the speed of light, but neither object is moving *through space* anywhere near the speed of light. Special relativity only concerns an object's velocity through spacetime. The expansion of space itself isn't an issue there.
Well, we already know that Mr. Obama supports this (his votes prove it).
That's the primary reason I didn't vote for him. As a constitutional law professor, he *knew* that supporting it was a gross constitutional violation. Therefore he knew that if elected that when he took the oath of office to uphold and defend the constitution that he already had and would continue to violate it.
Of course, you're right about Romney. It was claimed when Obama voted for it it was a political move to sway moderate Republicans his way. Romney's of the party that can't have enough government power over the people provided the rich are free to do whatever they want at our expense.
And what teaching of Jesus supported the crusades or the inquisition?
An eye for an eye.
Obviously, Jesus was just a fairy tale character, but what the character taught was Old Testament law.
He didn't smash up the money changers in the temple to send the message that greed was bad, but that they were violating the old testament laws. He said that not one letter of one word of one of those laws would ever change. All that goody goody nonsense was made up much later than the original fairy tales.
Stoning, death for bacon. All of that is *exactly* what the character of Jesus taught because the character was a Jewish rabbi.
It's amazing in this day and age how deeply ignorant of their own idiotic religion Christians are. Hell Fred Phelps is the closest thing to a real Christian in this day and age.
Really? He had to do a study to conclude that people who believe in the free market reject attempts to replace it with a state-run economy?
A "free market" is a hypothetical abstraction which could never exist in our universe. An unregulated economy which is what free market religious believers preach as such can't ever even get close to approximating such being that they are diametric opposites.
An unregulated market means that if you try to cut in to my take then I have your whole family burned alive in the public square. Banning such is a necessary regulation of the market in order to allow competition which is a necessary component of any approximation to a free market.
There has never been a functional approximation to a free market on a larger scale than a few people which hasn't necessarily been backed up by state power. The details of the state's influence and the scope are rational debate topics. Your kindergarten level idiocy is not one.
I do not simply believe what I am told or give in to ideas because they make me feel better or less uncomfortable.
You clearly do as you yourself proceed to demonstrate:
You claim God doesn't exist because there's no evidence to support his existence.
No. Reality doesn't work that way. You claim that a magical invisible fairy does things and I laugh at your dipshittery. Provide evidence for your delusion.
I claim that God exists because I've had spiritual experiences that lead me to believe so.
So you had a delusion not a "spiritual experience". Plenty of people do. In fact due to the advancements of human knowledge we as people know where exactly in your brain to stick an electrode in order to induce further such delusions. This is neither novel nor interesting.
That completely invalidates your "no evidence" hypothesis, and now if you expect me not to believe in God, you are the one arguing that I should discount the evidence because it doesn't fit with your world view.
No, apart from not being novel or interesting, your delusion and your sad pathetic clinging to such does not constitute evidence. It's a delusion. As your brain is an organic construct it sometimes misfires. Were there some perfect magical fairy who deigned the system, then you'd not be susceptible to such systemic failures. As you are, perhaps you should be less arrogant and at least try to learn from your failures.
I recognize that my evidence is personal and subjective, although I would argue that to a certain degree it is repeatable (i.e, anyone can experience the same things if they're willing to put forth the effort)
Your evidence is thus not actually evidence. At least not for the nonsense you're trying to sell based upon it. You can repeat it and much more strongly by submitting yourself for medical research. Zap that part of your brain and you have a religious delusion. That is where the evidence leads. not toward some magical fairy in the sky. The effort has been put forth and your cowardly clinging to retarded delusions does nothing for you. Against you it makes you an object of ridicule and mockery.
I would even go so far as to claim that at least in my case, my belief in God is more rational than your disbelief in God, because yours is based upon faulty premises which I have pointed out above.
I'm sure that you would do that. It's stupid, arrogant and delusional, but you've done nothing to argue against your desperate desires to put those characteristics of yourself above any actual virtues you might have. Any beliefs in a god are necessarily less rational than the rejection of such. Apart from the douchebaggery of solipsism, we know our universe is here. How it got here is an open question which many very smart and dedicated people are working very hard to try to answer. Claiming that some magical fairy made it all does nothing at all to answer that question. All it can ever possibly do is create an even more difficult to answer question, "Where did your magical fairy come from", while failing to address the original question in any way shape or form. Therefore, belief in a god in any guise s completely irrational. It adds nothing and subtracts much.
Note also that I have a strong scientific background Of failure? That much is clear.
If someone insists on having an argument rather than a discussion that pretty much means that there is no way they are going to change their mind anyway,
"An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition."
This is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to the persecution of Jews in Germany
No, Christianity is what led to the holocaust. It was an entirely Christian event done entirely by Christians in the name of Christianity following the script written by the father of protestantism and with the eager aid of the Catholic church.
You're proving the OPs point. Why do Christians have to lie through their teeth to attempt to make points?
Why do they care what "religion" says at all?
Because it's saying, "Shove shit into children's brains since that's the only way to get people to keep believing our vile trash".
Why are atheists so quick to dehumanize others?
Again, that's always been the primary tool of your team, liar. Christianity spread through being the most brutal thugs on the block torturing to death any who didn't bow down to their evil fairy tale monster. Today in America Christians are the ones dehumanizing people for being born gay and pissing in the face of the basis of this nation by trying to shove their evil fairy tale trash into our government whose primary defining feature was the explicit rejection of any role for religion due to the fact that religion is always a force for evil control and dehumanization.
Pull your head out and stop lying about basic historical facts. It makes you look like a douche and reflects negatively, if accurately, on your faith and those weak willed cowards who need retarded fairy tales to feel superior to decent people.
You managed to defeat your own point within the same comment, bravo.
Would you care to explain exactly how you think that occurred? You put out old specs as a great new thing and he pointed out the fact that those are old specs. You then touted a *different* tech which he rightly or wrongly downplayed. Those are completely different things. I believe the term for your cheesy rhetorical technique is "equivocation".
It must feel like a perfect snub: design great looking, innovative hardware, make the software work glitch-free and easy to use
"Innovative"? Right there, you make yourself sound like a MS shill. That's the word they redefined and use all the time. As you tried to equivocate around, you know that it's not even new, let alone innovative. We're talking beta software. It's almost at a release, but it is Microsoft. Alpha quality as initial release is what they're known for, but I'm feeling generous. "Glitch-free" you say when it hasn't even hit the market. This is exactly the nonsensical marketroid speak that is being mocked as it becomes so prevalent.
Quick, we must flood the comment threads pointing out how quad-core CPUs, ridiculously high-res displays, and a zillion samey-looking apps make all the difference.
As someone who owns the PS3 version of Skyrim (wasn't paying attention and ordered it instead of the PC version, said "screw it, I'm impatient" and played it instead of returning it, and now I'm regretting it more and more each day),
As someone who owns a PS3 but not an XBox and is waiting on a major price drop before buying Skyrim, I have to ask why apart from this?
We need to divide by zero to travel faster than the speed of light!
No you don't. You only need to divide by zero to travel at exactly the speed of light if you have mass. Going faster than the speed of light just means your mass is a complex number whatever the heck that means if anything.
I think they could work around the god thing as long as they kept the pope.
No, because then they'd have no excuse for their diseased policies on birth control. Without that poverty and human misery in general would decrease. Profiting off of the miserable poor is the catholic church's business model and has been for centuries. They have to keep god, because without him they could never get away with such unmitigated evil.
Religion is about the mystery and that which can not be known.
No, it isn't. It is about power and control and always has been.
I am a practicing Catholic
And you subscribe to the most vile example of this in the history of humanity?!?
So you pay to have children raped. This is a fact. You can claim to only support the good things the church does but you do not have that choice. If you have given any support to the catholic church then you have acted to aid and abet the rape of children. You have also acted to keep people in poverty and disease by paying to lie about condoms. Of course the only good things they do are putting a bnad aid on the bullet hole of damage *their immoral unethical diseased policies intentionally cause* That's how they grow their power you evil fucking kiddy raping nazi fuckhole.
You are a fucking monster and would put a bullet in your head long before supporting that evil kiddy raping gang of thugs if you had a single shred of decency. Do you still support the Nazis? Or when that got unpopular and the church lied like a rug to distance themselves did you just go along like a good little jackbooted thug? Oh, wait, the current pope was an active nazi, and made his nut actively aiding and abetting the rape of children.
Oh, but it's really just all about asking questions.
Tell that to all the millions of victims of your utterly vile hate group you kiddy fucking nazi scumbag.
If you believe that the bible is the exact word of God (which I do not)
Oh, so you pick and choose random crap to believe. Durrr I believe in this god in this book here...well...not really I know it's all crap but as long as I get to fuck kids I'll claim to. Fucking animal. Kill yourself, do it now. The world desperately needs to not have scum like you in it.
Given the various statements in the Bible, and the general interpretations of the text, the more correct command in modern English is "Don't murder."
You're almost there. "Murder" in the context you're using it means "Killing Hebrews", not the modern meaning. The bible is quite clear that the god it speaks of is only the god of that one race and that other people have other gods. Sorry, but you don't get to halfway modernize the usage and leave us with a deeply dishonest interpretation without getting called out on it.
Debating with atheists, I was surprised to find that even though they claimed that "science denies the need for a creator" there was no fact in those statements.
Science doesn't "deny" the need for a creator. It's just that no question has ever come up which requires postulating such. If you had actually thought about it, it would be obvious that adding in something which is necessarily *more* complex than the universe itself as an explanation for the universe could not ever provide an explanation which doesn't make things even more complex and difficult. A creator provides no answers only raises the same exact questions but with even more useless cruft piled on top and is hence *farther* away from any meaningful answer rather than closer.
If you take the time to try and answer the question for yourself, you may be surprised at how low the probability there is for the Universe not needing a creator.
No, you are dead wrong. Where did the creator come from? Who made him? This is an additional level of complexity over and above the existence of the universe itself. The probability of a creator capable of making the entire universe is therefore necessarily much lower than the probability of the universe existing without one. Your argument if applied honestly by yourself would require a creator for your creator and turtles all the way down.
I realize that this is my opinion, but will point out that it's an opinion which is educated and backed by logical thought.
No, it clearly is neither. By a simple application of educated logical thought I completely destroyed your position and your claims of great effort toward honest understanding on your part. What you have is wishful thinking and nothing more.
It's at least an interesting perspective if you begin recognizing the fallacies used to evangelize atheism.
No, it's nothing but ignorance and wishful thinking.
They are many, and complex, and from every side that claims to know an answer.
Which consists of the religious. Rationalists of whatever stripe do not claim to know all answers, but they're the only ones actually looking for them. Belief in magical fairy tales is the insistence that you have an answer when it's a fact that we don't. Yet.
But the truth is that atheists will not challenge their faith in atheism, any more than someone believing in an older book would change their faith.
The fact that you could even say something so ridiculous shows your lack of integrity in this conversation. Atheism is not a faith. It is the absense of belief in gods. Simple definition. If you or anybody else in the entire history of the world had ever been able to provide any rational basis for believing in a deity, then you'd at least have a leg to stand on. You haven't and you don't.
I'm probably as biased as anyone else, and perhaps more so since I have studied the question for a very long time
You've clearly not actually studied the matter at all or you'd have some sort of a basic understanding of the issues. As I've clearly demonstrated, you do not.
Slashdot Mirror
While its true that religion influences culture, to a great extent the opposite is true as well.
Absolutely. Look at Christianity. Over a thousand years of torture rape and murder and then the Enlightenment wrought a cultural change that morphed Christianity into something which as practiced today is legal in decent societies. Practicing real Christianity would get you locked up for life or put to death in any decent modern society...assuming you consider a society that still has the death penalty in spite of its proven ineffectiveness to be "decent".
Islam and Judaism are the same.
There are decent muslim societies and barbaric anachronisms like Saudi Arabia. There's only one Jewish nation and it's a barbaric nazi shithole. I'm putting that one up to a lack of a statistically valid number of data points.
There are people who say they are a religion, and there are people who take that religion very seriously.
Right. In the first category are most "religious" people. In the second category are things like Fred Phelps and similar ilk.
People in the first category, while mostly harmless in and of themselves are the primary enabling force behind the second.
The first category has to go for us to ever be able to forge a decent just society.
Without them gone ( by education, not doucheicide ) the second category will always drag us all down...and generally burn us alive as that's kind of their thing.
Dont believe me? during the downward spiral of the USA EVERY SINGLE president has been a Christian!
You seem to be trying to make a joke, but it's fairly accurate. In the early days of the country, none of the Presidents were Christians. Lincoln invented the idea of preaching biblical nonsense to lure in the bottom of the barrel.
Reagan perfected the idea and dragged the absolute worst of the worst our country has to offer out of the boonies where they'd previously been content to laze about welfare leeching off of the productive members of our society and told them that it was their right to piss in the face of every ideal this country was ostensibly founded upon.
This is why we're in our current situation. Social, economic, and military.
and how I was there, also the bad guy for not returning their calls.
Assuming you've ever taken yourself in hand so to speak, did your penis give advance written consent?
I thought not. Rapist.
Which religion believes that?
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have believing that nonsense in spite of all facts opposing it and no facts supporting it as a fundamental tenet of their faith.
That failure is known as "faith" in the religious sense.
It is a critical aspect since they have nothing else to offer and had someone not long ago incorporated that meme as an essential aspect (well, plus murdering anybody who didn't agree) they all would have died out long ago.
American fundie Christians take that failure of basic critical thinking skills as the only important thing in the whole nonsensical book of fairy tales.
I'm not sure if your question was merely rhetorical, or if you are a {troll|idiot}.
In fact Nazis disdained Christianity as a Jewish sect propagating, as they saw it, "weakness".
If you are too lazy to learn anything about the topic, please have at least the bare level of decency not to bald facedly lie through your teeth about basic historical facts.
The Nazis were *extremely* explicit Christians. It was a fundamental part of their philosophy which they were zealous at pushing on the populace.
This is obvious and backed up be every single relevant fact bar none.
Please stop lying to aid and abet the reputation of Nazis. It's really disgusting.
So are you really attempting to compare organized religion to Nazi Germany?
You do know the Nazis were *very* explicitly Christian, right?
You know the holocaust was an explicitly Christian event following step by step the script written by Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism and with the explicit official support of the Catholic Church, right?
Nazi Germany was just another one of the evils of organized religion. pretending otherwise just makes you look ignorant or dishonest.
How can you have two objects moving away from each other at greater than the speed of light, whilst maintaining special relativity?
You can have two widely separated objects in an expanding universe. As the universe is expanding everywhere, the farther apart two objects are the faster they are receding from each other. If they are far enough apart, the separation between them is increasing at a greater rate than the speed of light, but neither object is moving *through space* anywhere near the speed of light. Special relativity only concerns an object's velocity through spacetime. The expansion of space itself isn't an issue there.
I don't think Microsoft can meaningfully take this tact any more
<Pedant mode>
Tack is the word you're looking for.
</Pedant mode>
Well, we already know that Mr. Obama supports this (his votes prove it).
That's the primary reason I didn't vote for him. As a constitutional law professor, he *knew* that supporting it was a gross constitutional violation. Therefore he knew that if elected that when he took the oath of office to uphold and defend the constitution that he already had and would continue to violate it.
Of course, you're right about Romney. It was claimed when Obama voted for it it was a political move to sway moderate Republicans his way. Romney's of the party that can't have enough government power over the people provided the rich are free to do whatever they want at our expense.
Now that, sir, is hilarious.
And what teaching of Jesus supported the crusades or the inquisition?
An eye for an eye.
Obviously, Jesus was just a fairy tale character, but what the character taught was Old Testament law.
He didn't smash up the money changers in the temple to send the message that greed was bad, but that they were violating the old testament laws.
He said that not one letter of one word of one of those laws would ever change.
All that goody goody nonsense was made up much later than the original fairy tales.
Stoning, death for bacon. All of that is *exactly* what the character of Jesus taught because the character was a Jewish rabbi.
It's amazing in this day and age how deeply ignorant of their own idiotic religion Christians are. Hell Fred Phelps is the closest thing to a real Christian in this day and age.
Really? He had to do a study to conclude that people who believe in the free market reject attempts to replace it with a state-run economy?
A "free market" is a hypothetical abstraction which could never exist in our universe.
An unregulated economy which is what free market religious believers preach as such can't ever even get close to approximating such being that they are diametric opposites.
An unregulated market means that if you try to cut in to my take then I have your whole family burned alive in the public square.
Banning such is a necessary regulation of the market in order to allow competition which is a necessary component of any approximation to a free market.
There has never been a functional approximation to a free market on a larger scale than a few people which hasn't necessarily been backed up by state power. The details of the state's influence and the scope are rational debate topics. Your kindergarten level idiocy is not one.
I do not simply believe what I am told or give in to ideas because they make me feel better or less uncomfortable.
You clearly do as you yourself proceed to demonstrate:
You claim God doesn't exist because there's no evidence to support his existence.
No. Reality doesn't work that way. You claim that a magical invisible fairy does things and I laugh at your dipshittery. Provide evidence for your delusion.
I claim that God exists because I've had spiritual experiences that lead me to believe so.
So you had a delusion not a "spiritual experience". Plenty of people do. In fact due to the advancements of human knowledge we as people know where exactly in your brain to stick an electrode in order to induce further such delusions. This is neither novel nor interesting.
That completely invalidates your "no evidence" hypothesis, and now if you expect me not to believe in God, you are the one arguing that I should discount the evidence because it doesn't fit with your world view.
No, apart from not being novel or interesting, your delusion and your sad pathetic clinging to such does not constitute evidence. It's a delusion. As your brain is an organic construct it sometimes misfires. Were there some perfect magical fairy who deigned the system, then you'd not be susceptible to such systemic failures. As you are, perhaps you should be less arrogant and at least try to learn from your failures.
I recognize that my evidence is personal and subjective, although I would argue that to a certain degree it is repeatable (i.e, anyone can experience the same things if they're willing to put forth the effort)
Your evidence is thus not actually evidence. At least not for the nonsense you're trying to sell based upon it. You can repeat it and much more strongly by submitting yourself for medical research. Zap that part of your brain and you have a religious delusion. That is where the evidence leads. not toward some magical fairy in the sky. The effort has been put forth and your cowardly clinging to retarded delusions does nothing for you. Against you it makes you an object of ridicule and mockery.
I would even go so far as to claim that at least in my case, my belief in God is more rational than your disbelief in God, because yours is based upon faulty premises which I have pointed out above.
I'm sure that you would do that. It's stupid, arrogant and delusional, but you've done nothing to argue against your desperate desires to put those characteristics of yourself above any actual virtues you might have.
Any beliefs in a god are necessarily less rational than the rejection of such. Apart from the douchebaggery of solipsism, we know our universe is here. How it got here is an open question which many very smart and dedicated people are working very hard to try to answer. Claiming that some magical fairy made it all does nothing at all to answer that question. All it can ever possibly do is create an even more difficult to answer question, "Where did your magical fairy come from", while failing to address the original question in any way shape or form.
Therefore, belief in a god in any guise s completely irrational. It adds nothing and subtracts much.
Note also that I have a strong scientific background
Of failure? That much is clear.
Do you know what the word "tend" means?
Yes, it means the number 10 in decimal. In binary that would be 2 and that wouldn't make sense in the context of the original sentence.
Personally, I find gardening much, much, more fulfilling than most conspiracies, but I do like to make up a good one now and then.
You're only saying that because the seed cartel is paying you to.
If someone insists on having an argument rather than a discussion that pretty much means that there is no way they are going to change their mind anyway,
"An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition."
This is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to the persecution of Jews in Germany
No, Christianity is what led to the holocaust. It was an entirely Christian event done entirely by Christians in the name of Christianity following the script written by the father of protestantism and with the eager aid of the Catholic church.
You're proving the OPs point. Why do Christians have to lie through their teeth to attempt to make points?
Why do they care what "religion" says at all?
Because it's saying, "Shove shit into children's brains since that's the only way to get people to keep believing our vile trash".
Why are atheists so quick to dehumanize others?
Again, that's always been the primary tool of your team, liar. Christianity spread through being the most brutal thugs on the block torturing to death any who didn't bow down to their evil fairy tale monster.
Today in America Christians are the ones dehumanizing people for being born gay and pissing in the face of the basis of this nation by trying to shove their evil fairy tale trash into our government whose primary defining feature was the explicit rejection of any role for religion due to the fact that religion is always a force for evil control and dehumanization.
Pull your head out and stop lying about basic historical facts. It makes you look like a douche and reflects negatively, if accurately, on your faith and those weak willed cowards who need retarded fairy tales to feel superior to decent people.
You managed to defeat your own point within the same comment, bravo.
Would you care to explain exactly how you think that occurred? You put out old specs as a great new thing and he pointed out the fact that those are old specs. You then touted a *different* tech which he rightly or wrongly downplayed. Those are completely different things. I believe the term for your cheesy rhetorical technique is "equivocation".
It must feel like a perfect snub: design great looking, innovative hardware, make the software work glitch-free and easy to use
"Innovative"? Right there, you make yourself sound like a MS shill. That's the word they redefined and use all the time. As you tried to equivocate around, you know that it's not even new, let alone innovative.
We're talking beta software. It's almost at a release, but it is Microsoft. Alpha quality as initial release is what they're known for, but I'm feeling generous. "Glitch-free" you say when it hasn't even hit the market. This is exactly the nonsensical marketroid speak that is being mocked as it becomes so prevalent.
Quick, we must flood the comment threads pointing out how quad-core CPUs, ridiculously high-res displays, and a zillion samey-looking apps make all the difference.
Yet, that's exactly what you did.
As someone who owns the PS3 version of Skyrim (wasn't paying attention and ordered it instead of the PC version, said "screw it, I'm impatient" and played it instead of returning it, and now I'm regretting it more and more each day),
As someone who owns a PS3 but not an XBox and is waiting on a major price drop before buying Skyrim, I have to ask why apart from this?
We need to divide by zero to travel faster than the speed of light!
No you don't. You only need to divide by zero to travel at exactly the speed of light if you have mass.
Going faster than the speed of light just means your mass is a complex number whatever the heck that means if anything.
I think they could work around the god thing as long as they kept the pope.
No, because then they'd have no excuse for their diseased policies on birth control. Without that poverty and human misery in general would decrease. Profiting off of the miserable poor is the catholic church's business model and has been for centuries. They have to keep god, because without him they could never get away with such unmitigated evil.
Religion is about the mystery and that which can not be known.
No, it isn't. It is about power and control and always has been.
I am a practicing Catholic
And you subscribe to the most vile example of this in the history of humanity?!?
So you pay to have children raped. This is a fact. You can claim to only support the good things the church does but you do not have that choice. If you have given any support to the catholic church then you have acted to aid and abet the rape of children.
You have also acted to keep people in poverty and disease by paying to lie about condoms. Of course the only good things they do are putting a bnad aid on the bullet hole of damage *their immoral unethical diseased policies intentionally cause* That's how they grow their power you evil fucking kiddy raping nazi fuckhole.
You are a fucking monster and would put a bullet in your head long before supporting that evil kiddy raping gang of thugs if you had a single shred of decency.
Do you still support the Nazis? Or when that got unpopular and the church lied like a rug to distance themselves did you just go along like a good little jackbooted thug? Oh, wait, the current pope was an active nazi, and made his nut actively aiding and abetting the rape of children.
Oh, but it's really just all about asking questions.
Tell that to all the millions of victims of your utterly vile hate group you kiddy fucking nazi scumbag.
If you believe that the bible is the exact word of God (which I do not)
Oh, so you pick and choose random crap to believe. Durrr I believe in this god in this book here...well...not really I know it's all crap but as long as I get to fuck kids I'll claim to. Fucking animal. Kill yourself, do it now. The world desperately needs to not have scum like you in it.
Given the various statements in the Bible, and the general interpretations of the text, the more correct command in modern English is "Don't murder."
You're almost there. "Murder" in the context you're using it means "Killing Hebrews", not the modern meaning. The bible is quite clear that the god it speaks of is only the god of that one race and that other people have other gods. Sorry, but you don't get to halfway modernize the usage and leave us with a deeply dishonest interpretation without getting called out on it.
Debating with atheists, I was surprised to find that even though they claimed that "science denies the need for a creator" there was no fact in those statements.
Science doesn't "deny" the need for a creator. It's just that no question has ever come up which requires postulating such. If you had actually thought about it, it would be obvious that adding in something which is necessarily *more* complex than the universe itself as an explanation for the universe could not ever provide an explanation which doesn't make things even more complex and difficult. A creator provides no answers only raises the same exact questions but with even more useless cruft piled on top and is hence *farther* away from any meaningful answer rather than closer.
If you take the time to try and answer the question for yourself, you may be surprised at how low the probability there is for the Universe not needing a creator.
No, you are dead wrong. Where did the creator come from? Who made him? This is an additional level of complexity over and above the existence of the universe itself. The probability of a creator capable of making the entire universe is therefore necessarily much lower than the probability of the universe existing without one. Your argument if applied honestly by yourself would require a creator for your creator and turtles all the way down.
I realize that this is my opinion, but will point out that it's an opinion which is educated and backed by logical thought.
No, it clearly is neither. By a simple application of educated logical thought I completely destroyed your position and your claims of great effort toward honest understanding on your part.
What you have is wishful thinking and nothing more.
It's at least an interesting perspective if you begin recognizing the fallacies used to evangelize atheism.
No, it's nothing but ignorance and wishful thinking.
They are many, and complex, and from every side that claims to know an answer.
Which consists of the religious. Rationalists of whatever stripe do not claim to know all answers, but they're the only ones actually looking for them. Belief in magical fairy tales is the insistence that you have an answer when it's a fact that we don't. Yet.
But the truth is that atheists will not challenge their faith in atheism, any more than someone believing in an older book would change their faith.
The fact that you could even say something so ridiculous shows your lack of integrity in this conversation. Atheism is not a faith. It is the absense of belief in gods. Simple definition.
If you or anybody else in the entire history of the world had ever been able to provide any rational basis for believing in a deity, then you'd at least have a leg to stand on. You haven't and you don't.
I'm probably as biased as anyone else, and perhaps more so since I have studied the question for a very long time
You've clearly not actually studied the matter at all or you'd have some sort of a basic understanding of the issues. As I've clearly demonstrated, you do not.