I’d also like an answer to my quesiton, srmclauren: Is a belief in Creationism a necessary component of salvation?
And the wise man shouts it aloud. We’ve been through this already - perhaps the reason you’re not answering questions is that you can’t find posts on previous pages?
creak That’s the sound of goalposts being moved. So you concede that new species do evolve? That’s something. As for those transitions, the last one happened when the birds evolved, nearly 100 million years ago, so it’s not surprising that there aren’t a lot of fossils around. You are aware that birds share a lot of anatomy with some types of dinosaurs, right? And that feathered dinosaurs have been found?
Egg laying furry warm blooded animals, like the duck billed platypus, are not transitional forms to mammals (being much too late) but are examples of animals not in the main line of mammals. We also have plenty of air breathing walking fish around today - again not a transitional form in this sense, since they’re too late, but again a proof of concept, as it were.
“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you’ll understand why I dismiss yours.” – Steven Roberts
Hitler burned Anne Frank for being Jewish, once. For that, we call him evil. God burns Anne Frank for being Jewish, forever. For that, theists call him “good.”
" The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric bronze-age text known as the Old Testament, three antihuman religions have evolved – Judaiism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchial – God is the omnipotent father – hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates."-Gore Vidal
“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites”-Thomas Jefferson
You see, the religious people —most of them— really think this planet is an experiment. That’s what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen’s wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can’t say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can’t the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn’t want Lot’s wife to look back, why didn’t he make her obedient, so she’d do what her huband told her? Or if he hadn’t made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would have listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition. : (Carl Sagan, Contact)
“We look with disfavor on a church which fills children’s minds with sadistic tales of a cruel vengeful tribe of barbarians under the guise of teaching them the revealed word of God.” – Robert A. Heinlein, For Us, the Living
Care to play Dueling Quotes some more ?
Hardly, as said, everything is a “transitional form”.
Afraid not. If nothing else, a designer wouldn’t bother; they are pure parasites.
Your rants work better when you do not resort to outright lies. (You’re going to make srmclauren look good by comparison.)
First, that’s a quote ( whose attribution I’ve just found I’ve lost, unfortunately ) not a rant. Second, we have plenty of people right up to the top in this country who believe just that. Third, why in the world do you think it a lie ? Is it really so alien a concept that someone might not approve of your religion, might honestly regard it as evil ?
I think the lie tomndebb was referring to was that she was “burned”, actually. She was sent to a concentration camp (and all the horrors of those) and died of typhus, from a brief search. No burning.
< shrugs > I didn’t write the quote, and it was an obvious bit of poetic license.
[Der Trihs, you are claiming to have quoted someone, but you conveniently can’t remember who? Perhaps you should memorize the rants of a better class of liars.
And, while it is true that one can find some rather tiny group of Christians who probably believe that Jews are burning in hell, based on your claim (that assumes that it is a widely held belief) we can note that you obviously want to take every child away from every parent who practices religion (because I have known a couple of atheists who have made that claim).
(And Ms. Frank died of typhoid fever, but that is more a matter of ignorance than dishonest polemic.)
One of the things I find funniest about that wanted poster of Jesus, apart from the fact that he is described as blond and blue-eyed (really must have stood out in Roman Judea among all those middle eastern semites, one would imagine) is that he is described as tall.
Of course! Good people are tall! That is why tall men generally have better incomes and more promotions than short men, even when, as studies have shown, many of the short men had done much better than their tall counterparts in college.
I remember a nun telling us in rapture that “there is a tradition” that Jesus was the only man in history to be exactly six feet tall. Now, since human beings are slightly taller when they get up in the morning and shrink a little during the day, and since men and women shrink slightly throughout their lives after reaching their maximum growth in their teens, one wonders when exactly Jesus was “exactly” six feet tall.
But the most interesting thing about this is that the Lord God chose to give his son a body that grew to exactly six imperial feet, a measurement system that would not be invented until the Anglo-Saxons established it about a thousand years later.
None of that metric system that those horrible, irreverent and atheistic Europeans use, no siree bob! Six feet exactly in imperial measurements.
Believe it or not, I learned this bullshit during school time financed out of public funds in Roman Catholic separate schools in Ontario, Canada.
Actually, i’m going to have to defend Der Trihs on this one. He didn’t say “all theists”, just theists. I wouldn’t think that even Der Trihs believes that all Christians hate Jewish people. And I wouldn’t say that the number of Christians who believe Jews are going to hell was “tiny”, either. Definetly a small amount of those who’d identify as Christian, but certainly a visible minority.
(Of course, there’s still the problem of most of even that minority of Christians not believing God is good because of his Jew-burning tendencies, but for other reasons. The number of Christians who’d say “God is good because he burns Jews” is, thankfully, a tiny number).
Really? If there is a “gap” between species A and B, and I fill it with a transitional species AB which isn’t exactly like A or B, won’t you now have TWO gaps to complain about?
Boy, you are determined to make me out a liar, aren’t you. A common obsession of the religious; many of them just hate to admit that anyone truly disagrees with them; “there are no atheists in foxholes” and all that. I seldom lie ( never have on this board ), and I’ve never been accused of lying when I actually was; only when I told the truth.
False comparison; Christianity has a long, long tradition of claiming that everybody who disagrees with it will burn forever. Atheism has no tradition about taking anyone’s children away, or any other traditions for that matter. Atheism isn’t an ideology or a moral system or a religion; it doesn’t and can’t make such demands or claims. It consists of the simply disbelief in any and all gods. It’s not complex or organized to have the agenda you claim, or any other.
But I did not claim that atheism had an agenda (would this now make you a liar?), only that some atheists had an agenda, just as some Christians have varied beliefs even though you falsely posted as though one of those beliefs was widely held. That does not necessarily make you a liar, just a sloppy poster. But as a sloppy poster, you are fair game for posts showing that your comments are worthless.
Never mind.
See what happens when I try to be nice? 
In my youth they were called “Dominicans.” JMJ, Tom, I thought you were old enough to remember the days of hearing from the sisters how everybody but Catholics were going to Hell! The “nice” ones thought that people who had never heard of the Mother Church might go to Limbo but Jews and, especially, Protestants, having rejected the One True, Holy, and Apostolic Church, were gonna burn.
Feh! You don’t actually BELIEVE that crap, do you? I mean, I can’t hardy even pronounce some of those names!
Well, the Baptists who came to my door pretty much said exactly that when I politely told them I wasn’t interested because I was Jewish. (I didn’t feel like playing the atheist card.) It is not politically correct to emphasize this, but the number of Christians who feel we’ll burn (and no doubt feel sorry about it) is not tiny.
Since we’ve had plenty of theists say that whatever god does is moral by definition, I don’t see any major theological objection to this view. It becomes a matter of dueling Bible verses.
The millions of people who bought the Left Behind books come to mind; there’s a reason it’s been called “Christian sado-porn”.
I guess I had a better educated bunch of Dominicans. I was almost out of high school before Vatican II closed and got published and none of my Dominican teachers in grade school nor the Dominican priest who helped out at our parish ever made that claim. (Of course, Fr. Feeney had been excommunicated several years before I started school after declaring that only Catholics were going to heaven.) I didn’t know that many Baptists and the Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians I did know didn’t believe that. The Baptists were one group who might say that, (it was about 50-50 with them), but then the 50% who might claim Jews were going to hell also told me I was.
I went to Catholic schools as a kid during and right after Vatican II, and the nuns told us it was Limbo, not Hell. Can’t remember what order the nuns were, but I went to a bunch of different schools, so I’m sure I got a sample of different orders.
Yup, I thought the same thing. Long live Kirk Cameron !