When English brick makers would return to work after the day off for a major Saint’s Day, they would gather outside the place of work and allow God to determine if they should return to work. They would throw a brick in the air, and if God kept it, it was a sign they should return to work and make more bricks. If it fell back to earth, it was a sign that God had enough bricks and wanted them to take another day off.
A prick.
Putting aside that you just slandered hard work, supporting one’s family, caring for others, paying tithing, and accumulating sufficient food and resources to share with the poor…
…I’d just like to focus on the fact that, prior to obtaining and eating the forbidden fruit, Eve reportedly spent an undetermined long time obtaining and eating **non-**forbidden fruit, and that wasn’t considered a sin at all by god - in fact god wanted her to do it. So this silly notion that self-support is sin is not in the slightest supported by the adam/eve/snake/forbidden fruit story. Not in the slightest, even scripturally speaking. Self-support is not sin. Disobedience is sin, in that story. Which is quite obviously what that story is intended to tell us.
If you are getting such blatantly and obviously incorrect messages from your interpretations of the bible, you should probably stop reading it or using it as a resource in directing your life. Your interpretation skills are apparently not up to the task.
Guys, there’s a difference between fighting ignorance and fighting willful insanity. It’s pointless to use logic on deaf ears or a dead brain. I can’t fight this fight without running around in circles, screaming. And that would scare the cats.
Just let it be, and it will go away.
Where there’s no sense, there’s no feeling.
Errr no, they don’t. They question and test that equation all the time, and didn’t accept it at face value when GodEinstein proposed it either. They tested it, saw the approximation worked well enough to be used in most cases, and agreed on it. For those cases where it doesn’t work, it is discarded.
They don’t recite the newspapers, nor believe every single word that’s in them is Absolute Truth, unless they’re morons. It’s quite possible to be a moron AND an atheist of course, though the balance does seem skewed in their favour.
They don’t worship (you do know what worship means, right ? Worship implies more than mere trust) doctors or their potions, they realize the doctor has a higher propabiblity of being right about medical matters than the janitor. Empirical evidence suggests they’re right.
And they buy things because they *chose *to do so. Do you not buy things, ever ? Are you speaking to us through the miracle of prayer, you Luddite ?
Free will. It is a bitch of a burden. But it beats enslavement to a book, and willful ignorance.
So by your theory (I did say it was a theory ;)), anything a man does, short of lying on his back in the grass, waiting for God to manifest food in his mouth, is counterproductive ? If we didn’t have roofs it wouldn’t rain on us, is what you’re saying ? If we didn’t build bridges, parting waters would be a daily occurence ?
Do *you *live in a barren field ? Do *you *part waters ? Do *you *lie in the grass praying until food happens ? Did God manifest your computer, and the powerstation to make it work, and the fiberlines that connect it to the net ? Do you refuse to see a doctor when you, or one of your umpteen children (which, in all honesty, I pity from the bottom of my godless heart) breaks an arm ?
Madam, it is my empirical belief, which I’ll hold onto until proven otherwise, at which time contrary evidence will be critically evaluated, that you’re dangerously off your rocker. Not only don’t you understand thing one about atheists, or science, or the world, you don’t even understand your own damn religion.
So you’re saying dark energy…is sin? That’s a pretty fascinating interpretation of cosmology. You’d think God would’ve mentioned this when writing the Bible, as 70% of the mass-energy density of the entire universe being the essence of sin seems pretty important. Is there detectable redshift in areas of high sin concentration, like strip clubs and science museums? I see a good research thesis opportunity!
It isn’t for the benefit of the fount of insanity, it’s for those reading the drivel spewed forth and still on the fence but not quite entirely brainless.
I’ve heard that at some points in history there was so much red shift that the regions were called “red light districts”.
So, you think God doesn’t know where you are going unless you tell him. Interesting.
As for me, I’ll rely on Google Maps or my GPS to find my way, thank you.
You know, sometimes I think people just believe because as an atheist, you don’t get to point and shout ‘told ya so!’ in the afterlife if you were right. So, let’s just quick-snap invent an atheist afterlife: with constantly rising computing capacity, in the future, it will be possible to conduct a near-limitless amount of simulations (and an actually limitless one if we’re going to get a Tipler-style Omega Point) likely including my own mental state at the point of my death, and all of yours, too. And in that afterlife, I’m gonna do an awful lot of pointing and shouting. That just to level the playing field a little.
Now I at least want to somewhat seriously respond to the common ‘the lab was intelligently designed!’-argument:
See, we only needed Shakespeare because we couldn’t wait a brazillion years for that first Hamlet script, impatient lot that we are; nature is never that much in a rush. What this experiment showed is that there are conditions under which self-replicating molecular structures can arise, and if those conditions are not explicitly forbidden to occur in nature, given enough time and a big enough lab (roughly universe sized should do), things will eventually conspire in just the right way (or, more likely, at least one of the right ways), and that’s that then. It doesn’t disprove a creator god; but it eliminates the necessity for one.
Who said they’re not? However, what has then abiogenetically arisen doesn’t really have much to do but evolve (and possibly receive American Express credit offers). In a nutshell, wherever something replicates itself with a good deal of fidelity, yet not absolute perfection, evolution takes place.
Also, for the lulz.
The ignorance in this thread, I think I need an address to fight this one.
one theory that I didnt see posted (and I am not sure I ever have) regarding Creation and evolution is that God is an artist, he kicked off the big bang and then let physics and evolution take over from there, he had no plan that specified the human form, we are just what happened to come of all that time.
not that I buy it but its not crazy unreasonable.
Not crazy unreasonable, but also not Christian, what with that egotistical “We are created in God’s image” business that Christianity in general accepts.
Another view I like deep down in my twisted and cynical heart has been put forward by Philip Mainländer, in which god’s creation of the universe is essentially suicide: the ultimate equidistribution of energy and information via entropy, a heat death scenario, being the only means to achieving non-existence for him. So the big bang was basically the gun on god’s temple going off.
We’ve got evidence for the existence of evolution, physics and the Big Bang. What we don’t seem to have is evidence for Creationism or gods. When you come up with evidence for the latter, I will consider incorporating said evidence into a theory involving the former, okey dokey?
please keep in mind I am a pretty hard core atheist, I dont buy any of the nonsense that poses as religion the world over. that theory is something that came up in a conversation I had once, and out of all the whacko xian crap I usually hear it was really pretty refreshing.
there will never be any evidence for the existence of god, God, Gods, FSM or the IPU, that is why its called faith. the sooner people of all religions stop crying about science attacking their faith and realize that the better off we will all be.
Acceptance of evolution is a standard part of Christian theology* - God intended to create a species with free will and intelligence (i.e. “in His image”) and used evolution as his means. The particular human shape is not a required outcome for evolution - and it wasn’t for God either.
*Yes, there are a few groups that think that there is a conflict, but Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterian, Episcopalians, Anglicans, etc., are not among those groups.
Please provide some evidence to support this assertion.
How do you know that it wasn’t because Pandora opened a jar releasing all the evils of mankind?