Ridiculous Religion vs Absurd Atheism

[TheLionPrince]

[quote="Regulus"]Serious questions:

If Adam and Eve were the first two humans, then why are there other, less sophisticated primates? Did they evolve from Adam and Eve? How can the human race be so diverse, if we all share the same two ancestors? Wouldn't we be almost genetic clones of each other, like cheetahs? And, hey, were do the Neanderthals come into this?[/quote]

The Bible does not really support the theory that homo sapiens descended from primates since God stated he created man in his image. Yes, there is theistic evolution which states religious thinking of God is compatible with the views of modern science, though non-theistic evolutionists reject the existence of a supernatural being and is more of personal opinions than established facts.

The diversity of the human race originate with Adam and Eve who gave birth to "many sons and daughters"; only those who are named in Genesis are Cain, Abel, and Seth. It's commonly accepted that the descendants of Adam and Eve's children were a result of incest, but as debated with Woeler, those were the only union partnerships possible at that time.

All of Genesis 5 records the genealogy of Adam with each generation having "many sons and daughters". It all comes to a head in Chapter 6, it states "human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, and the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose." After Noah's family came out of the ark after the Flood, in Genesis 9, it says "three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth." The descendents of the sons of Noah is quite complex to generalize so this article should explain the rest.

I'm not positively sure what to make of the Neanderthals, though I speculate that when the descendants of Japheth or the population that disperse after the Tower of Babel into modern-day western Europe and eastern Asia could have resulted with the Neanderthals. Genetic mutation through adapting their new environment created a difference 0.3% of DNA genome in them resulting in a genetic drift, and there we have the Neanderthals. You're free to call it a "theistic evolution" theory, though it's a confirmed fact that DNA is constantly adapting through sequences of mutations. And while we may not be genetic clones of each other, an article reports on a DNA survey that certifies that humans are 99.9 percent identical in DNA.

[quote="Regulus"]There's also the whole issue about us knowing that the Earth has been here for 4.5 billion years, and the bible completely disregarding all that, but that's a bit of a different issue that irks me. That's for another post. First things first, I want to hear responses to my above questions from someone who actually believes the bible is true.[/quote]

The Bible does not even regard the age of the Earth; it's the Young Earth creationists that believe the Earth is 6,000 to 10,000 years old.

[quote="Woeler"]Humans are not perfect. God apparently is, yet we were created in his image. God doesn't like incest, yet he creates a species that practices it. He creates us sick and then orders us, on the pain of eternal torture to be well again.
Now of course we get the eternal ''but God gave us free will'' argument. Yes, apparently he did. Apparently he is so full of himself that he needs to be reminded everyday of how great a leader he is. How much we all love his celestial dictatorship. You either obey or you burn in hell. It's a bit like North-Korea, but at least you can F-ing die and leave North-Korea. Free will only makes matters worse.
And last, but not least. If God can take credit for the 'abuses in relationships' he prevented. He can also be take credit for all the wars, natural disasters, crusades, murders and rapes he didn't prevent.[/quote]

Well, hopefully, my argument will be a breath of fresh air. Yes, God gave mortal humans free will, though Satan corrupts God's free will given to us for his own purposes. The real answer is that the Bible plainly states the Earth is in possession of Satan. After the fall of man in the Garden, Satan apparently gained ownership of God's Creation. So we have our answer: evil is in the world because the devil rules the world. In 1 John 5:19, it states "We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one." Elsewhere, in Ephesians 2, Satan is regarded as the "prince of the power of the air". And even Jesus recognizes Satan's hold on Earth, "I will not speak much more with you, for the ruler of the world is coming, and he has nothing in me" (John 14:30).

So, every rape and murder in history has been done by humans through the corruption of the flesh/free will by Satan. As for secular wars, God left man in charge of taking the Earth, and some wars could have been prevented by our own governments. For instance, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave an appeasement to Adolf Hitler to avoid war letting him continue his polices of lebensraum, which resulted in the invasion of Poland. In the early 1940s, intelligence agencies in the United States had knowledge that the Japanese were planning to strike somewhere in the U.S., though they thought the Philippines would be the first target and widely underestimated Japanese aggression. Top officials in the Bush administration didn't act upon a classified memo that al-Qaeda was planning to attack the United States. While you may have a point about Christianity playing a role in religious conflicts such as the Crusades, you're overlooking one of the causes was the massacre of 3000 Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem by the Turks, and as a result, many deaths of Muslims was done in the name of Christianity in hope of restoring the Holy Land. That's where you have your point, although it seems both religions are to blame, not just one attributed to God. And while God may not prevent every natural disaster, what springs from it is human charity and compassion for those affected that are a result of God's goodness reflected through his believers that wish to help them. And may I correct God's "dictatorship": You either obey or don't obey. You just have to reap with you sow with both cases.

[quote="Woeler"]When was this again? 6000 years ago? 4000 years ago? Did the first human live when the Egyptians already learned how to read and write, or was it a bit later. Say in Sumerian times. How can anyone with a rational mind even begin to think this is true? And of course there were diseases. There were epidemics all over the human civilization. [/quote]

I'm pretty sure that last sentence was meant to come off as my own interpretation (which apparently was flawed), and not at all fact. I wasn't well aware of any possible diseases that could have occurred during Adam and Eve's lifetimes, and the first forms of medical tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal date back to 7th century BC. The Epic of Gilgamesh was also stored there. Since Noah and Gilgamesh are implied to be the same person living in ancient Mesopotamia, Adam and Eve and their children were long dead. Any record of them (if there was) was long gone given the Library's tablets were barely saved in recent times, so I just decided natural causes killed them.

[quote="Woeler"]Any biology textbook (an actual confirmed source of knowledge) will teach anyone that humans didn't get much older than 50 before the last 4 centuries. It takes an extreme amount of anti-reasoning to believe that a human being lived up to an age over 150. 2000 year old books do not, at any given point overpower modern science. Never ever.
The bible is as much proof for Adam's existence as Charles Dickens is for the existence of living tin soldiers.[/quote]



[quote="Woeler"]Yes, those things are called tsunamis and earthquakes, and they are caused by plate-tectonics. There are again 2 possibilities here.
1. These things just happen due to the structure of the Earth.
2. There are tsunamis and earthquakes all over the world basically every day, but this very time it must have been god because bronze age people said so.[/quote]

You remember how I said earlier it was just a massive rainfall that caused the Flood. I was partially wrong.

[quote="Genesis 7:11-12"]When Noah was 600 years old, on the seventeenth day of the second month, all the underground waters erupted from the earth, and the rain fell in mighty torrents from the sky. The rain continued to fall for forty days and forty nights.[/quote]

There's the tsunamis right there.

[quote="Woeler"]If I ever do, I'll be sure to call a doctor.[/quote]

LOL!

[Woeler]

[quote] The Bible does not really support the theory that homo sapiens descended from primates since God stated he created man in his image. Yes, there is theistic evolution which states religious thinking of God is compatible with the views of modern science, though non-theistic evolutionists reject the existence of a supernatural being and is more of personal opinions than established facts.[/quote]

There are millions of pieces of (visible, touchable) evidence for evolution. There is no such evidence for God, and the bible is no source for legitimate information. It's not God/Evolution 50%/50%, it's God/Evolution 0.000001%/99.999999% because nothing can ultimately be disproved, but that does in no sense mean there is any truth to it.



[quote] Well, hopefully, my argument will be a breath of fresh air. Yes, God gave mortal humans free will, though Satan corrupts God's free will given to us for his own purposes. The real answer is that the Bible plainly states the Earth is in possession of Satan. After the fall of man in the Garden, Satan apparently gained ownership of God's Creation. So we have our answer: evil is in the world because the devil rules the world. In 1 John 5:19, it states "We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one." Elsewhere, in Ephesians 2, Satan is regarded as the "prince of the power of the air". And even Jesus recognizes Satan's hold on Earth, "I will not speak much more with you, for the ruler of the world is coming, and he has nothing in me" (John 14:30).[/quote]

This is a big lump of nonsense. The whole concept of Satan proves that God is either not all-powerful or not all-loving. God created the world, God created evil. God knew evil would come from this world. God is either a gigantic sadistic asshole, or he doesn't exist.

[quote] So, every rape and murder in history has been done by humans through the corruption of the flesh/free will by Satan. As for secular wars, God left man in charge of taking the Earth, and some wars could have been prevented by our own governments.[/quote]

God created, God knew, God is a giant idiot.

[quote]And while God may not prevent every natural disaster, what springs from it is human charity and compassion for those affected that are a result of God's goodness reflected through his believers that wish to help them. And may I correct God's "dictatorship": You either obey or don't obey. You just have to reap with you sow with both cases.[/quote]

Yes, 'compassion'. Totally worth thousands of lives. Totally moral.

So, a dictatorship. Hitler is in heaven, but Bill Gates donating millions to poor people will go to hell for not believing in God. Can anyone look me straight in the eye and say that is moral? What person with the slightest piece of braintissue can approve of this? What moral garbage is this?

9 million children die every year before they reach the age of five. Picture one of these Asian tsunamis that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those every ten days, killing children under five. That's 24.000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 every minute.

That means before you have read the end of this sentence some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their child's life to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered.

Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn't care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil.

And worse than that, most of these people --many of these people, certainly-- will be going to Hell because they're praying to the wrong God. Just think about that. Through no fault of their own they were born in the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and missed the revelation.

There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindu, polytheists. no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey-god Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in Hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13 and Revelation 14.

So God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus. He engineered the circumstances of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is eternity of conscious torment in fire. On the other hand your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus on death row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he's going to spend an eternity in Heaven after death.

One thing should be crystal clear to you: This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability. And please notice the double standard we use to exonerate God from evil. We're told that God is loving, and kind, and just, and intrinsically good, but when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would even embarrass the most ambitious psychopath we're told that God is mysterious, ''who can understand God's will?''.

And yet this is precisely, this merely human understanding of God's will, is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. something good happens to a Christian, he feels some bliss while praying, or he sees some positive change in his life, and we’re told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents’ arms and drowned, we’re told that "God is mysterious". This is how you play tennis without the net. And I want to suggest to you, that it is not only tiresome when otherwise-intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprensible.

This kind of faith, is really the perfection of narcissism. “God loves me, don't you know? He, he cured me of my eczema. He makes me feel so good while singing in church. And just when we had given up hope, we found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother’s mortgage.” Given all the good —all that this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others, given the misery that’s being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene.

If God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery? Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes, like witchcraft. Now, of course, there is a way of not taking these questions to heart. God is not bound by moral duties; God doesn’t have to be good. Whatever he commands is good. So when he commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it. Ok, well here we’re being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. But it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the well-being of human beings.

This, to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.

If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is gonna turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic.

And I’m not the first person to notice that it’s a very strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence. I mean, if you lived 2,000 years ago, there was evidence galore, I mean, he was just performing miracles. But apparently, he got tired of being so helpful. And so now, we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrine’s implausibility. and the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and what we know about the all-too-human origins of Scripture becomes impossible.

If there is a less moral framework... I haven't heard of it.


[quote] so I just decided natural causes killed them.[/quote]

I just decided cows are blue, apples can fly and trees are immoral.

[quote] There's the tsunamis right there.[/quote]

If you start a sentence with 'when Noah was 600 years old' you cannot prove to me that the rest of the sentence is less nonsense than the beginning of it.

Give me one example in the history of the world of a single spiritual person who has been able to show either empirically or logically the existence of a higher power with any consciousness or interest in the human race or ability to punish or reward humans for their moral choices or that there is any reason other than fear to believe in any version of an afterlife.

[TheLionPrince]

Well, after two weeks on preparing for final exams and nearly a week of relaxation, we can continue this debate. Now, where were we?

[quote="Woeler"]There are millions of pieces of (visible, touchable) evidence for evolution. There is no such evidence for God, and the bible is no source for legitimate information. It's not God/Evolution 50%/50%, it's God/Evolution 0.000001%/99.999999% because nothing can ultimately be disproved, but that does in no sense mean there is any truth to it.[/quote]

I was and still am aware of that. It's nonsense to throw out the Bible as a legitimate source knowing there is just visible and touchable evidence as there is for evolution. For one, there is the Mesha Stele, which archives the victories King Mesha of Moab had over King Omri of Israel, and lines up with 2 Kings 3:4-8. There is also the Ebla tablets that are even older than the Torah which contain the names of the Biblical figures such as Abraham, David, and Ishmael and Biblical locations such as Sodom and Gomorrah.

[quote="Woeler"]This is a big lump of nonsense. The whole concept of Satan proves that God is either not all-powerful or not all-loving. God created the world, God created evil. God knew evil would come from this world. God is either a gigantic sadistic asshole, or he doesn't exist.[/quote]

The existence of Satan and demons merely shows God gave them free will as he did with humans, but they chose to rebel against God's authority. And yes, God knew evil would come into this world, but he didn't create it. It came from manipulation from Satan in the Garden of Eden, and his power still corrupts the world to this day.

[quote="Woeler"]God created, God knew, God is a giant idiot.[/quote]

Your argument doesn't hold much water. If God created rape and unlawful murder, then, why does he condemn it through the Ten Commandments and have those who commit rape condemned to death (Deuteronomy 22:25)?

[quote="Woeler"]Yes, 'compassion'. Totally worth thousands of lives. Totally moral.[/quote]

Yes, thousands of lives are lost during a natural disaster. Loss is an essential part of the healing process, and the Bible states God will "restore everything you lost; he'll have compassion on you; he'll come back and pick up the pieces from all the places where you were scattered" in Deuteronomy 30:3.


[quote="Woeler"]9 million children die every year before they reach the age of five. Picture one of these Asian tsunamis that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those every ten days, killing children under five. That's 24.000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 every minute.

That means before you have read the end of this sentence some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their child's life to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered.

Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn't care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil.[/quote]

Strong words, there! If you read my last post with an open mind, then, I address to you that God left man in charge to tend the Earth. God understands the parents' grieving of their dead child(ren); he himself let his own son suffer and die at the hands of the Romans. Maybe, instead of blaming God, you can blame the corrupt and lack of industrialization across the countries of the world. Look at the figures and statistics for how much corruption costs in third-world countries: source. And that's just for developing countries; developed countries can be just as bad. When a government like that mismanages money to that degree, it is bound to hurt the welfare of the population living in poverty. And the World Health Organization reports that "Most of these children are dying in developing countries from preventable causes for which there are known and cost-effective interventions. Unless efforts are increased there will be little hope of averting the additional 5.4 million child deaths per year, or a reduction of two-thirds, needed to achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4 by 2015." So, instead of blaming God, place the blame on corrupt government and the lack of massive intervention from us in developed countries, and then do something about this to help combat these problems like donating to a responsible charity organization.

[quote="Woeler"]So, a dictatorship. Hitler is in heaven, but Bill Gates donating millions to poor people will go to hell for not believing in God. Can anyone look me straight in the eye and say that is moral? What person with the slightest piece of braintissue can approve of this? What moral garbage is this?[/quote]

Wrong again, a matter of free will left to everyone. As for Hitler, Joseph Goebbels himself wrote in The Goebbels Diaries that the "Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race. This can be seen in the similarity of their religious rites. Both have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end they will be destroyed. The Fuhrer is a convinced vegetarian on principle." True, Hitler did give speeches emphasizing his version of Christianity, but the Nazi Party ran on a platform of "positive Christianity". According to this source, it is a similar type militant, non-denominational form of Christianity which emphasized Christ as an active preacher, organizer, and fighter who opposed the institutionalized Judaism of his time. Positive Christianity purged or de-emphasized the Jewish aspects of Christianity and was infused with aspects of nationalism and racial antisemitism.

At a speech in Nuremberg on 6 September 1938, Hitler confirmed what positive Christianity worships:

[quote="Adolf Hitler"]National Socialism is not a cult-movement-- a movement for worship; it is exclusively a 'volkic' political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship.... We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else-- in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will-- not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord.... Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.[/quote]

Since positive Christianity does away with the belief in Jesus as the Son of God in favor of nationalism socialism and social Darwinism, according to Hitler's words, he is not a Bible-believing Christian. He viewed Jesus as an Aryan opposing Jews, and according to his writings in Mein Krampft, it is the Lord's work for him to "fight off the Jews". Positive Christianity is a mere distortion of the original Judeo-Christian religion, and it is highly likely that Hitler is in hell for believing this given the Jews are God's chosen people.

As for Bill Gates's atheism, the Bible strictly states that earthly works does not guarantee salvation. In the Book of Isaiah, it states our righteousness is "filthy rags"; in Titus 3:5-6, it states "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit; which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior."

[quote="Woeler"]There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindu, polytheists. no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey-god Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in Hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13 and Revelation 14.[/quote]

Calm down, Woeler, calm down. My church has a global outreach program called the Surge Project. Under their South Asia jurisdiction, they report that in the past five years, they have planted 549 Christian churches in south Asia. Of that number, 390 are in India, 81 in Nepal, 35 in Sri Lanka, 24 in Pakistan, and 19 in Bangladesh. The same site states a pastor named "Victor Nazareth in Delhi, India, now has 21 churches under his supervision and over 900 people" are in attendance.

This is just the beginning, and there's still more work to do. Eventually, all of India and Hindu-believing countries will hear of the Gospel, and the choice to believe in Jesus will be left to them. But please do not delude into believing Christianity is not making progress into these countries.

[quote="Woeler"]If God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery?[/quote]

If God supports slavery, then why did he collapse the kingdom of Egypt for practicing the same economic philosophy? If I am not mistaken, the slavery mentioned in the New Testament was meant to be interpreted as debt slavery, or debt bondage. It was very common during ancient Rome, where the events of the New Testament occur in. Basically, if one person couldn't pay back a borrowed loan from a banker, then, they ordered by law to serve the banker in order to pay it off.

[quote="Woeler"]So when he commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it. Ok, well here we’re being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. But it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the well-being of human beings.[/quote]

Well, you do have to remember the Amalekites attacked the Hebrews first on their journey from Egypt as recorded in Exodus 17:8-10. Israel's only justification for slaughtering the entire Amalekite civilization was an act of self-defense given these feud lasted with no end from the days of Moses to the kingdom under David. Yes, war and genocide is morally wrong, but it calls for decisions that may be unpopular in our eyesight. If King Saul hadn't killed all of the Amalekites, it's only evident that the Amalekites will resurface again as they did in Judges, and lead to more violence, war, and suffering. If anything, this shows us how the world operates: we make morally wrong short-term decisions but it leads to long-term benefits such as peace and prosperity.

[quote="Woeler"]If you start a sentence with 'when Noah was 600 years old' you cannot prove to me that the rest of the sentence is less nonsense than the beginning of it.[/quote]

Back to the ages, again, are we? I really didn't want to resort to this, but you leave no choice. There was an ancient manuscript called the Sumerian King List, which lists antediluvian kings with extended lifespans, and a noticeable gradual decline in lifespans after the Flood.

Why I didn't want to bring this before was because the problem with the Sumerian Kings list is that it records ages of tens of thousands of years for some kings whereas the Biblical account only records several hundred years for the patriarchs. The kings may be mythologized versions of actual historical figures, but it seems to verify what the Bible claims that some ancient people did indeed live to be very old, and some of the kings listed also appear in the pre-flood genealogies of the Bible. The Weld-Blundell prism is evidence of that as well.

[quote="Woeler"]Give me one example in the history of the world of a single spiritual person who has been able to show either empirically or logically the existence of a higher power with any consciousness or interest in the human race or ability to punish or reward humans for their moral choices or that there is any reason other than fear to believe in any version of an afterlife.[/quote]

Well, the existence of God defies logic, but maybe Kurt Gödel, perhaps?

[juhouh]

Too much of text srsly... How can anyone even write/read that much about a single subject?

There is no god imo and who cares how this planet was made. It just happens to be

[Regulus]

[quote="juhouh"]There is no god imo and who cares how this planet was made.[/quote]

Gravity. That's how this planet was made.

Woo! That was easy.

[Regulus]

I'm just gonna leave this here. Good stuff, if you have the time to watch it.

[MooLion]

I will check out that link soon! I just kind of think those saying God is real can't really come up with a truly feasible argument to prove anything, in my opinion. So it will be interesting if anything the guy says in the video can really hold water. I'm also interested to what the Christian answer book to Richard Dawkin's 'The God Delusion' had to offer for logical response.

I do think, if there were a God, surely he'd want his creations to just get on with life and stop worrying about the fact he created them. 'Yes, I hath created thou - now please enjoy the life I hath bestowed upon this Earth!'

I really tend to stay away from these big debates - they just go around in circles. I am very clear in my mind what I think, strangely more clear about this then so many other things where I am all 'oh, I don't knooow!'. I think that, and then I just try and get on with my life. 'You're religious? Okay, as long as you're not crazy about it than it's all fine here - I respect, you respect. We each get on with it.'

Anyway, I'm not here to debate, just wanted to put my 10 pence in like a few others.

[TomCat]

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[Iberian]

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[it means no worries]

i am atheist, although i dont go around telling religious people that they are stupid, i respect their beliefs.


THIS IS NOT MEANT TO CAUSE OFFENCE:
you have as much evidence of God as i have of my imaginary friend