do you have any suggestion njord? seems a little pessimistic otherwise

@Njord https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP4A3C3E4Cs RC Sproul - "What's wrong with you people?"

This thread has degenerated from what it once was: wholesome posting of verses from the bible. If we could get back to that instead of pointless arguments, that'd be great.

These discussions are actually the only interesting thing about this thread. It's also interesting to see these defenses on the almightys glory. Sometimes i see the flawedness only when reading it the second time

All hail the supreme leader jeff

that video shows what christianity is, its a good video..... But for us that do not see ourselves as slaves it do seem like the christian god is an ahole while if you see your self as one that needs to summit to god, it seems righteous.


to me it seems like a slave religion

@tacky

its not pesimitic, it is what it is.....

John 15:15 - "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you."

When we're saved, we're given a new nature ("born again"), so that we desire the same thing God desires for us, and we don't want to continue to do the bad things we used to. In this way, we become progressively righteous, called sanctification. We'll never be completely free from sin, but we will overcome known sins. We're not slaves because Christianity isn't a list of rules we struggle to keep (as many people, including many Christians think), but it's depending on the Holy Spirit to be conformed to Christ, which we desire because of our new nature.
Doubt that'll change your mind, but I explained why it isn't a slave religion.

your talking about something different than in the video you posted, which seems completely like a slave/master dynamic.

So you got a new nature that is better than those not saved.And you will overcome known sin. Thats seems pretty prideful to me

to shoot down someone else’s opinion because it is not your own and not even provide a counter opinion, other than you don’t agree, seems pretty negative/pessimistic

Edited 2/5/2020 21:54:51

I was talking about something different because you were too. You initially said God was narcissistic, so I sent you that video. Then you said that Christianity is a slave religion. Now you're making a new argument, saying it's prideful.
The new nature/Holy Spirit is a gift... how could I be proud of a gift? I deserve hell just as much as anyone else. Even if it was a source of pride, why is that a bad thing according to moral relativism?
Ephesians 2:8-9 - "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast."

if Fizzer created function to mute forum threads I would be so happy...

Edit: There is no argument that would dissuade believers from believing, or dissuade non-believers from not believing, or else it would've been said some time in the last 2,000 years. No point arguing about religion. The Bible has great stories though.
The best argument I have heard in my life to encourage faith in God is Pascal's wager (which in hindsight isn't a very good argument anyway). We can however, go about it pragmatically. We can ask the other side questions that can feasibly be answered (i.e. no questions like "where do we come from?" "who created the universe?" that sort of thing). The point of this is to establish whether or not we need religion.

Do I need to believe in God, to be a good person?

(I haven't read any of the new comments so sorry if I'm interrupting an ongoing argument :P)

Edited 2/5/2020 22:50:44

@Ganymedes
I could just as easily ask you for evidence that God doesn't exist, and you would be just as (supposedly) unable as me to find any. (though if you'd read through the whole chat you would see me giving examples of evidence in support of the truth of the Gospels and therefore attesting the existence of God).
Because He is an omnipotent deity that set the laws of this world in place, He is not bound by the laws of this world. Therefore "proof" (or "disproof") of His existence cannot be found by observing the laws of is world.
And, to be honest, unless you are actually open to the idea that God could be real, no evidence I give will be satisfactory, because you won't want it to be and you'll convince yourself it isn't. (To support my point, the fact that you ignored my evidence in support of the gospels and called for more.)

Anyway, let's assume God doesn't exist. The universe accidentally explodes into existence from nothing, a ton of extremely improbable chemical reactions accidentally happen to form nucleic acids and other biomolecules, these miraculously survived long enough to miraculously clump together with lots of other biomolecules, the nucleotides randomly bond together in a chance order which coincidentally forms the genome of the first prokaryote, somehow the cell gets a membrane, ribosomes and the thousands of other components essential to cell growth. So somehow it's genome is correct, and it is able to function fully...

Now, I don't know if you're much of a scientist, but I'm at least a half scientist (and biochemistry is my interest area) and when I look at that scientifically, I see mere guesswork at how the world happened. I have not seen experimental evidence to support any one of these steps happening, much less the chance of them happening all at once by pure accident, which are ridiculously tiny chances.
Anyway, assuming all that unlikelihood to have happened, we are the result of random chemical reactions, and therefore so are your thoughts. In which case, there is nothing to say that one person is right and one wrong. Bye bye objective morality.

Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Ecclesiastes 4:12 NKJV

Commentary:
This verse is telling us the value of having friends; you can stand together, help one another out, encourage each other in their faith and in other things.

Edited 2/5/2020 22:54:37

"a ton of extremely improbable chemical reactions accidentally happen to form nucleic"

You have almost answered your own question there friend. Improbable, not impossible. Something to consider is that these reactions happened over billions of years. I know it's difficult to comprehend just how much time that is (I'm not being sarcastic), but that is a really long time for small changes, granted improbable changes to accumulate. I only have to reference the butterfly effect for you to know what I mean.
As someone who is "at least a half scientist (and biochemistry is my interest area)", I'm sure you're aware of the studies carried out on the 'Miller-Urey experiment' vials. They have discovered 20 amino acids and amines! The building blocks of life!!! This is honestly incredible and testament to human ingenuity and genius. They created organic compounds from inorganic substances (feel to correct me on my terminology, long time since I studied biology). This happened in less than 70 years, imagine how much more could happen in a thousand years, a million years, maybe even billions of years hmmmmmm.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/New-insights-into-prebiotic-chemistry-from-Stanley-Bada/ee5b3b10e890dc36f2d67a206471924e78b4813e

Edit: I said less than 100 years, but it's less than 70 years.

Edited 2/9/2020 13:36:44

For evolutionary theory a simple google scholar search yields an extensive library of research on evolution.

https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/7/5/1296/605886
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/283/5407/1476
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1715338/pdf/ajhg00124-0223.pdf
http://nekhbet.com/king.pdf

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hcPSag2pn9IC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=evolution&ots=LTxgG4P07b&sig=fSJ6CZi_bvr5E0PxsKuJPnDzxHM#v=onepage&q=evolution&f=false

Some Homo Sapiens Related Stuff too:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/309/5741/1720
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867404011432
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0237

And that's just scratching the surface. I could easily dredge up thousands and thousands of research articles like this. I encourage you to pick one and try to read through it carefully. Note how meticulous and careful the sort of work that is being presented in these papers.

Meanwhile, a google scholar search on creationism will yield hardly any formal literature. Some well written books that don't have a lot of research backing to them, but nevertheless, these are the sort of actual scientific articles you find:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2386841/
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.genom.4.070802.110400
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/331/6016/404
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-08766-011

These articles are not addressing creationism as a theory, but actually addressing the social science, the science of science and communication, aspect of how creationism maintains its strong hold.

You will find the same sort of theme in global warming vs. denialism
And the same thing with flat earth theorists.

A scientist is trained to be a skeptic on everything. Advanced degreed scientists, in their training, spend years working on research projects, only the be scrutinized, criticized, and questioned by their peers on every little nook and cranny on what they have done. Sometimes years of work get shot down by a single devastating question.

Considering this, it should be considered remarkable on how universal the consensus is in science accepting evolutionary theory.

Religion trains you to be faithful and believe, with very limited and vague hard ground truth. It is in fact a sort of challenge to believe, because it isn't obviously clear where its source is, persey. And that's fine.

You can see why I want to separate these two, as these sorts of views are inherently incompatible with one another.

As a scientist, your job is to put everything else aside and play the role of the skeptic. You doubt everything. You criticize everything. You look at the evidence in front of you and you look at it objectively. And not ad hoc willy willy either. Most definitely NOT with what the bible says as an initial "firewall". You look at peer reviewed articles. You look at professionally and meticulously done work with very specific objectives. With the knowledge from the statistical analyses and physical interpretations you obtain from your studies, and after much scrutiny, you then build your ideas from robust analysis which know how to utilize them, and reject the ones that don't.

If you truly want to be a scientist, this is something you will have to come to terms to. I know that it can be really difficult to "doubt" the bible, so to speak, but you HAVE to understand that you cannot be a true scientist unless you are willing to throw away everything you know and accept something different as "truth".

Until you can realize and come to terms with this, it is my duty to reject you as a scientist.

A few more thoughts:

My religious peers can justify evolutionary theory. This is some of their reconciliating thoughts that they have:

Have you considered that the early bible and the miracles of Jesus are meant to be taken allegorically and not literally? Perhaps then, instead of creationism, we should consider that god brought us into existence via his very genetic changes He envisioned?

What is a "year" to god?

The bible you read is at least twice, if not thrice, translated from its original language. Most words between languages are far from being able to match conotatively. There is no such "perfect translation" of the bible, and the true contations of it have probably been lost for centuries.

The books of the bible may have been given by God to the prophets, but they were written by humans. Humans are flawed creatures (even prophets), who may not have fully understood God's word.

Some of my peers are willing to separate their spirituality from the science (which is probably the best solution here), and therefore scientific evolution and spiritual creationism can coexist.

Another note:

Religions themselves debate amongst themselves who is the true religion. Is it Christianity? Islam? Judaism? Hinduism? Buddhism? Baha'i Faith (btw I think baha'i is a really cool concept)? Therefore, just accepting one of these to be irrevocably true and inexplictly intertwined with every aspect of life is just simply inappropriate. By doing so you really don't give any of these other religions any acknowledgement. However, if you are willing to split your frames of reference you can find space to accept and respect all of them.

Edited 2/5/2020 23:43:02

a scientist would never understand faith...


or hope

Edited 2/5/2020 23:50:23

Tacky- that is not true either- my entire argument here has been to completely separate religion and science and think of them in different "frames": a spiritual one, and a physical one.

what i mean is science is hardly the answer to everything, and sometimes you need faith and hope more than science. especially in difficult situations. imagine being Anne Frank.... it can be comforting to believe that there is something after this world and that feeling is very important to many people happiness

whether or not god is real, feelings are, and it is what makes us human...

Edited 2/6/2020 00:44:44

I am sorry, guys, but there is no way I can keep responding to you all in the size and thoroughness that I think is required in a debate like this. I'd love to, but it takes me way too much time (I am already spending more time than I would like to on WZ). It's not that you've asked unanswerable questions; they're no harder than some of the other tricky ones you've ready posted and that I've done my best to reply to. However, to answer them (especially yours, Aura) requires me to write a freaking essay, and I just don't have the time. Especially hard because it's mostly 2v1. 😉 So, although I'd love to keep debating , I think I'm going to have to stop the really detailed responses.
Also, Aura, I hate to say it, but whether you reject me or not, I'm going to be a scientist. 😉

@LND, no. not 2v1.

2v2

That's fine. I've essentially finished what I have to say.

Unfortunately, you face an uphill battle. The reasons for rejection isn't even a personal belief. It's just a matter of fact in science. I'm fine with you being a skeptic on evolution. I'm not fine with the decided lack of it on creationism. It's a scientist's duty to be a skeptic, period the end.

If you are going to a school with any reputation, you are going to have to confront this conflict of interest. And sooner rather than later. You will have a very hard time claiming yourself to be a scientist otherwise.

No, this is no 2v2 argument. This is much bigger than that.

Edited 2/6/2020 13:35:28