what is humanity without science, spirituality, imagination and intellectual curiosity? denying any of these doesn't make sense. balance is an essential part of the good life.

Sadly, science, imagination and intellectual curiosity make spirituality impossible.

I am a europien christian and i agree Tacticus and [WM} x

P.S The first point he made and the one just above. (The points i agree with)

i don't think that can be found some proof about the existance of God, or things that can erase spiruality from people. religion is just a question of belief, u can believe in God, u can believe that God Doesnt exist or u have no beliefs and u admitt ur ignorance about everything that u dont know (agnosticism). i was agnostic for the last 8 years and this year i have found out into myself a real christian belief without any philosofical or scientifical researches (totally unuseful). dont know if u are aknowledged with cartesium theories but trust me even if someone scientifically demonstrate that every religion is a joke, this still wouldnt be a proof about the non existance of God. i think that nothing should be said about religion among serious people cos it is just an inner question of belief. most of the big arguments about religion were born for the fact that some people (religious or not) havent understood this simple fact (mainly cos i think that they have no respect of the other) and use religion just to demonstate their hate about a category of people (mostly the church). so if we want to discuss about church's faults or scientists' faults is a thing, but i still think that nothing can be seriously said about religion and God.

I think the religion is similar like the wine: the small amount can be medicine, but beyond a certain amount it become poison.

I born as christian, but I can say calmly that the Bible contains historical facts and fairytales too. People who take too seariously the religion lost their reality sense and become dummy fundamentalist.

This is our cultural heritage. Not just God, but Allah, Jahve, Ahura Mazda, Shiva, Visnu, Brahma, Krisna, Buddha, Zeus, Odin, Ra, Mithras, Manitu, Kilulu, etc., etc.

I cant imagine bigger nonsense that all of this guys just fabulous fictional characters, except one who seariously honestly a real existing human-like allmighty superguy. This is a weak joke.

@x:

|> (However, I personally would not impose any views on my children, and would try to promote knowledge, understanding, and making decisions for yourself.) I agree with you, people instill their beliefs in their children regardless of the belief, whether it be racism, politics, religion, music tastes, etc.

Are you making a distinction between a "view" and a "belief"? Because if they're synonyms, you contradict yourself.

|> Yes. From birth, people are in one caste, and there is no mobility. The lowest caste are called 'The Untouchables'. Go figure. And I suggest you not make accusations about my accusations in admitted ignorance.

I only said calling something "apartheid" is a serious accusation; it was a request for clarification / confirmation, not a statement you were wrong to apply it.

|> |> |> also, people are born into religion, they rarely choose their religion, and being brought up in a religious way can damage people.

|> |> Then where did the first religious people come from? Or, how did religion ever get so big? I also fail to see how it can "damage" people.

|> I don't know what in my post merits a demand for a history of religion.

If people rarely choose their religion, "inheriting" it from their parents (and if we assume evolution, instead of creationism), then which were the first parents to teach their children religion?

The point was not to start a discussion about the origins of religion, the point was to show that apparently many people at some point *chose* to become religious, so it must have something to offer. (Sure, nowadays plenty of people choose *not* to be religious, so it's a valid question whether religion *still* has something to offer. However, I still disagree with your apparent believe that all religion is bad.)

|> If you want a general case, many religious people will be taught that various natural human things are sins - homosexuality, masturbation, eating seafood, sex before marriage etc etc. A gay teenager being brought up under Leviticus: do you have the empathy to be able to understand how that might be damaging?

That's a good point, but you seem to be only focusing on the bad sides.

I think you might misunderstand my point of view, so let's make it explicit:

- I'm not religious myself, but I don't like people flaming religion (or anything else for that matter) undeservedly. Some of my points may be me being "Devil's Advocate" (no pun intended; just don't know another name for the concept).
- I "dislike" (to put it mildly) the hardcore extremists just as much as you do. However, I think you are *also* taking it out on religious people who are far more "relaxed", following the core of their religion (be a decent human being, pray every once in a while, wear a cross necklace / headscarf / kacchera / whatever), without hurting anyone else.
Basically, people can teach about Heaven and how you have to be a good person to enter and only explain about Hell when asked "What if I don't go to Heaven?" (and including "But you have to be utterly horrible to go *there*, you shouldn't worry about it, you're a nice kid.").
If you don't know anyone like that, I assure you, they exist, there's a lot of them even. Go watch Dawson's Creek for an example (from fiction, but still demonstrating the point). The grandmother of Jenn (??) is strictly religious, but has a boy living in her house who turns out to be gay, which she is okay with. Can't remember the exact dialogue, but the gist of it was "God created him this way" and "Who are *you* to take it upon yourself to deliver God's punishment".

Btw, just out of curiosity, which religion forbids eating seafood? I do know that Christianity tells people not to eat meat on Fridays (??), but that actually caused people to eat seafood instead (the closest thing to meat that was allowed -- it's even been blamed as one of the reasons for the near-extinction of the beaver; because of the scales on its tail it counted as seafood, so people ate beaver meat every Friday... :s ).

|> Yeah, the monotheistic religions aren't dissimilar. I was picking a single example, I'm no Islamophobe. And I wasn't suggesting that all muslims discriminate against women.

My bad, I read that as an attack on Islam.

|> A religious person invented algebra, another religious person sentenced Galileo to house arrest.

Not sure about algebra, but did the invention have anything to do with religion? Or were the two properties "inventor of algebra" and "religious person" present in the same person without actually having anything to do with each other? Galileo getting sentenced to house arrest on the other hand *was* definitely very much related to religion.

|> But the people in Saudi Arabia banning women from driving and leaving the house without a male companion ain't atheists.

I've been told the Saudi air force employs female fighter pilots. Sure, they've got to be driven to work by their husband (Quran forbids women from driving a cart, and by extension a car), but it never said they can't fly a plane (that's what you get for writing your holy book a thousand years before the invention of the plane :p ), so piloting is allowed.

On a more serious note, a bunch of those seemingly-crazy rules of Islam actually made perfect sense *at the time they were invented*. This includes not eating pork (which indeed could get you sick, "back in the day") and the part about women not going out of the house alone (originally, the guy accompanied her *to protect her*, not because she was inferior or anything like that; if you and a friend of yours leave the bar in the middle of the night and you make a detour to walk her home, you're doing the exact same thing...).
I don't know any similar examples from Christianity, but wouldn't be surprised at all if there are.

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@VaporX:

I hope this doesn't sound hostile (it's *not* intended to), but you are perfectly free to not read this thread, which even has a very descriptive title (we didn't hijack another thread to have this discussion).

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@Urfang:

|> I think the religion is similar like the wine: the small amount can be medicine, but beyond a certain amount it become poison.

I refuse to delete all the text above I just wrote, even if someone just summed it (and the other 180+ posts in this thread) up in just over one line...

Shame on me, I didnt take the time to read all of this, but some thoughts to what I've read:

@x:
The very definition of a divine wonder is that it is rationally/scientifically spoken impossible. So I dont see the point of scientfical impossibility as an argument against the possibility of wonders, because wonders ARE a priori something impossible that is acclaimed to have actually happened. And after that believe or disbelieve strikes in. And disbelieve comes with the argument of rational possibility - without knowing actually the truth, but believing that the rational world view is correct and therefore out of rational reasons this acclaimed wonder cant have happened.
But it is mere believe to claim that the rational/scientific framing of what is allowed to happen and what is not allowed, has the absolute truth. So it is just believe against believe and neither strikes home with proof. In short: If the materialistic-naturalistic world view of science, in which science is like the bible and got a monopoly to all explanation, is wrong and there is a god, the argument with rational possibility would already be wrong before stated.

@Ace:
The point with all this suffering in this world is according to the bible that this world has itself parted from God by Adam's fall. The spirit that rules this world is Satan. He says as much to Jesus himself and Jesus does not deny that. It's just a very simple reason.
So you can view this world since Adam's fall as Satan's bonus. No man is free, but under that rule of Satan and of sin. And the effects of sin lead necessarily to death via suffering, because sin is sort of anti-love and unwise. And Jesus broke the spritual hegemony of Satan in this bonus to bring back the life and the love and the realm of God into this world to free his own and bring them back to the realm of their and his father which is God. But there are those who rather live under the rule of Satan and dont want to be freed from that. Thats the story in a nutshell.

|> But it is mere believe to claim that the rational/scientific framing of what is allowed to happen and what is not allowed, has the absolute truth. So it is just believe against believe and neither strikes home with proof.

When science says "mass attracts mass" (~= "gravity exists") you can simply say "I don't believe it", of course. Yet anyone can perform a demonstration. Anyone with at least a highschool education (and a semi-decent grade in physics) can even calculate just exactly how much two bodies attract each other.

When the Bible says "Jezus turned water into wine" or "Mozes parted the Red Sea" or any other miracle, there's not a person on this planet who can give you a demonstration.

Of course, I'm the first to admit that a *demonstration* is by no means a *proof* (and science cannot possibly proof anything, ever; Google "falsifiability" if you don't know what I'm talking about). On the other hand, a demonstration (or rather, countless demonstrations and not a single one demonstration of two masses not attracting each other, despite countless attempts) is at the very least a lot "closer" to a proof than "this story (first told two millennia ago, being retold and retold for centuries before being written down for the first time) says so, therefore it must be true".

way to go hamlet, reviving a 3 month old dead thread and re-started an age old debate..

for thousands of years Religions said for example there is another "dimensions" in the universe. Now is science that is telling us that.
In a smaller scale the ocident did the same thing for a long period with acunpucture for example.

The rationality way of accepting facts depends wherever YOU realize that can be possible. So its not about discovering truth, is just a selfish sense of being the judge of right or wrong. And anybody do that.

This kind of talk is for the small minded (that includes atheists, christians and any form of conviction), that will only try to shut you down whenever they feel corrected.

For example, Astrology was subject of thousands of years of knowledge and educations in cultures like China and India. There is lots of lots of studies and well educated people in this matter in this both countries.
But now IGNORANT teenagers and young adults, or elder fundamentalists won't take even a 5 minutes study on the subject and already feel free to condemn all the subject and believers.
That happens with every spiritual subject. And its freak annoying, is the f... babel tower over and over again.

I for one i prefer to first really understand what great spiritual minds have to say, and not trying to shut them up with my ignorance. They for sure had much more going on on their minds than i had. I didn't move the life of billions of people, and I wont.

The UNIVERSE is so big that we can't even count it for this day, we don't know the extansion of his hugeness. So anytime a person put a limit in something that is infinite that is small mindness and fundamentalism.

There is rules in the universe, spiritual rules are not unscientific, or unproofable, they just are unknown to this date.
If Life after death exists or not, it is the reality for everybody. Either we all not experience the nothingness or all of us leave in the afterlife. The reality of the facts is the rule, and one of them is.

You may say that we can't never know, or nothing can be proof. That is bullshit, that is a lie you tell yourself to feel better.
There are a great number of spiritual leaders that KNOWS stuff (and not just believe), they can give you lectures for days, weeks or months in a single small spiritual subject. Is your call about not accepting either these people or their information.
Why I know they know? Because they see reality, and the things they talk about really happens, and they are precise.

Ow, and about the miracles in the bible. They are the most easy thing in the Bible to proof, because they are happening all the time. But is easy when you have an inteligent mind and can make inteligent excuses to dismiss yourself the duty of seeing reality as it is.

Since they're happening all the time, surely you can help us small-minded atheists find some well-documented examples...

I'm a multi-atheist. There are multiple God I don't belive in.

^ +1

I'm a multi-agnostic. There are multiple gods I don't know anything of.

I havn't read all 10 pages, so tell me if it was in this thread before, but I have a question for you religious people:

If God exists, I don't think he is both all-knowing and all-good. If he is all-knowing and all-good then why did he never taught us the basics of hygiene? Just simply telling us that most sicknesses are caused by bacteria/virusses could have saved millions of (innocent) lives. So why didn't he?

A) he doesn't knows about bacteria. Thus, he didn't create them and he isn't all-knowing either. That's a serious problem to his god-being.

B) he doesn't cares about us, people and/or isn't all-good (actually rather bad). What's the use of worshipping such a God- except for fear ?

C) He doesn't exists.

It's just one of the many paradoxes that are part of religion. If you can find a way out, please tell me.

From what I understand, Islam tells you not to eat pork because it used to be a bad idea (pigs carried diseases which could transfer to humans if they ate the meat (without properly cooking it...!?)). So in a sense, that's God (or Allah, what's in a name) telling his followers something about hygiene. I have no idea whether or not the Quran explains the reason behind that rule ("doing so could make you sick"), but with or without the existence of an omniscient being, he/she/it couldn't possibly have explained the *detailed* reason behind that rule ("there's nasty microbes in there").

Of course, another explanation would be that some clever contemporaries noted the fact that eating pork meat could make you ill and (desperate to make people actually listen to them) made the message come from a divine being, instead of telling it themselves. For all I know, they started by telling people and (when large amounts of people started to notice the advice was sound) they themselves decided the message must've come from "above".

Interesting opinion, because I wasn't thinking of eating pork, but you're right on that. I was more thinking about epidemies like Plague. Perhaps we may conclude that Allah is better then God? :) (as far as they're not the same)

well this is a paradox just for people who doesnt have a belief.. let me explain: i'll make an example of a thing that really happened to my girlfriend's aunt. she was in rome for the jubilee (think it was 20 years ago more or less) she was on a very crowded bus and she was standing right near on the doors, since the autobus was too crowded the doors didnt bear all that weight and just opened, she was the first to fall and she died in the impact while her 2 little children fell upon her seeing their mother dead. plus she was a really good and devote woman. with an history like that u can easily proove that god really doesnt care about us right? wrong! and it is wrong for a very simple fact, heaven. she went to heaven the biggest gift and joy ever, so this story is a tragedy to people who doesnt believe in god but not to people who believe in it. so when u say that god doesnt care u should consider also the real existance of god and that this life with all her tragedies is nothing compared to the joy of heaven or the tragedy of hell. i know that u will probably laugh about this cos u dont believe in heaven too, but u have started ur ipothesis saying "if god exist" so if god exist u cannot exclude heaven. plus there are 2 other facts: if god exist He is absolutely wiser and more aknoledged and more (u can put whatever adjective u want)than u. so the fact of judjing his actions claiming to understand and also judje them is just a totally fool thing. there is a third thing that proove that every human try to demonstrate existance or non existance of god has no sense but about this look cartesium philosphy:P

@antiloopje:
|> Perhaps we may conclude that Allah is better then God? :) (as far as they're not the same)

Like I said, I wouldn't be surprised at all if similar examples exist in Christianity / the Bible (I just don't know any off the top of my head). Besides, they're the same entity anyway; the difference between Jews, Christians and Muslims is not which God they believe in, but the way they practice their believe (different customs, rituals, etc.). I'm not sure about Mohammed, but Jesus was Jewish.

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@Your Time:
I don't care how beautiful Heaven is; if I were God I'd have waited giving her that present until her children were older..., a lot older. If Heaven is eternal, it doesn't matter one bit whether you go there now, tomorrow or in a million years; you'll be there just as long (mathematically speaking, `infinity - some (finite!) number = infinity` is a valid statement). But on *this* end, those years would've made all the difference!

And now I step in just to show my little and, more than likely, easily disprovable point of view:
I am a Catholic Christian, yet I believe in many of the things that non-Catholics (or non-extreme Christians) would believe in, i.e. gay rights and evolution. Since we are gradually changing as a society, I see no wrong for religion to conform with it. It seems that no matter what you believe in, no one wants to have someone else's beliefs imposed upon them, whether you are Christian, atheist, Buddhist, or Muslim.
And, regarding the use of the Bible or Quran to prove or disprove your point, don't take it literally or read into it more than needed. It may have been God's word, but it was fallible humans who wrote it down, therefore the Bible is bound to have flaws. Considering the fact that it was written 3 000 years ago, that it had to be translated from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin into the numerous languages in the world today, and that the printing press was invented around 1440, the Bible could have been changed easily or been mistranslated without too many people pointing out the mistake between the time it was originally written and the time it was officially printed from a printing press.