[quote]
Looks like this has turned into a debate anyway as you can see. Even moved [/quote]

So are you saying that World War II was caused by religion? No!

[QUOTE]Moldboy:
Well now, if it said that the earth is flat with rounded edges, okay then. But does it? No! It says circle. Is a plate or bowl a circle? No. If it meant that it would say half circle or sphere. And:[/QUOTE]

Are you saying that I am going to stop believing in God? Remember faith and evidence can co-exist. I have to say that there is nothing wrong that showing God does exist.

[QUOTE]ciroxyz:
You perception of Christmas is obviously messed up. It is about giving and not getting. No matter what religion you are! It sounds you are more voicing your opinion rather than ours.[/QUOTE]

Another thing, although there are many gods, the actual God, is different from the others. He is alive and living, He does not live on earth or in temples, He doesn't accept offerings andfood given to Him, He just wants our lives so He can save our souls, and He one and doesn't need people to take care of Him and is almighty and Holy and just in everything. These are the decisive features characterizing God apart from others and showing that He is the true God. All the others are pagan. The Bible doesn't contridict science, rather, science contridicts the Bible and when it does, it is ALWAYS a theory unable to be proven. But known stuff and FACTS, never ever go against the Bible.

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i am confused by your answer cmatcmextra.
i said that religion has brought to this world is death caused by the numerous wars between deffierent religious factions.

[QUOTE]
Sure, religion is a cause of wars
[/QUOTE]

[cmatcmextra]
Your view of "religion = death to millions" is ignorant.
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how can you agree with me with one quote and then rewrite what i actually said with the next quote and end up by calling me ignorant ..... makes me think that perhaps it is you that is the ignorant one.

[QUOTE]
Also, bear in mind, that the Muslim terrorist organisations which use jihad as an excuse for blowing up western cities, are misinterpreting it. It's their fault not the religion's.
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unfortunately you are completely wrong on this quote ..... please read the quote below taken from the koran .... the muslims version of the bible.

by the way , before you ask .... i am not a muslim.

if you were to look at the rest of the koran you might find lots of quotes that you could use to prove the existence of allah ... the muslim god.
doesnt it strike you as strange that there may be two gods that have created our universe?

[QUOTE]
KORAN commands to kill infidels:

Allah is an enemy to unbelievers. - Sura 2:98

On unbelievers is the curse of Allah. - Sura 2:161

Slay them wherever ye find them and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. - 2:191

Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah's religion reigns supreme. (different translation: ) Fight them until there is no persecution and the religion is God's entirely. - Sura 2:193 and 8:39

Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it. - 2:216
(different translation: ) Prescribed for you is fighting, though it is hateful to you.

..... martyrs.... Enter heaven - Surah 3:140-43

If you should die or be killed in the cause of Allah, His mercy and forgiveness would surely be better than all they riches they amass. If you should die or be killed, before Him you shall all be gathered. - 3:157-8

You must not think that those who were slain in the cause of Allah are dead. They are alive, and well-provided for by their Lord. - Surah 3:169-71

Let those fight in the cause of God who sell the life of this world for the hereafter. To him who fights in the cause of God, whether he is slain or victorious, soon we shall give him a great reward. - Surah 4:74

Those who believe fight in the cause of God, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil. - 4:76

But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever you find them. - 4:89

Therefore, we stirred among them enmity and hatred, which shall endure till the Day of Resurrection, when Allah will declare to them all that they have done. - 5:14

O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Those of you who make them his friends is one of them. God does not guide an unjust people. - 5:54

Make war on them until idolatry is no more and Allah's religion reigns supreme - 8:39

O Prophet! Exhort the believers to fight. If there are 20 steadfast men among you, they shall vanquish 200; and if there are a hundred, they shall rout a thousand unbelievers, for they are devoid of understanding. - 8:65

It is not for any Prophet to have captives until he has made slaughter in the land. - 8:67

Allah will humble the unbelievers. Allah and His apostle are free from obligations to idol-worshipers. Proclaim a woeful punishment to the unbelievers. - 9:2-3

When the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. - 9:5

Believers! Know that idolators are unclean. - 9:28

Fight those who believe neither in God nor the Last Day, nor what has been forbidden by God and his messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, even if they are People of the Book, until they pay the tribute and have been humbled. - 9:29 (another source: ) The unbelievers are impure and their abode is hell. (another source: ) Humiliate the non-Muslims to such an extent that they surrender and pay tribute.

Whether unarmed or well-equipped, march on and fight for the cause of Allah, with your wealth and your persons. - 9:41

O Prophet! Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites. Be harsh with them. Their ultimate abode is hell, a hapless journey's end. - 9:73

Allah has purchased of their faithful lives and worldly goods, and in return has promised them the Garden. They will fight for His cause, kill and be killed. - 9:111

Fight unbelievers who are near to you. 9:123 (different translation:
Believers! Make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Let them find harshness in you. (another source: ) Ye who believe! Murder those of the disbelievers....

As for those who are slain in the cause of Allah, He will not allow their works to perish. He will vouchsafe them guidance and ennoble their state; He will admit them to the Paradise He has made known to them. - 10:4-15

Allah has cursed the unbelievers and proposed for them a blazing hell. - 33:60

Unbelievers are enemies of Allah and they will roast in hell. - 41:14

When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks, then when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds, then set them free, either by grace or ransom, until the war lays down its burdens. - 47:4
(different translation: ) When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads, and when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly.

Those who are slain in the way of Allah - he will never let their deeds be lost. Soon will he guide them and improve their condition, and admit them to the Garden, which he has announced for them. - 47:5

Muslims are harsh against the unbelievers, merciful to one another. - 48:25

Muhammad is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another. Through them, Allah seeks to enrage the unbelievers. - 48:29

Prophet! Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal sternly with them. Hell shall be their home, evil their fate. - 66:9

The unbelievers among the People of the Book and the pagans shall burn forever in the fire of hell. They are the vilest of all creatures. - 98:51

Fight them so that Allah may punish them at your hands, and put them to shame. (verse cited in Newsweek 2/11/02)
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Actually, (and please correct me if I am wrong) Islam is the religion of muslims right? Anyway, the koran, and this religion is an off shoot of the belief in God. Mohammad believed he was a prophet of God and started the movement. But it was after the Bible was written. Meaning? Although we worship the same God, our religious beliefs arte different. Christians don't believe Muslims are on the right track because:
1. The Bible was being written long before the Koran and was influenced by god.

2. Muslims believe in earning your way to heaven, something which the Bible says is not true and since it was written before the Koran we know that is more accurate.

3. We have about 20 men that wrote the Bible all at different time periods, but all in harmony. Then we have one person who wrote the Koran claiming to be a "Prophet".

The Koran probably does give evidence for God, but that is because it had some of the basic beliefs taht we have.

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I for one will still remain an Athiest. I do belive that there is a higher plane that we are not aware of, however, I do not at all believe in a God. If I were to practice any religion, it would probably be Buddhism. The reason for that being is that it is the only religion in the world that can respect and accept other gods and religions. They teach to worship your gods as you wish, however, respect the principal of the buddhist way of life.

To be honest, I thought that I would open up your post and see some SOLID scientific evidence that God really existed would be there, but I was a little supprised that most of your evidence was in Biblical passages. I do not want to fuel this debate anymore because I do believe that we could not make it through life without a little faith in something, even if it is just to make it to the next day. But for the horrors that I have seen I can not bring myself to believe that even a vengeful god would allow.

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That's a poor example. The Iraq conflict's not about religion, it's about money and power as are the majority of conflicts these days.
Hundreds of years ago, it was a different story. The Crusades most definitely were about religion. To describe them as anything else is foolish. The atrocities committed by both sides centuries ago engendered resentments that still exist today in the attitudes of the Middle East towards the Western world.

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This is probley the worst proof i have ever seen.

If you dont believe in god, you wouldnt believe the bible, therefore why would we suddenly believe in god after you quote the bible?


You flaws in evolution arnt even real flaws. life is common, but intellegent life is rare, the creature who has the trait that allows it to live (such as intellegence in humans) lives, the one who doesn't dies. The one that lives mates and passes the gene that allowed it to live down to its young, and the cycle repeats.

We are much different then or cromagen cousins as far as the brain goes, not to mention we are about a foot taller then they were.


And if the world is only 10 thousand years old, how do you explain dinosour bones and of prehistoric findings.

Please dont try to even share you religon unless you have some real proof next time.

thank you


and wild 20

christanity just copied other single god religons before it, so really islam and christanity are just copys of religons you believe are false.

 

 

 

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The quotes you made from the Bible are just as the same as the many versions of the Bible there are out there. The different versions are different interpretations of the Bible and its meaning. People can't agree on one thing so they change it to their meaning.

I'm not discrediting your finds or anything but I'm just wondering how sure are we about it? Faith alone shouldn't be tested by facts and what not, but how do you know what is true if there isn't a one true fact or belief. I hope you get wha ti'm saying. its sort of confusing.

I still believe in the existence of God. I see it as God did something and humans just took over after he created life or a chance for life to start.

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Tyssen:
You are right. Religion didn't cause the Iraq war, which is why I don't like it when people say that religion causes all the wars today. It isn't true.

fasdsffasda:

The point is to first VALIDATE the Bible, which I believe I have since no one can explain why many men all had science down even before the scientific facts were known. The Bible can prove itself, and that is what I am showing you guys.

Now can I remind you that evolution isn't even a scientific fact. It is what you call a theory, a hypothosis that cannot be proven because there is no real evidence to back it up except for extict animals that we still can't study. Your question about bones and dinosaurs is actually quite simple. Again the bible gives a reason. There was a flood proven by the deep canyons we have today and noted by ripple marks in areas of flatness such as plains. If you look at arial views pf the great plains in the US, you can see ripple marks that show a large amount of water once washed through there at enormous speed, thus further validating the Bible's acount of a worldwide flood. This would have also wiped out the dinosaurs and left mass graveyards and fossils seen today, validating the Bible even further. The Bible is the one source that can actually explain major events in history.

Prehistoric findings! Oh yes, I love this one. Remember that only eight people survived after the flood because none o them believed in God. This left thousands to die leaving people, villages, pottery and masses of other evidence that is supposedly prehistoric natives from ten million years ago. ame goes with bones, only a few of each animals were taken on the ark, which gives thousands of animals left out, showing that something wiped them all out at once. Another is the fact that sea life fossils have been found on mountains! Why, when the water dried up, sea life living on the land died without the water if they got trapped in pools. All this just adds to the Bible's acount of creation and a one true living God that created us.

You said that hristianity is just a copy of other religions? Please note that it is the oldest and existed even before there WERE other religions. It was not copied. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, the belief that there was a one true God. Christianity is just the belief that Jesus came and died for our sins. CHRISTianity. Judaism is the oldest religion though, dating back to before Babylon. Showing that the one TRUE God actually is one that stayed the same over the course of 4000 years before other religions sprang up.

Cookies: Are you condemning what I am doing because you say I will lose my faith. I can assure you taht although faith cannot be proven, I believe God can. I understand what you are saying. I just like giving facts as well. What I am really doing now is proving the Bible to be correct. But hey, thanks for the comment anyway.

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well wild i don and i dont believe in god beacuse has anyone ever seen him?
and most of the stories in the bible people just made up
up i do believe in god because he has made things happen when i have asked him to
so i think all in all there is a force out there thats greater that any other force in the unbierse

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You are right Golden. There is a force out there. Some say it is just a freak of nature, but the coincidences are just to, well, a coincidence. That is why I believe there is a God that came and saved us from the sin we created after he created us.

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ON EVOLUTION

The original post in this thread posed the question along the lines "If organisms evolve in response to environmental changes and surviving better in their biomes, why have humans evolved to so great an extent and other lesser organisms to so little?"

The answer is simple—genetic mutation. Darwin's Theory of Evolution states that evolution is simply the greater manifestation of a mutated trait in a population. The progenitor of this thread brilliantly proposed the situation in which humans fundementally evolved from fish. However, why do fish yet exist if they are therefore obsolete? Everyone should agree there are different species of fish, developed due to some form of isolation. This isolation could be geographic or simply the instinct to infest the sea over a greater distance. Because these groups of essentially the same fish are living by themselves, each group developes its own "quirks." Eventually these quirks are magnified to such a degree that the fish can no longer be classified as the same species, for the can no longer copulate with one another. I propose that this is a situation similar to what happened in the creation of land creatures. Only certain populations of fish, living in isolation, developed a mutated gene by happenstance to be able to further develop into amphibians, who ultimately became humans.

In shorter terms, fish still exist because the fish that survive today were descendents from the fish that never developed the necessary traits to walk the land. Note that despite the above example, genetic distinction doubtlessly occurred much earlier than the development of fish.

Fish have indeed evolved, by the way. The first "fish" were probably similar to todays cnidarians—jellyfish and other simple marine creatures. It took massive amounts of time for fish to become the scaled vertebrates they are today.

ON CREATIONISM

By Creationism, I mean the literal belief the interpretation of the creation of the world as found in the book of Genesis and the story of the succession of the human race from Adam and Eve.

There is already a problem. There are in fact two creation stories found side-by-side in the book of Genesis (Gn 1-2:4a, Gn 2:4b-14). The first one, in which God creates the universe in six days and rests on the seventh, explains man coming as the final creation of God. The second story, which includes the creation of Eden, is a very short story, but a very controversial one to itself (more on that later). It is from this second story that the story of Adam and Eve arises. The first story reads as if many humans were created all at once, whereas the second story mentions only Adam and Eve.

But let's abandon discrepencies thus far and continue on, for there is more flawed logic in a literal translation afoot. Let's assume that God created the world as stated in the first creation story, except for the part where He creates humans, wherein we'll believe the second one (cut & paste Bible interpretations... hehe). So we have Adam and Eve, who finally eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree and are exiled from Eden into the land where they are no longer able to comprehend the animals, production results only from manual labour, the woman must bear the pain of childbirth, etc. They have two sons, Cain and Abel. Abel seems to be a meticulous young man and has a very good relationship with God, because he offers the best of his crop as an oblation to Him. Cain gets jealous of Abel because God seems to favour him (Cain apparently hadn't been offering the same level of oblations/sacrifices as his brother). So he decides to off him.

And hence we have reached the end of the human race as we know it. If we are indeed to believe that God created the entirety of the human race in Adam and Eve, then we're screwed. Adam and Eve have probably been alive some four hundred years now (Genesis mentions astronomical lifespans), and now one of their only two sons has died. The human population consists of three people: Adam, Eve, and Cain. The Bible only mentions one more child from Adam ("Seth" in Gn 5:3). However, this doesn't solve the problem; the problem, you see, is a lack of females. Neither surviving son is mentioned in the Bible showing Eve their manly chuztpah. So in theory, we don't actually exist.

Yet somehow we do. The Bible also mentions Cain having relations with his wife (Gn 4:17a); where did she come from? Then I guess we have to assume that both creation stories are completely true. There is a problem with this, as mentioned earlier—there are discrepencies. One story (the first) mentions the creation of beasts and animals, and the other (the second) does not. There is a verse, however, that causes even more controversy. "... while as yet there was no field shrub on earth and no grass of the field had sprouted, for the Lord God had sent no rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil..." (Gn 2:5). The italicised is the problem—tilling the soil. Man did not do manual labour (according to the Bible) until he was banished from Eden. However, God (whom, translating literally, many believe wrote, or at least dictated, the Bible) mentions the soil as something that is going to be inevitably tilled; that the soil's sole purpose is to be worked by the hands of mankind. If God indeed wrote the Bible, he has little faith in humans.

ON RECONCILING THE DIFFERENCES

If God indeed wrote the Bible. Believing that God Himself wrote the Bible leads to a literal interpretation of the Bible, for God is believed to be infallible—why would one interpret any way other than literally if He wrote it? However, we can clearly see the contradictions in the Bible, and we have only explored so far as the first five chapters of Genesis! I cannot list all the contradictions, there are so many. This means in no way that the Bible is wrong, however. It just means that a literal approach is not the best way. The Bible is a holy work of literature; it has themes, metaphors, and figurative language like any other work. Proper interpretation is the result of analysing all the above.

For instance, what is the true message of the creation stories? A recurring verse in the first creation story is "And He saw it was good." This means that creation is inherantly benevolent. The crimes of Cain and the subsequent forgiveness from God show the mercy of God and the imperfection of humanity, which struggles to serve Him. All of these inferences are perfectly compatible in both creation stories and throughout the Bible, as well as with the Theory of Evolution.

A contextual interpretation of the Bible means that God inspired the writings found in the Bible. But God did not come down with His almighty Ticonderoga and inscribe the Bible into stone tablets. That's a whole lot of stone, a whole lot of pencil, and a whole lot of date discrepency to account for. The writings found in the Bible are spaced so far apart in respect to their writing chronologically that it suggests many different people wrote the Bible. Carbon-dating of the individual scrolls, a thorough analysis of the Hebrew in which the stories were written, and other methods have found the two creation stories found in Genesis are at least two or three hundred years apart. If God wrote it, why wouldn't he do it all at once? God has no bathroom breaks.

Overall, contextual interpretations of Bible stories can be far more wholesome and less erroneous in relating to other sources of knowledge than literal interpretations. Literal interpretations are very narrow in application; they are full of absolutes, which results in a massive population of infidels. When enemy cultures and religions with these strict interpretations of sacred scripture meet, the Crusades, terrorist attacks, and malevolent cults may occur. Religion itself isn't wrong (I myself, though not Christian per se, am religious), but persecution on behalf of God (who is portrayed as the force of good) is silly.

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