Can we agree on this?

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Originally Posted by ukmonkey

Can a real religious person explain to me the definition of the word faith, I could do with a laugh.

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"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."


On a deeper level, I agree with MrDevious on this one. The Athiest does not have faith, cause if it were faith, there would be substance and evidence. But since the Athiest has none against God, they are just trusting in man. I was generalizing using the word faith meaning that we have to trust in someone else to come to our conclusions. Trusting in something that is not true doesn't mean you have faith. Jesus is FAITH. If you don't have Jesus, you don't have FAITH.

Thanks Richie Rich!!!:hippy:

again, i believe that is an incorrect assumption. I dont believe in God anymore, and i am not saying that that there isnt a god, just that my intuition adn reasoning has led me to believe that God in the sense of the bible is not something i can believe in. I think that takes faith to believe that. There is more then one kind of faith.

God is a righteous judge. He gives us free will. He will deny those that deny him. If this controversial word of God is TRUE, then those that deny him will have to face the cosequences of being seperated from the LIGHT. Let God be true but every man a liar. :hippy:

"as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy sayings, and mightest overcome when thou art judged."

To each his own. :jointsmile:

God is a creation of Man.

Science is an observation of the world.

We didn't create the Universe around us, but we sure as hell created religion to fill the bits we didn't understand.

The truth remains the truth regardless of what you or those around you choose to believe.

Right. Promoting faith is pretty much saying that it doesn't matter whether or not one's beliefs correlate with the truth about reality.

"I have faith in Jehovah, you have faith in Allah, he has faith in L. Ron Hubbard. Yeah, we can't all be right, but who cares what the truth is? If everybody else is believing in stuff with no real good reason to choose those particular beliefs, then it's okay for me to believe stuff without having anything to back it up too."

It is just a way to justify not thinking about stuff. When you believe in something that isn't true like religion, you have to make up all sorts of excuses for why reality doesn't seem to support your position. It's very interesting to see all the different ways people of faith cope with this. The various rationalization mechanisms are pretty much the same no matter what false belief you're talking about. Believers in religions, crazy conspiracy theories, psychic powers, astrology, and alternative medicine all use the same techniques for justifying their rejection of logic and reason in favor of what's comfortable to believe for them.

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Originally Posted by Pass That Shit

I think it all comes down to faith. You either believe something or you don't. There are no facts. I think that for every scientific fact the athiest provides, there's a counter from a different scientist that makes science fit with the word of God. Since we weren't around at the beginning, we have no clue on how we got here. What we think may have happened to start it all comes down to us trusting in someone else. Agreed?

:beatdeadhorse: It always comes down to faith. Some put their faith in man, and others in God.

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If you walk inside my house after coming from the mud path and steal my cookies, I wouldn't have needed to be there when you walked in. Your footprints would let me know someone was inside, and that someone walked in from the mud path.

Your assertion that for every scientific fact there is a scientist that lines it with the word of god is also wrong. No real scientist would say the earth is not about 4.6 BILLION years old or that humans did not descend from apes. These are FACTS, not THEORY.

Then you go after the fact that evolution is "just a theory". Well, gravity is also just a theory, thermodynamics is just a theory too. Yet these "just a theory" (and many others) work well enough to build pretty much everything you see on your daily life.

Try to build a plane with the knowledge the bible gives you. Does it work ? No.

Try to build a plane with the "theories that could be wrong". What happens? We build planes, and even better planes, and even better planes than previously thought. The fact that's it's a THEORY doesn't make it wrong.

The thing with religious people is that you take gaps in scientific knowledge and attribute it to god. You know, like ancient egypt people who said Ra was the god that made the sun rise, or in ancient greece where poseidon was the god of the seas.

It's like:
"oh you can't explain where matter came from? GOD!!"
"oh you can't explain how life started? GOD!!"

But..
"If God was there before everything else, then who created god ? And who created god's creator?" ad infinitum

--> "He's the alpha and the omega!!!"

Right. PLEASE!

What we call "proofs" the earth really have billions of years is not a so strong proof.

For example, lets imagine someone goes to a theater, but arrives late, so the person watches the movie from the middle, instead from the beggining. Im supposing the person is alone in the theater (i know its sad, its just for the argument's sake). My question is, how this person can be absolutely sure the movie really started from the beginning? It could have started, from the middle, only moments before this person arrive to the theater. So, this person just could not tell the difference.

The same happens with us. We are here upon the earth only some millions of years (at most). How can us be so sure of things that happened much before we're here? How can anybody prove, in an unquestionable way, that the world was not created just a little time before?

Once, one friend of mine that was given to this phylosophies, and who showed me this argument, went even further: we cannot prove that even yesterday really happened. The universe could have been created today, and we could have been created today too, but our minds filled with memories to simulate that we were here before, and that we had a past.

I struggled a lot against him, but in the end i had to agree. Really we cant prove or disprove it. Since that day i stopped to take so much things for granted. We think we know much more than we really know. But now im aware of it.

theres no such thing as time, there was never a beginning and there will be no end, we have lived for billions katrillions babigilions of years, maybe not as a separate entity as we do now, but we still existed forever.

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Originally Posted by Oneironaut

I disagree. Having faith, that is, believing something without evidence for your position, is something that I try not to do. I am an atheist, but I am not an atheist because of faith. I do not believe in God because I do not see any evidence for such a being (at least as far as the gods described in scriptures, and the concepts of God which have been defined for me by believers).

Being an atheist does not mean saying you know with 100% certainty that there is no such thing as anything that might be worthy of the label "God". Atheism is simply the lack of a belief in gods. I lack a belief in gods because in order to believe in a god I would need to be presented with a good definition of what this god is and sufficient evidence to support the claim that it exists.

Screw faith. If you don't have enough evidence to answer a question, just be honest with yourself and say "I don't know". I don't know what caused the universe to come into existence, nor whether the Big Bang even had a cause. I don't know if there are parallel universes. I don't know if there are extraterrestrials in our galaxy. I don't know if string theory is true or not. I'm not going to make assertions about things that I don't have evidence for.

I am going to use the evidence we have, and the kinds of evidence we lack, to judge the probabilities of the claims I am presented with, without making any absolute claims to ultimate truth. I am an atheist for the same reason I don't believe in fairies; not because I have faith, but because I have not seen any evidence at all for any of the supernatural beings posited by any of the religions I have examined, and thus it is valid to say that the existence of these extraordinary beings is extraordinarily unlikely.

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Not sure if this has been said before, but you are agnositc, same as I am. Agnostic's feel they do not have enough information on the matter to make a decision one way or another. Athiest feel they have enough information to declare that there isn't a god.

Just clearing that up, because there is a distinct difference between agnositc and athiest.