Joel's Islam questions answered

[Joel]

2 Creations???? Genesis 2:4

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,

This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven.

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens--

Here is the same verse from four different translations all meaning the same thing. Here are the details of the creation of the heavens and the earth particularly the details of the sixth day.

As for the flood again details to the summary. Try reading it as a whole instead of trying to pick it apart, makes more sense that way.

Joel

[Jammrock]

Aha, in otherwords.... you little suckers, working class, blue collars, farmers whatever sit where u r, work hard and endure because life sucks after all, BUT you will be rewarded when u die. Maybe that is not the exact case in western societies but it is the case in many other societies. Those ppl are being exploited, tortured and brainwashed into believing that thats the way life is.

Great googley moogley, man! A bit vehement are we? Once again you have gone on blaming religion for ... the acts of men. There was once this guy named Lenin that thought this guy named Marx had this really cool idea. Create a government with no religion, after all it was the bane of human society, make everyone equal and the world would be a happy place. So Lenin started this revolution thing and took over a fairly large and powerful nation. He banned all religion and forced everyone to be equal...and boy did that turn out great! Good thinking Efty!

Everything in life is a giant double edged sword. Great ideas in the right hands make wonderful things. Great ideas in the wrong hands cause trouble and pain beyond belief. Marxism in a pure and base form is a theoretically sound social doctrine. I have to say in theory, because no society has ever been able to pull it off. Marxism in the wrong hands creates some of the worst dictators in the history of the world, i.e. Stalin and Moa Tse-dung (who combined are responsible for an estimated 140 million deaths...of their own people...which is roughly 10x the number of total people killed in WWII, including the holocaust). And for the sake of arguement, the same can be said about things like Christianity. Good Christians do great things. Bad Christians start the Crusades.

In sum, don't pin the fault for the world's problems on relelgion, because the problem lies in the people, not the philosophy.

Jammrock

/me puts more asbestos on Wombat's igloo...

[efty]

I am not a Marxist

I never said I am a Marxist. Not believing in a god does not make you automatically a marxist.

You missed the whole point. Christianity become so popular because it was the religion of the poor, the repressed. Ask your self why... because it explained, why they were poor and why they were miserable and repressed. It told them that, Thats life, but you will be rewarded when you die. The ppl instead of trying to change and better their lifes they accepted it as it was. Gradually this led to the dark ages.

Furthmore, I am not saying that a religious person is automatically a bad or good person. What I am saying is that the philosophy behind Christianity(which I know best) is wrong.


Joel,
What you quoted was simply 4 different translations of the bible. Read the lines as I wrote them each section on its own skipping the ones not included. Then you will see, that it does make sense. Also look how god is referenced in your quotation-- "Lord God" . Now look at 1:1-2:3. God is simply refernced as God.... In the hebrew bible Lord God and simply God are two different names. Ellohim and Yawheh(don't know if I spelled it right). Both of these two gods occur in ancient non "jewish" cultures in proximity to ancient israel.

I am not trying to provoke anyone. Religion is a sensitive matter. And yes RedRed, I am agnostic. And I consider atheism a religion on its own. Because neither the existence or the non existence of a god can be proven.

Efty

[Joel]

Aha, in otherwords.... you little suckers, working class, blue collars, farmers whatever sit where u r, work hard and endure because life sucks after all, BUT you will be rewarded when u die.

Stereotyping aren't we? Nothing in the Bible says that you have to be a poor, uneducated, dirt farmer to believe in God. Actual it tells us the opposite. It tells us to be "fruitful(prosperous) and multiply". It is the evilness of man that keeps others from being fruitful. It is the evilness of man that values a person based on how much money he makes and the toys that he can buy.

I never said I am a Marxist.

I don't recall anyone calling you a Marxist.

Christianity become so popular because it was the religion of the poor, the repressed. Ask your self why... because it explained, why they were poor and why they were miserable and repressed.

Men are not religious because they are repressed. Men are repressed by the evilness of other because of their religious beleifs. And yes that is explained in the Bible.

It told them that, Thats life, but you will be rewarded when you die. The ppl instead of trying to change and better their lifes they accepted it as it was.

If they don't seek to change and better their lives then they are not following God word.

Furthmore, I am not saying that a religious person is automatically a bad or good person. What I am saying is that the philosophy behind Christianity(which I know best) is wrong.

Again, please explain since you "know best".

Also look how god is referenced in your quotation-- "Lord God" . Now look at 1:1-2:3. God is simply refernced as God.... In the hebrew bible Lord God and simply God are two different names. Ellohim and Yawheh(don't know if I spelled it right).

Well there is a guy that I work with that his name is James but me call him Jim. He's still the same person either way.

Joel

[KRSESQ]

Now why would we as humanity overcome the need to believe in a god? The reason is very simple. Because we have no evidence pointing to the existence of a god.

I feel it necessary to point out that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In fact, many folks point to the very existance of the universe as a whole as evidence of a creator, because of the mathematical precision with which it operates, and because if even one of the variables in the physics were off by even the smallest fraction, the whole thing would fall apart into a big messy pile of quarks. People (including some VERY intelligent people, for example Einstein, Jefferson, Martin Luther King) can certainly be excused for seeing the universe as a planned, constructed thing.

Kevin

[efty]

I quit

I quit....

[The PIT]

Luckily the mathematics was off otherwise the universe wouldn't be around. They would have been an equal mix of Matter and Anti-matter which would have course cancelled everything out. Since nothing is perfect there happened to be more matter than anti-matter hence the Universe.

The next question is if God created the Universe what created God?

Arthur Clarke wrote a good bit on this in one his books.

"The Hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.
If you assume that the Universe can be quote explained unqoute as the creation of an entity known as God, He must be of a higher degree of organisation than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the orginal problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress."

Anybody remeber the Hitchhikers guide to galaxy and the sketch that disproved God???

[Jammrock]

Efty (if you ever come back),

I never called you a Marxist. I used Marxism/Communism as an example, because that is the most prevalent example in modern society.

Jammrock

PS - Welcome to MURC, Efty!

/me helps Wombat out of his asbestos igloo.

[Jammrock]

[Begin blatant rip]

The Babel fish, is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best- selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

[End blatant rip]

Ripped and slightly edited from: http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/CLinZ.CH/babel_original.htm

Jammrock

[efty]

I am back

The truth is that the existence of god cannot be proved or disproved.

I do not consider the existence of the Universe a proof of the existence of a God. And Pit was right to quote A.C Clark. I prefer to believe in something that i have some evidence, direct or indirect. I can choose to believe in dark matter, even though there is no direct evidence to its existence, there is indirect. For god, there is neither direct or indirect. It is just a creation of man to satisfy various needs he has which he cannot live without them.

[Jammrock]

What makes you think there's no indirect evidence of God? There you go again, thinking you know everything.

Jammrock

[spoogenet]

Nowadays, we do not need religion to explain the world surrounding us.

There are many things that religion explains, or attempts to explain, that are currently inexplicable by any other means.

While evolution is a hotly contested issue within the worlds of science and religion, I personally feel that evolution itself could be better explained by religion than science. In the scheme of evolution the changes that have taken place over time almost seem to be ruled by an invisible hand rather than mere random probability.

Science can more easily explain a quadraped evolving to walk upright than it can explain the measures, countermeasures, and counter-countermeasures with respect to the interaction between plants and animals. However the degree of success of, say, a plant that smells bad to herbavores is rather astounding at times. Regardless of the explanations, these phenomena sure make me feel tiny in the grand scheme of things.

That is not to say, however, that a god exists or not.

Since we are in a theological discussion here, I would like to throw this one out for people who are more into religion than I. Back in the day, a close friend of mine who studied the Bible and all things Christian with great feeling got into a debate with me about evolution. He produced some material rebuffing the concept of evolution. The material basically went like this: "Things can't spontaneously sprout new appendages, therefore evolution cannot exist." Then it continued to say something to the effect of "The Bible says that God created everything with the ability to change, but this doesn't mean that they can sprout new appendages." Now I view this as an argument of semantics and definition, however given what this person had said, I would say he supports the possibility of evolution and even thinks the Bible does. He just calls it change, and calls evolution something on the order of spontaneous appendage sprouting. What do people here think?

(Anybody got a spare asbestos igloo?)

b

[efty]

Making the same mistake over and over again

If we are unable to explain something then we automatically we try to explain it through religion and the existence of a god. The same exact way people used to do thousands of years ago when they had a sun god etc.

Jamrock please show me the evidence, direct or indirect.

Efty

[KRSESQ]

Pit:

Some mildly amusing intellectual questions:

1. How do we know that anti-matter isn't actually "normal" and we aren't in fact "anti-matter?"

2.

The next question is if God created the Universe what created God?

Just for fun, find the Isaac Asimov story "The Last Question."

Any good Bible-thumper will tell you God has always existed and always will. I suspect that this may allude to some concept of quantum physics and/or the space-time continuum that we have yet to comprehend. (This would be a good one for Steven Hawking.)

3. Arthur Clarke raises an interesting question. What DOES the universe look like to its creator? It certainly looks infinitely immense to us, Just as a petri dish does to a bacterium. A bacterium might be just as likely to reject the "ridiculous" idea that the petri dish was created by some higher being.

Efty:

"Direct evidence" is easy to define. "Indirect evidence" could mean virtually anything to anyone.

Spooge:

My advise for arguing with creationists is simple: Save your breath. You will not change their minds and they will not change yours. Unless you just want the intellectual exercise. I covered that turf with my own brother a thousand times. It gets boring after awhile.

Kevin

"The galaxy is in Orion's belt!" Men In Black

[KRSESQ]

Hey, Joel. Did your Islam questions ever get answered?

Kevin