Padre ...

While I am an agnostic, I don't have a problem discussing religion (all facets and any denomination).

What I have problem with (as I tried to state), are the fanatics that constantly trumpet the Christian religion and the Bible as though it were the ONLY religion and the ONLY 'good' book and nobody else has a right to their beliefs (if doesn't agree with the fanatic's beliefs). They are the ones that I wish would shut the hell up.

BTW - I don't have a problem with someone who says they are a Christian, who worships whenever they have a chance and lives their life according to the Ten Commandments. The ones I have problems with are the fanatics who proselytize with every other breath .. especially when you have made it clear you are NOT interested in hearing another word about religion out of them.

I realize this is a religious thread and religion is what gets discussed. What I have a problem with, is someone who says (in essence), 'you don't have a right to comment your opinion' (whether it is religious or not). As an agnostic, when I comment in a religious thread, my opinion IS my religious opinion and my religious belief.

The reason why there are so many different believes and faiths is that we just don't know. We don't know everything, even today. No wonder that some people centuries , even thousands of years , ago tried to explain why we are here and how it al started and by doing so created religion. A writer once said : we are all prisoners in our own body. There's one thing we all agree on, we live in a amazing world, universe. Here's a nice link:

http://www.primaxstudio.com/stuff/sc...niverse-v1.swf

What me started thinking is this : It was written by Napoleon Hill somewhere in the 1930's and go something like this (I will make it short). When you dismantle a watch and put all the pieces in a box and throw it out on the table, how many times would you have to repeat this until all the pieces fall together to form a workable watch? It can't be done because one piece is missing, it's called order. Every piece has its place and in the case of the watch it was the watchmaker who put all thouse pieces together to get a workable watch. When we see around us , everything has order. Without order no mathematics, chemistry, no functional universe. And, order is ...made.

My opinion about afterlife : will we be aware of it?

The main thing that shows people's lack of understanding is when you ask;
"whats your religion?" and your answer is: Roman Catholic, Church of England, Protestant etc.
That is your denomination, your religion is Christian.

Dawkins was attacked for his ancestors being slave owners, so are Thomas Jefferson's descendents. Mine may be murderers, who knows. The UK 'Sunday Telegraph' stoops to new lows. They write:

"He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism. Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against "intolerance and suffering", must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour. One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744. The Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership."

This was based on a telephone interview with Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins said a reporter had called him and named a number of his ancestors who he said were slave owners. After the reporter quoted the biblical verse about the Lord "visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" Dawkins said he ended the conversation.

However, he said the reporter rang back and suggested Dawkins may have inherited a "slave supporting" gene from his distant relative. "'You obviously need a genetics lesson,' I replied," Dawkins wrote on his blog. "Henry Dawkins was my great great great great great grandfather, so approximately one in 128 of my genes are inherited from him (that's the correct figure; in the heat of the moment on the phone, I got it wrong by a couple of powers of two)."

The article in the Sunday Telegraph went on to state that the "Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership." However, Dawkins said the estate was now a small working farm struggling to survive and "worth peanuts".

Dawkins added: "As it happens, my ancestry also boasts an unbroken line of six generations of Anglican clergymen, from the Rev William Smythies (born 1635) to his great great great grandson the Rev Edward Smythies (born 1818). I wonder if [the reporter] thinks I've inherited a gene for piety too."I can't help wondering at the quality of journalism which sees a scoop in attacking a man for what his five-greats grandfather did. Is there really nothing more current going on?"

The Sunday Telegraph declined to comment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...trade-ancestor

Oddly enough I am not a fan of Dawkins, I agree with his views but I really don't like the guy however in this case I like his response, seriously what was the purpose of bring up a selected portion of his ancestry that is unrelated to his cause.

Seems to me people are getting rather desperate to follow that path.

Monty, I think you'll find that because Dawkins proposes an honourable and reasonable explanation of the origin of human life and the universe (evolution) BUT often in a way, through provocative public debates and stunts that insult the believers of God (attack the belief but why attack or belittle the believer? - who like scientists / evolutionists is genuinely searching for meaning or an explanation to everything - but finding it in an intelligent Being/entity that is outside of time and laws of physics - thus some of his targets will try all sorts of stunts / tactics that seek to ridicule Dawkins. He does have a glass jaw, but I respect his research and his motives to seek and find an explanation for all that exists and how it came into being. His tactics however provoke his opponents to use silly (I think) counter-arguments but other use good arguments which Dawkins can not always answer.

The big one of course is what caused the Big Bang and how do you get gas or matter out of a vacuum or if you argue carbon and elements floated around the vacuum of space in the earliest universe, then where did they come from, how where they made? Evolution theory's answer is no less fantastic, no less incredulous, no less in need of some leap of faith than (belittled, ridiculed) Creationists (Bible Christians/Protestants) or God-believing evolutionists (most Catholics) account for the beginning of matter and life in the universe.

Originally Posted by Padre

attack the belief but why attack or belittle the believer?

In my case, for the same reason that most adults would cast a very incredulous eye over another adult who professed to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden or any other theory that had so many obvious holes in its logic. If it were not "religion", and any person professed a similar following of any other unproven and illogical line of thought, to the degree that they do religion, it would constitute very good grounds for committal to a psychiatric ward in any first world country that I can think of.

I don't know that I believe in the theory of evolution either, but given only the two of them I know which one I'd follow.

You question the theory of "matter' in the universe, which is fair enough,.... But by the same token, if we want all the answers as to who "made" all of this, the same applies to God,.... where did (s)he come from? Who made God, and once made, what did (s)he make the universe out of? (I'm told that it was before the time of Bunnings Hardware).

It's endless and unanswerable. If we resort to the answer that God has just always "been", why can it not be the same for the existence of matter?

Originally Posted by Padre

Monty, I think you'll find that because Dawkins proposes an honourable and reasonable explanation of the origin of human life and the universe (evolution) BUT often in a way, through provocative public debates and stunts that insult the believers of God (attack the belief but why attack or belittle the believer? - who like scientists / evolutionists is genuinely searching for meaning or an explanation to everything - but finding it in an intelligent Being/entity that is outside of time and laws of physics - thus some of his targets will try all sorts of stunts / tactics that seek to ridicule Dawkins. He does have a glass jaw, but I respect his research and his motives to seek and find an explanation for all that exists and how it came into being. His tactics however provoke his opponents to use silly (I think) counter-arguments but other use good arguments which Dawkins can not always answer.

The big one of course is what caused the Big Bang and how do you get gas or matter out of a vacuum or if you argue carbon and elements floated around the vacuum of space in the earliest universe, then where did they come from, how where they made? Evolution theory's answer is no less fantastic, no less incredulous, no less in need of some leap of faith than (belittled, ridiculed) Creationists (Bible Christians/Protestants) or God-believing evolutionists (most Catholics) account for the beginning of matter and life in the universe.

To be fair it is Darwin not Dawkins that proposes evolution as the origin of human life, Dawkins just writes incredibly long winded books about how it relates to Atheism.

Unfortunately though there is no real choice but attack the person rather than a belief because faith is the binding block for all sides whether it is God or Science you put your faith in to provide the answers it is really the persons make up you are attacking because that is what faith is, the only real difference is where you put your faith logic or spirituality.

As for the Big Bang well that argument is the same for Atheists, where did God come from, to argue that he/she/it was always there is no more logical than particles just appearing out of nowhere now is it.

Originally Posted by senojekips

In my case, for the same reason that most adults would cast a very incredulous eye over another adult who professed to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden or any other theory that had so many obvious holes in its logic. If it were not "religion", and any person professed a similar following of any other unproven and illogical line of thought, to the degree that they do religion, it would constitute very good grounds for committal to a psychiatric ward in any first world country that I can think of.

The basic tennant of Christianity is faith.
They believe in God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the ressurection because they do.
This is why a lot of people find it difficult to get their heads around it.
Some one once challenged Jesus to perform a miracle to prove he was the Messiah. His reply was basically, you don't get it, do you?
The true Christian has their faith.
If they ask for proof, they are not a true Christian.
This powerful standpoint has been, and still is exploited by the unscrupulous.

Originally Posted by Trooper1854

The basic tenet of Christianity is faith.

I'm afraid that as fallible as I may be, I'm a far too logical for that. The paragraph below sums it up far better than I could.

"Faith", is no more than the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the major thing that makes us different from other mammals.
It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me.
Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

Christopher Hitchens 1949 - 2011

To me, "faith" in the context of religion, is no more than another word for extreme gullibility.