45 replies to this topic

[Hostile]

http://edition.cnn.c...g.ap/index.html

So in Texas a man is running pig races next to a place where a mosque is being built. I'm predicting americans are losing patience with muslims, and this is only the start of another group of fanatics in the world.

I don't condone it, it's blatantly rude. But I think we'll begin to see more of this. I suppose it's a freedom of speech thing in a way...

I predict a bad trend coming from this. While I believe muslims need to reign in thier crazies, I'm not for out right being an asshole either though to them.

But in a way, you have to laugh at americans, they know how to make a statement. Like it or not.

[MSpencer]

"I am just defending my rights and my property," Baker said. "They totally disrespected me and my family."

An unbelievable idiot...
So by building their own place of worship on privately owned property, they're infringing upon his rights and "disrespecting" him? I don't get it... at all.

[Comrade Kal]

I once knew a jew with the surname Bacon.


My god we used to take the piss out of him after a few drinks.

[Verrückt]

http://edition.cnn.c...g.ap/index.html

So in Texas a man is running pig races next to a place where a mosque is being built. I'm predicting americans are losing patience with muslims, and this is only the start of another group of fanatics in the world.

I don't condone it, it's blatantly rude. But I think we'll begin to see more of this. I suppose it's a freedom of speech thing in a way...

I predict a bad trend coming from this. While I believe muslims need to reign in thier crazies, I'm not for out right being an asshole either though to them.

But in a way, you have to laugh at americans, they know how to make a statement. Like it or not.

I find this to be rude but we cannot assume that all Americans would behave in such a way. As one man does not represent the majority of Americans. I know plenty of Americans who ar politcally correct and do not mistreat people of diffrent beliefs/ nationality (ies). This man shouldve known better then to do this, i hope his farm burns down ( so long as no animals are hurt).

[xjjohnno]

Now here's something daft for you all,while we berate Muslims for promoting Jihad,heard of the Catholic and other flavours of Christianity's Confirmation where one becomes a soldier of Christ.
Do I detect parallels and perhaps a touch of hypocrisy?
Just as well I'm a retired Catholic and born again atheist or I might do something daft like going off on a sacred crusade for Christendom,like going off to kill Arabs in their home countries under the pretext of bringing them a better way.

[The Black Douglas]

Now here's something daft for you all,while we berate Muslims for promoting Jihad,heard of the Catholic and other flavours of Christianity's Confirmation where one becomes a soldier of Christ.
Do I detect parallels and perhaps a touch of hypocrisy?
Just as well I'm a retired Catholic and born again atheist or I might do something daft like going off on a sacred crusade for Christendom,like going off to kill Arabs in their home countries under the pretext of bringing them a better way.

Confirmation does not make you a "warrior of Christ" not literally anyway. I do not know of any part in confirmation where we were told we were warriors of Christ. Fishermen maybe, but not warriors.

In truth, I'm calling you a blatant liar. That or you forgot more than what was good for you.

[duke_Qa]

meh, i'm confirmated and i can't recall ever being ordered to go around killing in the name of god. but then again i did so because i wanted to get cash from the old people in town.

it let us take a few days off school to be on some sort of summercamp, which is as good an excuse as any to get off school for a few days. a few evenings of talking with the priest and praying(which was really creepy really imo 5-7 people around a table sitting there doing nothing but looking into the table with their hands crossed) then you have to memorize a few sentences to say on the day you get confirmated and go home and have a big good dinner and get some wads of cash!!

alot of people do a civil confirmation which is basically the same system only without the religious stuff i believe. though the moneyflow isnt as great there as its in the religious version because theres not that many atheistic old people with money around

[Ash]

To be fair I thought that kinda thing happened in Texas (the pig races).

Is it really fair for mosques to be built in a country where the official religion is Christianity? OK I suppose 'fair' is the wrong word, but the imposition of values upon another culture works both ways...as in, they go over to the USA, and then expect it to be exactly as it was back wherever they came from, down even to their places of worship.

You don't see many bloody churches in Iraq and Pakistan either, in all fairness. Chances are they'd get worse than a pig race nearby. Probably something hot and incendiary through the stained-glass window.

Edited by Paradox, 27 February 2007 - 06:21 PM.

[narboza22]

Now here's something daft for you all,while we berate Muslims for promoting Jihad,heard of the Catholic and other flavours of Christianity's Confirmation where one becomes a soldier of Christ.
Do I detect parallels and perhaps a touch of hypocrisy?
Just as well I'm a retired Catholic and born again atheist or I might do something daft like going off on a sacred crusade for Christendom,like going off to kill Arabs in their home countries under the pretext of bringing them a better way.

Confirmation does not make you a "warrior of Christ" not literally anyway. I do not know of any part in confirmation where we were told we were warriors of Christ. Fishermen maybe, but not warriors.

In truth, I'm calling you a blatant liar. That or you forgot more than what was good for you.

I'm Catholic (at least my parents say I am) and I know for a fact that when I was confirmed I was told that I was becoming a Soldier of Christ. That was one of my last WTH moments before I decided to be agnostic.

[MSpencer]

One of the effects of the sacrament is that "it gives us a special strength of the Holy Spirit to spread and defend the faith by word and action as true witnesses of Christ, to confess the name of Christ boldly, and never to be ashamed of the Cross" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1303).[1] This effect has been described as making the confirmed person "a soldier of Christ".[2]

It wouldn't surprise me if they tell you that you're a Soldier of "Christ." Confirmation really only became popular in Papal decrees stemming from the Crusades, when Christianity really needed people willing to do its bidding unto death.

[Cheshire Fox]

So, religion does have some outdated things like that. But tell me, how many Christians have you seen IN MODERN TIMES who go around killing people and telling you "I'm a soldier of Christ!" I do believe that is called a metaphor. Ever heard of it?

Yeah, there's verses in the Torah and psalms that talk about attacking and destroying other religions. The people in the Darfur region are Muslim. Did you know that the cause for freeing Sudan has had some of largest response from the Jewish community? Why are you so quick to bash religion as the root of all evil?

[MSpencer]

Religion is the only force which can turn ordinarily good people into absolute monsters. It is a divisive force which has been directly responsible for some of the greatest genocides in human history, and the truth behind it is completely lacking. Scientific study has a burden of proof for something to be accepted as even a theory which no religion meets. Religion wholly denies questioning doctrine, instead relying on people reading a book written by people no more informed than a modern day pig in the current affairs of the universe. Religion is outdated, old, divisive, and is a cause for religion, wars, and unnecessary cultural divides. All of the "good" that is done religion is human good, it is the human calling to serve humanity, it is the same kind of altruism that you see in large populations of mammals, it has nothing to do with a religion or that religion's beliefs. In fact, if religion had never existed, I'm sure someone would have come up with a positive aspect, such as humanism, to flock to and to tie together and better benefit the community.
Religion of old was used to explain the world in an age when people knew nothing of its origins. Prophets and seers were simply people with active imaginations who could very well have become accomplished writers (And probably did), much like L. Ron Hubbard who created scientology. Religions were educated guesses four thousand years ago, and even less educated guesses two thousand years ago, and 1300 years ago? Hell it wasn't even a guess, it was just a statement. Today, we know more about the world than we ever have. We don't need some archaic vision of some non-existent completely impossible being which just... made everything. Today, we have modern science to explain the world, and we have humanism and a greater understanding of communities and altruism to better unify the masses. Religion is outdated, out-of-touch, and a destructive force which threatens to deprive people of their civil liberties through exploitation by the rich and the ambitious. Religion by its very roots is not evil, but its potential for evil is unmatched.

And with that resolved, the Daily Show interviewed these guys tonight.

[Ash]

I wonder how a Christian (or a Jew, or Muslim or whatever) would answer this:

Let's assume for a moment that God does exist, and look at the following statement:
'God made everything'.
Why?

Why even begin to create the universe? Why create something you're not going to bother to use or interact with beyond some book that its inhabitants pick up once a week? Things are created for a reason. What practical purpose would having a universe give to Jehovah? None, as far as I can see. And don't say 'he created it so he could put mankind in it' - he didn't even think about us until like the sixth day. Before that he was just making light and dark and shit. If we were part of his game-plan he'd have done it all in a day and had the rest of the week booked off as holiday days, perhaps gone on a cruise of the multiverse to see what Zeus and Satan were up to.

[Cheshire Fox]

You have to know something about religion before you try to argue this! I can see this argument is going to be the same as one of those ultra - rightwingers from the middle states who knows nothing of the world trying to argue in favor of religion. Have you looked in the Talmud, and seen the debates there? Have you read the Torah, do you even know the laws or do you just asume that they all say: kill! Kill! Kill!

God may have created the universe for a thousand purposes. Let's say you don't believe in God. Let's start with this statement.

A point of energy at some point exploded, creating all matter.

Where was the point? How could it even exist if all was inside it? Wouldn't something have to be around it? How did it get so condensced in the first place? And I don't mean this as an argument in favor of God, I mean to say there are as many unanswered questions.

[MSpencer]

The theists have bashed that argument into the ground and have gotten nothing out of it. With a solid understanding of quantum mechanics, you wouldn't be asking the question of how.
We've essentially figured out the history thing. A couple billion years ago, a random fluctuation in the general order of things caused all of the current matter in the universe to be suddenly created within the volume of one proton. This caused a massive explosion, think critical mass x 1,000,000,000,000.
In basic probability theory, any outcome which has any chance of happening has a value which is not equal to zero. Since there is nothing we know of being present in the universe before this moment, we cannot measure time accurately before the moment of the Big Bang. It is safe to say it was almost infinite, with a complete void coming beforehand. With an infinite span of time, all probabilities approach 1, and a seemingly impossible outcome as predicted by quantum mechanics becomes an assured event which will almost assuredly happen.
This is not to say there was no matter beforehand, only to say that before the Big Bang occurred, there was time, perhaps another universe even, or just random molecules, but something definitely happened and it started with all the mass in the universe being concentrated in the volume of a proton. There's a rather simple explanation for this, string theory essentially states that matter is just vibrating energy, and with a lot of potential energy in the universe before the big bang, it is feasible that something like this could happen.
I'm not a physicist by trade but I'm sure one of them could explain it. This has also been explained in greater detail in other topics, look them up.

There aren't many unanswered questions about the beginning of our universe anymore. They're theories, yes, but religion is less than a theory.

[Calamity_Jones]

Why even begin to create the universe? Why create something you're not going to bother to use or interact with beyond some book that its inhabitants pick up once a week? Things are created for a reason. What practical purpose would having a universe give to Jehovah? None, as far as I can see. And don't say 'he created it so he could put mankind in it' - he didn't even think about us until like the sixth day. Before that he was just making light and dark and shit. If we were part of his game-plan he'd have done it all in a day and had the rest of the week booked off as holiday days, perhaps gone on a cruise of the multiverse to see what Zeus and Satan were up to.

lol Maybe he wanted some entertainment, made us all violent and hateful so we go about killing each other.

Anyway, arguments for and against religion and almost everything to do with it that could possibly be imagined has been discussed again and again and again. We're not ignorant and we've made some good arguments. Don't make poor MSpencer have to repeat the same things again and again and again

We know all the laws don't say "Kill! Kill! Kill!" But that doesn't mean that the church is against a good bit of killing. In fact, in past ages the church has acquired quite a reputation for killing, indeed, all religions have. Religion has a terrible legacy of hatred and warfare, it does not belong in the modern world, just history books, for it is after all an important part of our history.

As regards to the big bang. Imagine it as a super black hole of sorts.

Every particle in existence has a gravitational attraction to everything else in the universe. This attraction can be calculated with F = G(M1 x M2) / R^2... In other words, you take the mass of both things, x by the gravitational constant and divide by the square of the distance between them. This interaction is or course insignificant with small things over large distances. But, take a lot of mass that is very close together and the force can be incredible. Two large ships in the ocean will pull themselves together due to gravity if they get too close for example.

So, if you take an enormous amount of mass (say a big fat star)... and I mean big. Which is very close, eventually the attraction will overtake all other forces and pull the matter into a super-dense form that has such a high gravitational attraction that even light cannot escape. This is a black hole.

If you imagine that the whole universe was contained within a black hole like point then it quite nicely explains how it could all be compressed together. It would explain why there would be nothing around it too, anything nearby would be pulled towards it and consumed. Go read wiki articles for a better explanation.

I think one thing people fail to grasp is the sheer magnitude of the universe, and the sheer insignificance of humanity. People want to feel important. We're not. At all.

First, the Earth... It's pretty big isn't it? A sphere with a diameter of

Now, see this. This is a picture of the sun in scale with the Earth. The sun is a fair bit bigger isn't it? 110x larger diameter of the Earth.

Now, see this... That's a fucking big ball of gas eh? About 1500x bigger diameter than the Sun, that's about 150 000 times bigger than the Earth.

These incredibly huge things are also very far apart That's the Earth and the Moon, far apart aren't they.

Space is fucking big, and full of big stuff, we don't know everything about it, but we're starting to get the basics. It's a hell of a lot better than what religion can claim. It's about looking forward, not backward.

[Ash]

What I personally love is how Darkskul started accusing me of bashing the Torah when I made absolutely no such claim whatsoever. I only asked a simple question, which he completely and utterly failed to even speculate upon an answer to.


I said things are CREATED for a reason. Random occurrences don't happen for a reason, that is to say, there is no reasoning behind them. They can happen because OF something, but they don't happen FOR something.
For example, uranium-235 is radioactive. Why? Because its has too many unfilled electron shells. Why is it that way? Nobody knows. It certainly isn't that way because we made it so, and it isn't that way solely to fuel our nuclear reactors. It just is. It was a random occurrence that U-235 should come into existence. Indeed, why would God bother to make the tiny little detail such as U-235? Unless you have the technology to produce nuclear power plants or, such is humanity's want, nuclear weapons, U-235 is utterly useless. As the universe, it happened, but it didn't happen to serve a purpose. Although, as with many things, uranium developed a purpose because humanity gave it one.

On the other hand, the mobile telephone. Why? Because it allows long-distance phone communication from somewhere other than your house. It was created for a reason. Nobody creates a purposeless thing. Not even God. And if you can't even humour me enough to speculate as to a possible reason, then you just have to question...why?

Edited by Paradox, 01 March 2007 - 11:10 AM.

[Alsch]

Religion is the only force which can turn ordinarily good people into absolute monsters.

*coughMoney/Sex/GeneralStubbornnesscough*

And I just want to say, to those of you asking questions about Why...? The thing is, there is no answer. Arguing about it is pointless.

And about the original topic, you're right, that Texas guy is a real prick, but I can without a doubt say a huge majority of Americans aren't like that.

Edited by Alsch, 02 April 2007 - 02:18 AM.

[olli]

i agree with Mspencer about religion. all it does is start wars and ends it in bloodshed. it hardly offers comfort, and i have my views on it, but i suppose you can not be botherd to read what i think about religion.

and ask this to a religious person.

" is God so powerful that he himself can create a wall which he cant get over?"

if they answer yes, then say well he isnt all powerful, because if he was all powerful he would be able to get over it.

If they answer no, then say well he isnt all powerful because he cant create a wall which he cant get over meaing he isnt powerful, because surely someone all powerful would be able to do this.

and watch the look on thier faces

[Ash]

Ehehe, nice one, olli.

And Alsch...so what you're saying is we aren't allowed to question why. Great. Why not just destroy any OTHER semblance about what being human is all about while we're at it. One of the most important things is to question why. To simply tell me to not do so basically illustrates my point for me.

Edited by Paradox, 02 April 2007 - 01:54 PM.