America seems like such a backwards place sometimes

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The kid was also apparently only 18 months old. When I was a year and a half old I don't think I was saying much at all let alone 'amen'. It further saddens me however that not even the family of this boy are mourning the loss and are not at the very least accepting what they've done as wrong.

I don't get it.


Hey, they're just following the infallible book's commands and testaments. You, however, are a buffet tabler, you take the things you like and leave out the rest, even though the book tells you that's not being a true christian.


Yet you feel compelled to believe in a diety. Why is that?


I don't, actually. His original ideas leave a lot to be desired.


That's not what I'm disputing, I'm disputing that he's seen as the son of a diety, and a lot of the ridiculous claims attributed to him found throughtout the bible.


Are you serious? That's gotta be the one of the worst reasons I've ever heard. Go to a coffee house or a public library or something.


This needs no comment, it speaks for itself. I feel sorry for you.


You do realize Churchill was sarcastic when he said that, i.e. he argued for an open mind. Are you suggesting that people with open minds are extremists?

Europe is no better than America. The same materialism is embedded in its culture. People are not terribly fundamental about religion here (at least in Western Europe), but they are still crazy about race, nationality, and other things that people can discriminate against. It's pointless to compare them really and it only makes people angry.

Every nation has their flaws (e.g. the UK has terrible litter and more racists than America). But in general, the people of any country just want to have a normal life and not get into trouble. You might find more fundamentalists in America, but everyone else, comprising most of the population, are OK people. 'Backwards place' isn't really an appropriate term as it characterises the place as a whole.

I see you put one of Toad's quotes in your signature.

Not sure if that's out of sarcasm or what but America is not a totally cruel place. I'm getting a little sick of the blunt generalizations made about us as a whole and it seems as someone who isn't fond of nationalism....there's good examples of it from some of the non-americans.

You'd have to read up on that one. Lets just say that the philosophers lived much like the Roman emporers and their mentoring young boys came with an exchange of sorts. It doesn't remove the value of their achievements, it just illustrates more that you can't take ideas, culture, and then treat them as the same thing (unless pedantry was written into Greek philosophy - which it clearly isn't).




I do too, I look back and see that you mentioned something else earlier:



That sounds like a complete outside perspective - ie. you don't know how its handled, you don't know why any sane person would do it at all, almost like people who try to put anything intelligent of it are just living stupid-lite rather than full stupid; that's making the assumption that it's 100% anthropology; guys like Hitchens and Dawkins do this all the time.

The trouble with shooting down anything that came from 2000 years ago for the sake of the fact that it came from 2000 years ago is that it assumes that we were so radically different, radically dumber, had no concept of anything, that the human model of thought now has no relevance to what we were back then; and usually it takes a person to believe something like that who believes that nurture far outweighs nature - might want to take a look at studies of identical twins raised apart on that one. Science was not on the table but on another level - without getting completely wrapped in TV, palm-pilots, cappuccinos, fashion malls, they had a lot more time on their hands to look at the world around them as they also had much more in the way of social interaction in general. The funny thing is though - they're us in that environment; we haven't changed, mutated, or become some kind of animal genetically superior to people of 2,000 years ago. What we do have on the other hand is a very strange sort of braggadocio, as if to say that if it was too much before the time of television its inferior. That's to say almost that we needed the industrial revolution to have minds, to think, didn't it actually well up from that as a result? Also can you really see a person living 40 or 50 years of their lives - with every waking moment to doubt, to think whatever a normal person would think, and to figure that these people didn't have just as much fire in their gut to figure out what the heck life was or what was going on around them?

The other part - people who want to look at the bible as still having value. This is where it gets interesting. You have a) a message b) people of a time period. In order to make something actually stick it was a blend of both preaching a message as well as dealing with the beliefs and politics of the time, speaking to people in ways that they understood; it could be argued that if God wanted to send his son why not civilize people - probably even better to ask why he didn't just give the world a big hug and draw us all up into heaven. Most people who do look at this do so because they see bizarre anomalies in life, bizarre anomalies in the way the human being is built/operates (evolution, protracted creation, however someone wants to look at it). When one gets down to it it seems like the biblical and the real are like two sides of the same coin - science doesn't crush the bible nor does the bible attack science; one describes structure, one describes purpose. Many believers, as agnostic as many will realize they are, still weigh out in their heads the probability of the universe being as it is with a purpose vs. having it be random chance; the math for a lot of people of life just being random chance doesn't really work.

Overall though if you look into a book from that time and start picking out acts of stoning adulterers and calling current Christians crazy for having anything to do with it - do we live in a time now where lawyers are readily available for all? Do we live in a culture which is under much more control? Now....was culture like that two millennium ago? Were certain social norms and customs needed in a day where man had no guns, no tasers, security cameras, no bombs, no police more effective than the brigands were? The difference between you and maybe some other people here vs. a believer is that you see the bible strictly as being food for the barbaric bronze-age man 3000 years after the bronze age was over, we see a transcendent definition that bears the marks of 1st century AD for one particularly good reason - that's when it happened, the concepts, ideas, and general points made within its texts are much more solute than solvent (solvent being the culture).

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 12 May 2009, 10:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

If you're trying to debunk biblical literal inerrantists, then stop talking about Christians in general -- there are quite a number of us that don't hold that interpretation.


So when you find flaws in Darwin, you don't blame modern evolutionists for the errors that aren't theirs; but when you find flaws with a literal interpretation of the bible, you conclude that all modern Christians are wrong whether or not they agree with that interpretation?


Are you serious? That sounds like a pretty darn good reason to me.


Are you sure Churchill was being sarcastic when he said that? Are you even sure Churchill said that? It would seem that sort of thing would be easily found on the web -- but I've only been able to find a Terry Pratchett quote that says essentially the same thing. Was Pratchett being sarcastic? How do you know?

I could be wrong but what I'm seeing with the hardliner atheists here, they seem to see bible literalists and then something even more pathetic than a bible literalist which is a rationalist/apologist tying themselves in a hundred nots, twisting and contorting themselves so they can still hold their mother's skirt in life. If that is true, you may as well be telling a fundy Christian or Muslim "Oh, don't worry - I'm not gay, I'm bi"; the distinction won't score even one gram of respect.

Dont be a bigot towards the religious, but mostly, dont be so wrong.

The least religious provinces of Canada are the west. Stats Canada says your province of Quebec is more religious than the western provinces. Pay particular attention to the dark blue columns: no religious affiliation.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2 ... 84-eng.htm

The Bible is not invalid, but it is to be taken as being written when it was. In fairness, early man probably had some idea about getting down, so there is some knowledge to be found there, but reverting to the world views of ancient civilizations is...ill-advised.

"Cause that's why they have to pump it into your head when you're still little, and you've got a soft spot, and you're Santa Claus-eligible. And they ****in pump it all into your head, cause you don't know any better, and then they cork it in there with a whole bunch of fear, and what you do, when you go "I'm not hardcore", you make your own Christianity.

What your brain does is, you believe all the parts that don't affect your life at all. "I believe in Heaven", "I believe in Jesus, and the resurrection, yea sure." But the parts that affect your instincts directly, which is your real god if you think about it. Your ****in brain grows around that like a clubfoot.

"Oh, we have to adapt here. No, I believe in the Garden of Eden and all that...yea...oh, premarital sex, no, I think that was a typo, that's open to interpretation. But I believe in Noah, sure, and yea...love thy neighbor to an extent...except for that ****head up in 3B who play Beastie Boys until 4 o clock in the morning. I'm gonna poison his ****ing dog if it doesn't stop barking, but the bible was written before Beastie Boys were around so it's up to interpretation."

You don't believe it, you don't, and this is how I know, cause every time you see a tragedy, whether it's 9/11, or a bus goes into a lake, or a f*****g grandma spontaneously combusts, whatever it is, you see people on the news and they're whining like *****, and they're going "WHAAAAAAAA IT'S HORRIBLE, IT'S TERRIBLE AND IT'S TRAGIC, WHAAAAAAAAAAA, but at least he's in a better place now, he's with Jesus....WHAAAAAAAA."

Then why are you crying?! Why are you crying!?

If you with all of your faith, with the depth of your soul believes that your loved one is dancing around on a fluffy cloud in an everlasting paradise for all of eternity, without a care in the world, happier than pinworms in a baby's stool, why are you crying?

You should be ecstatic if you really believe it, you should be calling all your friends on the phone, "Did you hear the great news! Lightning struck my baby! Ya, he's in a better place! God picked him! I told you he was adorable! God spared him that average 72-year sentence on this ****hole planet!"

If you really believe that death leads to eternal bliss than why are you wearing a seatbelt? ...Cause you're just not sure."

- Doug Stanhope

At least I do not so: The literal interpreters of the bible are for me just one of the easiest (and most funniest) target. I do criticize all kinds of irrational believe systems, Christian or Non-Christian.

British Columbia has never been on my list when it comes to that, they're actually pretty clean, along with Ontario . Also, that data seems a bit old, 2004? o.O WTB more recent data.

Most Christians do not suggest reverting to the worldview of ancient civilizations.

I hope I don't have to tell you how ridiculous this is.


Because we're human beings with irrational human instincts, because there is such a thing as doubt, and because, regardless of how blissfully happy that person may be, we will never see that person again, or at least not for quite a long time.

About a year and a half ago, my grandmother died. She was the sweetest lady I'd ever met, and I cried a bit at her funeral -- the last time I'd cried was at least 6-7 years before that. Everyone agreed that she'd gone to a better place, and even if we thought she'd merely become worm food, we still would have thought so -- she'd been living in a nursing home with Alzheimer's for the last several years, and couldn't even recognize her own daughter most of the time among other medical problems.

We were all glad she was no longer suffering, that doesn't mean we were glad she was gone.

didnt read thread, dont care about the other pages, i just felt like saying:

WHO GIVES A DAMN!?!

theres 300M people living in the US. do people honestly think that every single one of them is going to have the same beliefs as they do? christ, gtfover it.

theres going to be more psychos here because, well, theres more people. if europe wasnt such a dark and lonely place where the women forgot how to have children, im sure their stupidity would be all over the worlds news.

Well, apathy sure is one of the national feelings in America.

There are nice and not so nice people in every country, but it's what these people do when they come together as a nation that actually matters, you are a democracy remember? And America is a monster.