Forums → WEPR → Is religion insanity (justified)?

He was saying this:
For instance cure illness requires rational thinking to develop the medicine

Sorry, I thought you quoted sarcasm that whent somthing like "Shure lets just ditch that ineffective medicine and start driving the demons from our bodies with a word I forget" exept he used the actual word, I just forgot it.

That is not natural selection though. If the intellectual does not survive, he does not pass on his genes, and does not produce more intellectuals. We should be getting stupider.

They pass on genes, they just tend to pass on less, and to be less atractive. I think it has to do with the fact that the females of all species have needed a male with strength to protect them, intellegent people tend to not fit that critiria.

I really do not understand your concern. I would think that you thought humans were rational beings, and that if Christians claimed God created people, that they would claim that he created them how they are now: Rational beings. So how my statement changes any of this I do not understand.

Sorry, I was arguing several points. First point, if he was all loving he whould let animals in. But do to the laws of most riligions, they won't be. But also do to those same laws, an rapist gangster , Hitler, and killers whould be allowed in to heaven just for saying sorry while animals, no matter how they lived there life, whould be sent to hell, or vanish. They could save lives, as dogs commonly do, and still recieve a punishment just for not bieng human.

For your last "statistical claim" I can not follow your argument. You throw out two arbitrary names, one of whom was a sort of theist believing in some sort of divine (Einstein) and the other a believing Catholic who replaced a pagan idea of the world (Ptolemeic and Aristotelian Earth-Centeredness) with a better scientific model. I don't quite get the point. Furthermore, I am fully convinced that if you follow the evidence and seek the truth, then you will have to concede that Christianity is true. Please remember the topic of the thread, too.

I don't have time to reasearch, but I wanted to point out the fact that maney scientest doupted there riligion. Einstine stopped believing in the churches god at a young age. Galilao doupted that the sun revolves around the earth, that maney riligios people believed do to the fact they thought god made earth. And another scientist, I can't remember his name, was also arrested becase his diagrams of the human body had ribs on both side of the male body, people thought they didn't becase it says that Eve was made of Adams ribs and that the human race was modled after them. He also doupted his riligon more.

They pass on genes, they just tend to pass on less, and to be less atractive. I think it has to do with the fact that the females of all species have needed a male with strength to protect them, intellegent people tend to not fit that critiria.

I am not a biologist, so I will not argue this much further, but please realize that "knowing truth" is just not something that natural selection selects for. It is about who has the most grand kids, and even if knowing truth was beneficial for that, we couldn't know that for sure. So maybe our brains function well to get to truth, but maybe not. Maybe your argument seems true to your brain, but in reality it just causes you to have more kids but is totally false. Your brain just tricks you to think its true because that will cause you to have more kids. If all we have to go by is natural selection, we cannot be certain that our minds are rational.

First point, if he was all loving he whould let animals in.

First of all, as a naturalist, why do you even care about animals. They are just a bunch of heaps of molecules, just like you and your parents and your siblings. There is no such thing as value, meaning, good, or bad if all we have as brute physics. So from your point of view you shouldn't have a concern. After all, nature doesn't do anything great for heroic people or dogs.

Now as far as God is concerned, from his own standpoint he simply did not create animals to have a relationship with Him in the sense that humans do. Getting into heaven is not about saying a prayer and having fire insurance for the rest of your life. People were created to live in a meaningful relationship with their God, and only humans have the capacity to have that kind of relationship that involves choice love and trust. Animals do not go to hell, as far as I understand they do not go anywhere when they die. But to call this bad is like condemning people for kicking rocks.

Also, in order to argue your point convincingly, if all animals should go to heaven, where do you draw the line? You have millions of bacteria living in your intestines. Do you ever think about how you treat them? What about termites eating your house? How about the lice in a dogs hair? Don't you also place different value on different animals? Do you ever use bug spray, or do you eat vegetables that have been treated with pesticides (unless you are vegan and eat nothing but organic food, you are too killing animals) Have you ever taken medicine to kill bacteria or viruses that were living in your body? You also draw the line somewhere, I just draw it between humans and animals, you probably draw it somewhere between small pet rodents and mice, rats, and roaches.

Now, if Christianity is true, than I know that there is a qualitative difference between humans and animals, and that while we were placed on earth to tend to it, we are allowed to use its resources and that killing animals is not inherently evil. I'm not talking torture for fun, but I use bug spray, I buy Wal-Mart food, and I eat meat.

On a final note though, in my reading of the Bible there may well be animals in heaven. Check out Isaiah 11:1-10. I think this refers to heaven, or at least some time (millennium ?) between the earth as it is now and the eternity in heaven. It talks about animals being there. I just do not think that those will be "the same" animals as those alive right now. But how knows, if you do choose to have that relationship with God and go to heaven, you might just get to see Dinosaurs there or something.

Finally, I don't think we are going anywhere on this scientist thing. Yes, Galileo doubted that the sun went around the earth, but so do I. That was not a religious issue. Sure, the Catholic church has suppressed scientific advances at times, but please remember: The University itself was invented by the church. All the older universities began as theology schools that only later added other faculties. The only reason science like we know it today got even started was because people believed that God had created an orderly universe and that BECAUSE of that, repeatable experiments would yield the same results. We still speak of "laws." Well initially it was assumed that God had made "natural" laws just like he had made moral "laws," so the whole enterprise in science got started out of a Religious motivation. Reason and knowledge is not opposed to Christianity. Sure, there are always fundamentalists, but I am perfectly fine following the evidence and trying to be reasonable, but at the same time I believe that the Bible is the completely true word of God. And I am not a minority, neither today, nor in the 2000 years of church history.

First of all, as a naturalist, why do you even care about animals. They are just a bunch of heaps of molecules, just like you and your parents and your siblings. There is no such thing as value, meaning, good, or bad if all we have as brute physics. So from your point of view you shouldn't have a concern. After all, nature doesn't do anything great for heroic people or dogs.

Im not conserned. But Im pointing out the fact that he only cares about the people that look like him. Sounds like somone else we have heard of, whos name starts with an H and ends with an itler...

Now as far as God is concerned, from his own standpoint he simply did not create animals to have a relationship with Him in the sense that humans do. Getting into heaven is not about saying a prayer and having fire insurance for the rest of your life. People were created to live in a meaningful relationship with their God, and only humans have the capacity to have that kind of relationship that involves choice love and trust. Animals do not go to hell, as far as I understand they do not go anywhere when they die. But to call this bad is like condemning people for kicking rocks.

Im an aithiest now, but when I was less then 10 I was a weak cristian... I didn't go to church, all the riligios learning I have heard has mostly come from AWANA... But from my knolage you just have to say "Sorry dude for my sins" and god will go " its tight bro, come on in" no matter how bad they were. And thats according to your magic book, so you can't deny it...

Finally, I don't think we are going anywhere on this scientist thing. Yes, Galileo doubted that the sun went around the earth, but so do I. That was not a religious issue. Sure, the Catholic church has suppressed scientific advances at times, but please remember: The University itself was invented by the church. All the older universities began as theology schools that only later added other faculties. The only reason science like we know it today got even started was because people believed that God had created an orderly universe and that BECAUSE of that, repeatable experiments would yield the same results. We still speak of "laws." Well initially it was assumed that God had made "natural" laws just like he had made moral "laws," so the whole enterprise in science got started out of a Religious motivation. Reason and knowledge is not opposed to Christianity. Sure, there are always fundamentalists, but I am perfectly fine following the evidence and trying to be reasonable, but at the same time I believe that the Bible is the completely true word of God. And I am not a minority, neither today, nor in the 2000 years of church history.

Yes they made it, and riligos studies came first, but the fact that without riligion we may have looked for those answers in the first place making us start science millions of years earlier... And the fact that riligion changes to fit the new idias has to do with people thinking the laws are made by god. People back in the midival times thought that everthing that happened was caused by god. They thought that demons took over there body when they were sick. They thought that storms, crop failure, and attacks were gods way of punishment. They thought that god lived on the clouds. Now that we know those to all be untrue do to new science riligos people think differently. Its the way riligion has survived.