₦airaland Forum

Yes, good and evil are not relative for one who is spiritually alive.

Each person should only accept what his or her soul has personally recognised.

Would you agree that spirituality is relative to each individual?
If so and spirituality is the way you make your judgement, good an evil cannot be anything else but relative.

But when we look closer it would seem that man was terribly uninventive with creation of Gods, don't you think.

Some of that may have been due to migration patterns and taking ideas from other cultures. But if not, maybe look at it another way?
Instead of being uninventive, it shows that humanity has a common urge to explain the unexplainable. The idea of a god being behind these occurences was such a strong one that it was able to gain such a strong following that it then gave birth to religions.

I don't think Invisible flintstones suspended in the sky are less believable than invisible Personalities suspended in the sky.

Neither do I, but it was a pretty common idea throughout ancient religions. But a moot point in this instance if we're talking about the beginnings. As I've said, the idea of the god would have come first. The personality would have come later as the religion was formed. Regarding that evolution: we can see that in action as religion evolved - the gods ceased living in the skies and took to the realms of the heavens.

If such books existed it will definitely be included in the bible but the fact is that non exist.

Not true at all. There is tons of stuff that has been omitted either purposefully or because it may have been lost. And what about oral tradition? Not everything was written down.

Also, another avenue: what about ideas that may have been "borrowed" from other religions?

What evidence, do you mean scientific evidence? I thought for a theory to become an scientific fact or law it has to be observed, tested, repeatable and falsifiable.

What an idiot. You really are exasperating with your ignorance at times.
The Big Bang is a theory. Theories are based on scientific evidence. If it were scientific fact, it would not be a theory would it?

Now stop drooling and tell me what a coccyx is.

Why would anyone seek an explanation that was outside or his experience.

It's human nature. In the example given, if you were to imagine two big flint stones, you would have to give them the properties of a flint stone. Therefore they wouldn't be able to float in the sky. Something would have to be holding them. Invisibility would also be a property that you would need an explanation for. We only have to look back through our history to see how the unanswerable is attributed to the gods.
Perhaps the flint stones idea would have come first, but once it was analysed it would have been found wanting and an alternative explanation would have been needed. As one would not be available, attributing it to God is a quite plausible explanation.

Just as an aside, take a look at the Norse God Thor. He was a giant who hurled lightning bolts. An ancient explanation for lighting? Answering the unanswerable?

I think that belief in God involves a lot more than you are allowing for, Bastage.

Agreed. But I am talking about how belief began. I also take into account man's sense of identity - wanting to believe that there is more than he can see. A need to believe that he is worth something. I believe that this idea would have been formed after the idea of God had been created though.

now my question, is it possible to believe in God without Religion

The answer is almost certainly yes.

Think about it. Which came first? The idea of God or the idea of religion? The idea of God must have come first and then the religion formed around it.

So how would the idea of God come about? In all probability it was man trying to explain the mysteries surrounding him. For example, a caveman saw a lightning bolt strike a tree. He has no concept of electricity or weather systems. All he sees is a massive, awe-inspiring flash of devastation. He then looks for an explanation and finding one not forth-coming attributes it to a god. God was literally the answer to the unanswerable. The religions then formed around Him to flesh out the story, to give him human traits and personalities and a purpose.

The problem occurs when we find answers for ourselves - for example, things like evolution theory.
Some people then refuse to accept those answers whatever the evidence and cling onto outmoded ideas. In cases such as these, religion becomes a hindrance. In the meantime, God moves on.

Whose lives did the bombs save exactly?

It was just an example and I have no wish to go in-depth in the subject here but:

http://hnn.us/articles/52353.html

The Shockly-Wright effort "to determine to what extent the behavior of a nation in war can be predicted from the behavior of her troops in individual battles" concluded that: "If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical cases comparable to Japan's has in fact been invariably consistent with the behavior of the troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of the defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans.   In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10 million Japanese.  This might cost us between 1.7 and 4 million casualties including 400,000 and 800,000 killed."

Every single author agrees that an invasion of Japan would have cost the US more war dead and casualties than in the whole of the preceeding war. The top figure given there is over twice as many. That is without even taking into account the horrendous figure that Japan would have lost.

As at the time those bombs were dropped everyone in the US Govt knew Japan was going to surrender a month or so earlier.

There was a rumour of a conditional surrender. But a rumour was all it was and a conditional surrender was unacceptable. Japan's "fight to the last bullet" attitude totally contradicted any rumours anyway.


I'll leave it there because as I said, it's not something that warrants going in-depth in this thread.
But what it does do is illuminate the grey area between good and evil. You see it as an evil. I see it as an evil that was necessary for good to come about or to stop a bigger evil from happening.

Dexmond.

Do you honestly think anyone is going to read all that crap?

Put it into your own words or post the link with a brief rundown next time, instead of just filling the thread up with bullshit.

Ostensible or what we consider to be relative to us all?

Can we ever experience the substance of things?  Or are we limited to perceptions.  Are our senses the only faculties we have for perceiving reality?

What you are basically talking about is a sixth sense. Unfortunately, as you know, there is no evidence that it exists (although I don't discount it and neither do a lot of scientists).

This is an interesting subject though because it ties in nicely with religion.
If you look at people who are religious, there is a sense of spirituality. In fundamentalism, that spirituality is considered to be infallible and therefore looked upon as a sixth sense. The problem is that spirituality is pertinent only to the individual and therefore it offers no conclusions to anyone else but the person who experiences it. Some may claim that spirituality is a shared human trait but there is absolutely no evidence to to prove this. There is a "cult" syndrome but it's not based on spirituality - more a shared feeling of personal and physical identification.

A person who believes that they hold an infallible sense of spirituality can, in effect, claim to perceive anything. They can say that water is not water if they believe it to be so. Obviously, to the rest of us, it is still water but to that individual, it can be anything he wants it to be. Although this is an extreme scenario, we do see the same sort of thing occuring all of the time and this is where dogma steps in. People base their sense of spirituality on what they've been taught about religion. They then apply that spirituality and refuse to budge as to them it is infallible. The Earth was created in seven days, Adam and Eve were the first people and so on. In cases like these, spirituality even seems to over-ride everything else.
I believe that where these people fall down is that they don't understand that in the spiritual, perception is relative. Dogma is it's worst enemy and doggedly holding to ideals that were formed by others in their realms of spirituality is not always the best way to go about things.

Taking that further, the five senses that we do have are relative. For example, my perception of the colour yellow may be totally different to yours or when I feel something soft, I may get a totally different sensation to the one that you have. Sure, we understand through a basic ability of communication what yellow is and what soft is but there is no way of knowing if we actually perceive it in the same way. So if the basic five sense are relative, what does this mean for spirituality when not only is it's relativity not understood but when it also includes dogma?

I don't think anyone, be they religious or atheist, who has studied scripture and it's surroundings can argue that Jesus wasn't fulfilling prophesy as he saw it.
It doesn't even matter if those prophesies are in the Bible or not - Jesus obviously thought he was fulfilling them.

From the wealth of religious texts that are out there, it's no suprise that they may have been omitted from the Bible.

Oh God. I laughed my ass off at that link.
Creationist bullshit at it's best.

"In Germany, they give old people a pill so they don't wake up".

Is there no fairy-tale or lie that these idiots won't fabricate to get their agenda over?


I wonder if any Creationist here can tell me what a coccyx is?

And the first thing Bashir does when the warrant is issued?

He expels 10 aid agencies from Sudan. Agencies that are desparately needed to help the situation in Darfur.
All the while, his people dance in the streets in Karthoum.

I have no sympathy for Bashir or his supporters. Screw serving a warrant on him. Carpet bomb the North of the country instead.

What if you modifiy one or more of its properies, say by heating it or subjecting it under some pressure, thus changeing some properties. Is it still water?

Water is generally classified as being the liquid form of H2O. Change the properties and you get ice, steam, etc. We say that it is still water but recognise it as being so in a different form. In reality, in those instances, we are just interpreting it to be so because we know that it's chemical form hasn't changed - it's still H2O but under a different condition.

OK, is it possible for something to have ALL the properties of water and yet not be water?

I would say improbable. We are limited by our own perceptions.
Anything we view as water is water.

Incidentally, that link is cool. It went clockwise for me and then anti-clockwise. Then I found that I could change direction at will.

The scenarious you mentioned are not real. However I will aswer them. I will act as God guides me and if it is according to his will that all we be saved, God will provide the scenarious not mentioned in your hypothetical question that will result in me saving all of them.

No they are not real. But they are feasible and have been used as philospical question about morality for years.
You say that you will answer them but I can't see an answer. You say that God will guide you but what I'm looking for is an explanation of who you would save and why (if you would save anyone at all).

A couple of other points:

Those who dropped the atomic bomb want to win the war and not to save human lives.

Is winning a war not saving the lives of those on your side. There's no doubt that the atomic bomb was dropped because US war planners had calculated that millions would die if Japan had to be physically invaded.

I clearly differentiated spritual decsions which can be evil or good from the manifestations of those decsions when filtered through the human brain.

But I'll bet your decisions are almost (if not entirely) identical to those based on the system of morality. Don't you think that's a bit of a coincidence?

To judge correctly wheather something is good or evil, one has to be able to sense the core (spiritual decision), the motive, the imagination, the thoughts, the words and the actions.

Unfortunately this has not been bourne out by history. Mankind's sense of good and evil has changed over the years. What may be seen as wrong in some evil in some cultures may be seen as goodness in others. By taking your interpretation, one would have to say that the spiritual goalposts have moved.

I do not rely on books to make spiritual decisons.

That doesn't make sense. If you are a Christian (however you use the term), you must have based some large part of your belief system around the New Testament. Even if you say that you don't rely on books, you cannot deny that you have at least been influenced by them.

e. Good and evil is black or white and their are no greys for one who can look beyound the shadows and into the core of all human decisions. Having given you my views on your questions, I ask you as follows. Can rape, peadophilia, murder, falsehood, genocide, ethnic cleasing be good and if so explain.

I do not deny that there are extremes of what we consider evil and extremes of what we consider to be good and that they stand in the black and white areas. But there are shades of grey and these have concerned philosophers and law-makers for millenia.
You bring up falsehood. What if someone tells a lie because they know that a tragedy will be averted - let's say Jane tells John that she can't find his car-keys when he is unfit to drive because of alcohol, even though she has them in her pocket. She has told a lie and committed an evil act has she not? But in doing so, she may have saved John's life. Is she guilty of evil? I would propose that she has stopped an evil - if she had told the truth and given John his keys, he may even have got in his car and run down an innocent bystander.
We cannot deny that there are shades of grey.

We're not talking about one or two ERV markers here either.
There are over 20000 that humans share with apes all inserted at about the same time.

Of course, that's just coincidence to DavidDylan.

the scientific argument that ERV similarity in apes and humans is proof of evolution is based on the unfounded theory that ERVs are the result of "failed viral infections" in the germline. i.e. these pieces of junk DNA that are useless to the cell eventually got passed down from a common ancestor.

Would you care to explain how those ERVs arrived in human genomes and ape genomes at about the same time. Whilst youre at it, could you also explain how mankind's hominid anscestors also share the same ERV markers?

RVs by themselves are TRANSPOSABLE ELEMENTS, which means they are not fixed to specific sites but are able to move around the genome

True but also misleading. The fact is that they prefer CpG islands and regions upstream of heavily transcribed DNA. It is exceedingly unlikely that an ERV shared at the same position in the genome between two species is due to two independent events.

Did you realise the implication of your Big Bang theory that explains that the universe was formed as a result of an explosion some 13-15 billion years ago is the same thing as saying that an aeroplane was constructed as a result of an hurricane crashing into a metal scrapyard.

LMAO. He's going to use the Jumbo Jet theory. Go on idiot. Expand on it and see how easily it gets destroyed.

Ironically, it was stolen from a scientist who thought Creationism was hogwash and then illogically twisted to become a laughable piece of idiocy which Creationists vainly cling to.

dude . . . we are not morons here

I beg to differ. Both you and OLAADEGBU are morons.

Let's summarise shall we?

Evolution - lots and lots of little bits of scientific evidence that adds up to a very, very strong theory.

Creationism - a theory based on a couple of words written in an ancient manuscript which in turn was plagiarised (but changed just enough to fit the new religion) from older myths. No physical evidence to back it up whatsoever.


Hmmm. I'd add cretin and dipshit to your slowpoke title.

It appears all our resident evolutionists, have gone silent once again

Where you are concerned yes. You are simply not worth replying to. None of what you post is ever your own work - you simply copy and paste from crappy Creationism websites. It's doubtful that you even understand a quarter of what you plagiarise.

However, there is enough evidence to suggest that blasphemy on Jesus' part was the brewing point of all the problems he had with the law.

What evidence and what problems? Remember, as he was tried by a Roman Court, the problems have to be with Roman law and not Judaic.
The contradiction here is that Jesus himself states that one should adhere to Roman law - "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's".

There is no evidence that he broke Roman law. Only evidence that he advocated abiding by it.

Did you hear just last year, of the exchange between Hezbollah and Israel, where 2 dead Israeli soldiers were exchanged for the release of 5 Hezbollah soldiers

This is a relatively recent phenomenom and back in history, the Jewish attitude was that there would be no swap - they would simply go to war to release the captive.
But the above is not what we are talking about in this instance. Although DD and Huxley have used the words "exchange" the incident in question here was not a prisoner exchange. It was supposedly giving the people the option of freeing one captive or another. A "custom" for which no evidence can be found outside of scripture as Huxley has stated.

Good post.

But,

What many people won't admit is that the resistance to change happens amongst scientists as much as amongst religionists.

Whilst I agree that scientists can be dogmatic, in general, they are no way as closed-minded as the extremists who inhabit religion. The nature of science is that is open-ended and dogma is seen by the vast majority as it's worst enemy.

We are back again with the vapid "go read up" game whenever you press these trolls to substantiate their noise making.

How childish, immature and ignorant. You repeatedly whined about wanting genetic evidence and then when it's presented to you, whine even further, claiming that it has to be spelt out to you word by word.

So far you've shown that you have no understanding of Big Bang theory so I don't hold out much hope for you understanding other complex issues. Am I really expected to explain ERVs to you when you've already posted a loads of crap about them that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of evolution? KAG has pointed out their pertinence in a way that is simple enough for even a slowpoke like you to understand. So yeah. Go read up. The only thing vapid around here is the cretin who expects everyone to spell everything out for him just so that he can ignore it's relevance. Maybe that happens on your "critical component" Earth (I'm still laughing over that one) but not on the real one that the rest of us inhabit.

WHERE ARE the alleged genetic evidence for evolution?

Go read up about Endogenous retroviruses.

Dont make claims simply because you think the rest of us are dumb fools and wont catch your lies.

It's not that you won't catch my lies. It's that you are a dumb fool and probably won't understand the subject matter.

The car radio is an ACCESSORY NOT A VITAL component of the car . . . just like the earth is not simply an appendage of the universe but a CRITICAL PART OF IT

LMAO. The Earth is a critical part of the Universe?
So if an asteroid destroys the Earth tomorrow, the Universe ceases to exist?

Please. Do you even live in the same Universe as the rest of us?

If Peter was crucified for blasphemywhile in Rome, then he could not have been blaspheming againgst the Jewish religion, could he?

Good point. Of course not . . .

Hey you plagiarists!!! That's what I said!!!

He must account for BB theory being the theory behind religion as well with his own logic.

But what is the "universe"? - The universe is defined as everything that physically exists: the entirety of space and time, all forms of matter, energy and momentum, and the physical laws and constants that govern them.

So that means the earth is PART of the universe no?

No you dickhead. It is concerned with the creation of the Universe not it's contents.

Let's put it a way that even an idiot like you can understand. If you buy a car and the radio is not fitted as standard, you do not expect the car's manual to have a section about the radio you fit afterwards. Big Bang theory is only interested in the car - not the radio.

Idiot. the earth is PART of the universe. Considering its the only one for now where life exists . . . we can safely say that the BB theory addresses the creation of the earth.

What a complete cretin. You show absolutely no knowledge of the subject.
The Big Bang theory does not address the creation of the Earth. Nowhere but nowhere does it claim to do so. It is only concerned with the creation of the Universe.

why then did the high priests arrest Jesus and bring Him to Pilate? why didnt they just take Him and kill Him themselves?

You tell me. It's one of those little contradictions in the Bible that you so often like to overlook.

That is simply NOT true. Peter was also crucified for blasphemy

Hmmm. Where in the Bible is this?

Very misleading. According to Tertullian, Peter was crucified in Rome when Nero was persecuting Christians and blaming and executing them for the fire that had swept through Rome three months prior. Even if he were executed for blasphemy it wouldn't have been for blasphemy against the Jewish god but against the Roman deities. A totally different scenario from the one you are trying to claim.

Big Bang Theory addresses the creation of the Universe.
Not the Earth.

You do talk shit, David.

Crap like this:

No, Darwin based his theory NOT on science but on observations.

Observation is part of science you idiot.

How has the evolution theory been proved correct? If it was indeed correct why is it still called a theory and not a fundamental law of life?

It is called a theory because it isn't complete. Being a relatively young theory with a subject matter that dates back to the beginnings of this planet this is hardly suprising is it? But how is it proved correct? Evolution has been witnessed in genetic research. Surely you know that - you're always burbling about how you're a so-called geneticist.

Gallileo and co had issues with the catholic church over creationism

LMAO. And there was me thinking that Galileo's issue with the Church regarded the fact that the Earth is not the centre of the Universe. Tell me David, do you still believe that it is? If so, how were you proven wrong? Wasn't it by the very science that you so swiftly consign to the trash can? You could not have picked a worse example if you tried.  

What a bonehead . . . where are the theories and why dont we ever hear of them?

There are lots of theories. Try looking once in a while. The fact that you don't know about them isn't the fault of the theory. It's the fault of your ignorance. Tell me, do you know about String Theory? If you don't, is it just some dumb theory? Do you know what's sitting at the bottom of the sea? Because if you don't, does it mean that it doesn't exist? Idiot, you may as well be propounding Schrodinger's Cat and leaning towards disproving the existence of God with that line of argument.
Sometimes, your stupidity is astounding.

The penalty for blasphemy (crucifiction) was exclusively Roman jurisdiction, that is why the high priests (essentially the Jewish leaders of that time) had to bring Christ before Pilate.

Totally and utterly untrue. The penalty for blasphemy against the Jewish god was not crucifixion and it was not tried by Roman Courts.

Why did they largely ignore John the Baptist?

Errr, I don't know if you noticed, but John the Baptist was executed because of his religious views - namely those concerning Herod's marriage. I'd say that being executed for your beliefs is hardly being ignored is it?

the big bang theory is the only slightly credulous theory on how the earth was formed which is why i brought it up. A 5 yr old knows that.

No it's not. There are other theories that are just as credulous such as the Big Bounce.
I guess you're dumber than a 5 yr old.