₦airaland Forum

superboi:
huxley i think you have no right to attack people for their believe, if they believe in christainity thats their reality, if they believe in islam thats their reality, if in science like you?, well that your reality. and every believe can expalin what they believe in, rationally to ardent of the believe. so if you ask anyone who believe in creationism why kangaroos are only found in aussy land, he will simply tell you it was creation and he explain too. if you ask a scientist he tell you it was evolution and explain using scientific language and both are logically based views in themselves but not totally to each other.

People have the right to have any ideas they care to have, however silly, nonsensical or brilliant. But ideas cannot be shielded from criticisms in the market place of ideas. Beliefs about gods and deities are but just ideas and are therefore not immune from the criticisms all ideas are subject to.

Can you give me reasons why ideas (including beliefs in gods) should be shielded from criticism?

~Sissy~:
no i dnt think smoking is a sin afterall some pastors do smoke, it deals more with your health not with your spirituality
i do think not controling your anger can be a sin, cause when one is angry all sorts of thoughts run through their minds and sometimes it may lead them to commit other sins out of anger. so it is a bad not to control your anger
as for divorces depending on the marriage, some divorces are justified so it wouldnt be considered a sin

See just how Christian thinking is all lobe-sided! Are pastors the arbiters of what sin is and do you draw your principles and notions of moral behaviour from your pastors? Supposing your pastor defrauds his church of money or commits adultery. Would this be less of a sin because "after all your pastor has done it"?

Where is this guy gone?

Where is this poster gone?

Tayo-D:
@Huxley and co,

sorry I've been MIA on this thread since my last posting.  I've been rather busy.

I thought the best way to r4espond to you guys right now is by way of an example.  What more country can we declare as more fundamentally religious than Iran today? Yet the same country just sent a communication satellite to space, they are building their air planes and long range missiles.  Cases like this merely tells you that religion is not the problem.

I hope to come back and establish some more points.

This is really infantile thinking, the product of irrationalism, itself the product of religious infestation of the mind.

Just think about it.   What would have been the chances of Iran (and any country for that matter) getting a satellite into space if they had relied on the geocentric view of the world promoted by the religionists?

Copernicus and Galileo suffered persecution for propounding that the sun (not the earth) was the centre of our "world". The religionist preferred view was geocentrism which had held sway until Galileo and Copernicus.  And what did the get for this truly liberating idea?   Nothing but persecution from the likes of you.   And you have the impudence to celebrate this achievement of the Iranians as prove that religion does not impact of development.

THIS DEVELOPMENT WAS ACHIEVED IN SPITE OF THE INTRUSION AND MEDDLING OF THE RELIGIONISTS.


And so have been many other scientific innovations.  Shall I list them ?

honeric01:
Not worth commenting on, this thread has no vision and is going to lead to vanity.

Looks like this is a religion infected mind (sorry, not mind but brain).

In my first post on this thread, I touched on a number of issues that could be blamed for the sad state of African development and the lack of intellectualism.

The lack of intellectualism in the African community is really one of the greatest thread to African development. Africa suffers from many aflictions such as poverty, bad governance, poor education and most of all an abject disengagement from intellectual life. Today, this disengagement from intellectualism is made more poignant by rampant spread of irrationalism promoted by the likes of the christian evangelical movements, the traditional African instititions, the quests for unrestrained wealth, etc, etc.

Some of the advocates of religion have ignored the other issues and decided to capitalise on my fingering religion as the main culprit. By the looks of the response thus far, I must have touched a really sore nerve with the religionists. And rightly so, I might add.

ALL religions come under the umbrella definition of superstitious irrationalism, SI. Now, ALL forms of SI are opposed to rationalism and reason. Scientific and humanistic progress are the products of reason and rationalism. Thus it could be argued that SI are opposed to human progress. Progress is what elevates and enlighten the mind, quite apart from providing food, electricity, books, computers, medicines, etc, etc. It also frees the mind from the stranglehold of SI.

Now, think for a minute about what the religionist since the time of Galileo have been up to with respect to human progress. There has not been a single medical inovation that has not been opposed by the religionists:

The use of anaesthetic for surgery,
Birth control
Organ transplant
Use of animal tissue
Stem cell research
Blood transfusion
The use of cadavre in medical schools
etc
etc
etc

Every single one of the above has been opposed by the religionists on religious grounds. Does this sound like we are dealing with rational reasonable and intellectual people? In fact, you do not have to go back that far in time to encounter religious meddling in human progress. It is happening right now in you local district schools, colleges, hospitals.

The religious are trying to infiltrate the teaching of their superstitious non-sense in science classroom all over America and many other parts of the world.

Can anyone thing of any single product of SI that has brought tangible benefits to humankind?

SI is the stuff of the Dark Ages, but unfortunately Africans seem to be particularly wedded to it and it is dragging the continent down.

So far, we have not really defined what we mean by intellectualism. I shall address this question in my next post, but if anyone has an idea, you are welcome to contribute it.

I shall end here by asking our religionists friend (notably Davidylan) the following questions, as a lead-in to the questions of what intelelctualism is.



1) The age of the earth is a question that was troubled the minds of many thinking humans. What is the currently accepted figure about the age of the earth

2) Upon observing nature, you realise that there are NO native placental mammals indegenious to Australia. How would you go about explaining this anormally?

If this is true, then it is great news. African countries NEED to draw together more to share and harness the great resources they have.

This will not only supply electricity to Adamawa, but will hopefully mean that the funds which could have been spent to create their own supply of electricity could now be spent on other humanitarian projects, like saving the environment. (We wish)

Honestly, this is the way forward.

A sociologist (Ebenezer Obadare, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas) has just published an article in the New Humanist (Nov – Dec 2007)describing the deplorable state of education in some of Nigeria erstwhile top universities. This is an interesting read and should serve as an object lesson in the damage posed by religious fundamentalism in university campuses. http://newhumanist.org.uk/1637


I have long posited this hypothesis and it is ever so refreshing to find a report which bears the same conclusion. In fact, any student of the history of the Dark Ages in Europe would have come to the same conclusion sooner. This should serve as a salutary lesson to everyone interested in the proper education of the citizenry.

In fact, it is nearly 10 years ago (Dec 1997- Jan 1998) that I visited the a university in Cameroon and was appalled at the growing religiosity of the university students. Every evening at about 5pm I noticed groups of 30 - 50 students congregating in various houses or assembly halls to study the bible and other devotional materials. These gatherings typically lasted in excess of 3 hours and would occasionally extend till the small hours of the morning.

Now, I may be biased, but I am given to understand that universities are institutions for the promotions of critical and rational thinking, intellectualism and the cultivation of the free inquiry. I did not attend such meetings but doubt if the subject of discussion was biblical textual criticism (Bart Ehrman), or the history of the Jews under the Roman colonial rule, or the Renaissance, or famine relief in Africa, or the Enlightenment philosophers (David Hume, Voltaire, Spinoza or Thomas Paine) or African literature (Soyinka, Achebe, Ngugi etc). It is my guess that they were gathered to develop strategies for the salvation of their souls in another world. Aside from the communal spirit and camaraderie of these events, can anything be more time-wasting and counter-educational than this endless kowtow to divine authority?

I regularly meet religionists (Christians and otherwise) who brandish a (or several) university degree(s) but have no knowledge of some of the most basic fundamental precepts of science and logic. They are typically those who take a literalist interpretation of their various religious texts, such as the bible or great book. This is an embarrassment. Here are some of the beliefs they uphold in spite of the fact that there is absolutely no scientific evidence in their favour:

1) The belief that the earth is about 6000 years old as implied in the bible. Any basic study of geology should reveal that the earth is about 4 billion years old. It would simply not be possible for organic matter to be converted into petroleum fuels naturally in 6000 years. This should be an indictment to anyone who holds onto this young-earth theory (but should know better) and rides a petroleum-based vehicle.

2) The belief that there was a worldwide flood in which Noah saved his family and some wild-life as reported in the bible about 4000 years ago. This is just palpably false and erroneous. There is absolutely no evidence for such a global flood event. In fact, this account can be categorically scientifically refuted in no less than 1000 ways.

3) The belief that the soul enters the zygote at conception. This stupid idea forms the cornerstone of the opposition to stem-cell research, the next-generation therapy for the treatment of a multitude of ailments.

4) The belief that dinosaurs and humans once walked the earth some thousands of years ago. Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago and humans (humanoids) have only walked this earth in the last 250 thousand years.

5) The belief that death, evil and suffering was the result of Adam and Eve disobeying a commandment in the garden of Eden. How about all the animals and plants that died out millions of years before humans evolved? These facts are easy to check, not least by a university student. Any good bookshop or university library should stock materials on these subjects.

Can our education system sink any lower? Anyone looking for an object lesson on the impact of dogmatic, uncritical thinking should look no further than the persecution Galileo suffered for propounding that the earth travels around the sun (heliocentrism), rather than the Sun travelling around the earth, geocentrism (as was maintained by the Catholic church). It was only in the 1990s that the Pope officially apologised for the persecution of Galileo. It is thanks to the Galilean understanding of celestial mechanics (not the biblical cosmology) that satellite technology is possible today. The potential for damage to our civilisation with biblical literalism, dogmatism and uncritical thinking is incalculable.

The forces that assail us as a human civilisation are numerous and enormous. In Africa, these problems are compounded, principally due to poverty, scientific and technological illiteracy, rampant corruption and poor governance, attachment to unproductive superstitious beliefs, unfair global economic and trade agreements and natural environmental forces beyond our control. In the face of such problems, the last thing we want is a degradation of our only means of a resolution - education. Nigeria seems to have taken a path to intellectual barbarism through the spread of the barbaric beliefs of primitive nomadic stone-aged tribesmen from Judea (Check out the barbarism of Numbers 31, Exodus 21:17, Joshua 10:26, Leviticus 27:29, etc). Every survey shows Nigeria as the most religious country in the world, but yet also the most corrupt and the most socially inequitable. Does such contradiction not say something about the parlous state of education and thinking in that country? Such beliefs are simply incompatible with enlightened 21st century thinking and inimical to the development of a universal humanistic ethic. It is about time we leave the literalism of the bible and great book to the stone-age where they rightly belong and adopt and scientico-naturalistic worldview more suited to the challenges that confront us.

If the entire African continent does not want to go down this degenerate road, we must find a way of arresting the decline in our institutions of learning and encourage the next generation of students to develop and think more critically. But am afraid, where Nigeria leads, the rest of Africa is never too far behind.


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Some of my other threads


The Dangers Of Religious Fundamentalism To Intellectualism
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=110955.msg1929006#msg1929006

Only For Those Who Know Their Bibles And Some History: Who Was Jesus?
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112697.msg1954632#msg1954632

Only For Those Who Know Their Bibles: Old Testament Stories
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112679.msg1954426#msg1954426

Human Sacrifice In The Bible: Lev 27: 29 & Judges 11
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112584.msg1953340#msg1953340

Please, Please, Please: Christians - Read Read Read Your Bibles
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112578.msg1953311#msg1953311

When Was Jesus Crucified?
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112557.msg1952665#msg1952665

On Conversion To A Religion (christianity Or I-slam)
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112547.msg1952353#msg1952353

Faith-healers And Tele-evangelists
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112398.msg1950528#msg1950528

Where Did Sin Originate?
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112377.msg1950291#msg1950291

For The Non-beleivers Only, 1
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112262.msg1948957#msg1948957

Would Christains Be Criminals And Offenders If They Were Not Christians?
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112259.msg1948919#msg1948919

On The Authenticity Of The New Testament, Part 1
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112240.msg1948631#msg1948631

Has Atheism Got Principle? No
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112216.msg1948180#msg1948180

It Is Biblical To Have Sex (and Lots Of It) Before Marriage
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112139.msg1946940#msg1946940

Should The Old Testament Laws Be Observed In The Modern Era?
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112114.msg1946682#msg1946682

Founding A State or Nation On Religious Principles
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=112086.msg1946268#msg1946268

Great Books About Non-belief
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111928.msg1943935#msg1943935

Who Are The Self-declared Non-believer? Resources For You
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111806.msg1942137#msg1942137

Beware of a Simplistic Interpretation of Jesus's 2nd Coming Passages
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111677.msg1939992#msg1939992

Archbishop Cause Furore Over Sharia Law In The Uk
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111645.msg1939155#msg1939155

Eminent Christian Scientist (francis Collins) Explains The Evolution Of Humans
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111482.msg1936158#msg1936158

Please, Help Me Out With Your Knowledge Of The Bible
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111474.msg1936099#msg1936099

Why Biology Is So Important To Our Modern World
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111466.msg1935975#msg1935975

Genesis Vs Genetics
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111227.msg1932655#msg1932655

Jesus Genealogy
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111222.msg1932616#msg1932616

£300 (three - Hundred Pound Sterling) Essay Competition
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=111143.msg1931508#msg1931508

Beware Of Religious Fundamentalism In Your University Campuses
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?topic=110965.msg1929160#msg1929160

Any new takers?

Tayo-D:
@Huxley,
How can you attribute this so-called backwardness to christian evangelical movement when the countries we consider advanced actually practiced the same faith? Their faith was a springboard and a foundation upon which their society was founded and yet they are far developed than Africa.

Bash christianity for all I care, but you cannot quantifiably and rationally dump the failure of the African society on it. It just can't stick!

The point I made was that religions and superstitious irrationalism is ONE (amongst others) reasons African development (should I say enlightenment) is endangered.  Now, since you have picked out religions from amongst the other reason I gave, let me address this as follows

Most of human history on the planet, we have lived in utter ignorance of the true nature of the reality that surrounds us. Or better still, our knowledge of this reality was provided by superstition, religion and mythology.  We did not know that the planet was spherical, or that germs caused diseases, or that we lived in a heliocentric "world", or that atoms was a fundamental constituent of matter, or that there are other galaxy beyond ours, etc, etc.  Religions and the institutions that buttressed them were the main source of knowledge about reality.  This situation obtained right up until about 400 years ago, at the start of the industrial revolution and "enlightenment" in Europe.

When the religious held sway, what did we have?   Human sacrifices, burning of heretic, witchhunts and burning at the stake, slavery, racism and prejudice againts women, the corruptions of the Catholic and Vatican, religious wars such as the Crusades, religious persecutions of scientist such as Galileo and Bruno, etc, etc, etc.  Granted some religious institutions housed schools of learning and harboured individuals who promoted learning, but this was never allowed to contravene religious dogma.  Does the persecution of Galileo and the BURNING of Bruno ring a bell. The religious even persecuted their own kind.  Think of the burning of Servetus by John Calvin.  The misdeeds of the religious was mainly responsible for  ushering in the period in history known as the Dark Ages.

The enlightenment was a period that saw a challenge of the hegemony the religious had enjoyed since the dawn of humankind.  The key figures in this movement were the likes of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, etc, etc.  These brave men effectively put an end to the period of religious serfdom and since then civilization has blossomed while religions are beating a retreat in the countries that have adopted the tenets of the enlightenment.  In Western Europe, less than 50% of people count themselve today as religious.

However, religions continue to intrude into matters of civic life, attempt to regulate who one has sex with, what sort of medical treatment one should have, opposing scientific research and spread dowright lies about the nature of reality.

Africa, on the other hand is still mired in the intellectual dark ages of religion and superstitions. Almost all the misdeeds of the religious in Dark Ages Europe is happening today in Africa, viz witchhunts, children accused of witch acts, religious exploitations by venal Christian Pastors and Ministers, religious wars (Muslim vs Christians),  degradations of educations as students pursue salvation, etc, etc.

Did you watch the Nigerian child witch film?  Does any of this bode well with intellectualism.  By what epistemic  justification would a Christian have for condemning these venal ministers?

Have you read about the deploration state of education in Nigeria universities?  Does this bode well with a match towards intellectualism?


I submit that I have made my case and the facts speak for themselves.

I did try to address these issues in the follwoing threads, a while ago.

1. African Cultures And Intellectualism

2. The Dangers Of Religious Fundamentalism To Intellectualism

Enjoy!

Another take?

The lack of intellectualism in the African community is really one of the greatest thread to African development.  Africa suffers from many aflictions such as poverty, bad governance, poor education and most of all an abject disengagement from intellectual life.  Today, this disengagement from intellectualism is made more poignant by rampant spread of irrationalism promoted by the likes of the christian evangelical movements, the traditional African instititions, the quests for unrestrained wealth, etc, etc.

dalaman:
I don't believe in the other gods because Jesus says he is the way the truth and the life. My personal experiences have shown me how REAL Jesus is. I don't believe in allah because I know for certain that the koran was plagiarised from the bible. Jesus is real you only have to walk with him to know that there is no other God out there except him. I also believe that my morals do stem from the Bible. I ask this question, because I wonder why you live in this prescribed way of living if there is no eternal consequence for your action.

But the others gods also claimed to the true way to salvation and other people who follow these other gods (such as moslems, hindus, sihks) also report real personal experience with their gods.

The god of the Christians and the Christian religions was largely plagiarised from the existing religions and pagan myths of the middle and near east. Almost NOTHING about Jesus and the life he led was unique and original to him. I shall bring an old thread in which I discuss this at some length.

As per moral, I bet you DO NOT get your morals from the bible. I you did you would be a very bad person indeed. Let me remind of some of the moral injunction mandated by the bible:

1) A parent is to kill their child if the child were to curse them.

2) A rape woman must marry their rapist

3) Humans are to be given as sacrificial animals to god

4) People to be stone to death for working on the sabbath, adultery, etc.

5) One should make plans and care about the future

6) One should not defend onself againts miscreants

7) One should cut off ones bodily parts for fear of sinning.

The above just a few of the moral instructions from the bible. Now, which of these do you observe?

wirinet:
Hello Huxley, Long time no see, i have been busy keeping body soul and family together. I am unable to access your links cause of the terrible connection i have, but from Pastor AIQ's response, i get the drift. And I agree partially with the pastor. Please i want to to get a very good book i am reading right now on the meaning of existence itself from a scientific angle. You will love it.
The title of the book is " The Dancing Wu Li Masters", it tallies with what pastor is trying to say. Also i suggest pastor should read it also.

Hello Wirinet. Nice to see you again. Hope you are well.

It is a shame you are not able to access the links above as I feel the author touches on some very pertinent points. The Pastor's response above misss the mark completely and I would urge you to visit these links to get the picture for yourself.

As per the book you suggested above, I first became aware of it about a month ago when I saw a fellow passenger in a train reading it. I later check the reviews on Amazon, only to discover that it is a blend of science and eastern religion and mysticism. These sort of books are fast becoming fashionable, satisfying a desire for those unfulfilled by traditional religion. It would be presumptious to dismiss it offhand without reading it myself, but I generally do not read such books. Could you oblige me by sharing some of the most cogent lessons you have learnt form this book?

Pastor AIO:
What this guy is trying to say in a metaphorical way is that what he is spewing from his gob is utterly meaningless. He couldn't drop the hint more heavily. The video is actually entitled Meaninglessness. lol.

But on a more serious note. This guy hasn't thought through what he is trying to say properly at all. He reminds me of the way I used to think when I was a teenager and in my twenties.

1)I think that the first thing that he has got to realise is that MEANING is a reference. Meaning Means reference/inference. What do I mean by that? When you ask me what I mean you are in fact asking to what am I refering. If I said to you 'Je suis medicin' and you asked what does that Mean, and someone explained that it means that 'I am a doctor', basically that Means that the French words 'Je suis medicin' is connected and signifies and is a reference to the english words 'I am a doctor'. Meaning is a reference. It implies that there is an interconnectivity between different object and events in the world.

For example, The sky is grey with dark clouds. This MEANS that it is going to rain. The event of rainfall is intimately connected to the event of the darkening of the skies, such that one can be said to mean the other. If I make marks and sigils (alphabets) on a computer screen those sigils are a reference to something else whether concepts or words or whatever. The writings are therefore said to have meaning.

2)The quest for meaning is actually an instinct. It can be overridden (as he obviously noticed) by such occasions as the birth of his baby. However Human beings have an instinctive need for meaning. It is hard wired into the way our brain works. If you witnessed something that didn't make sense to you, your first instinctive reaction would be to try to make sense out of it. The fact that you are making sense suggests that it is a creative process that occurs in the brain and not something that is inherent in the event itself.

This instinct for meaning, for finding connections between events, is the driving force of modern scientific inquiry. We seek to understand the interconnections between events because we instinctively believe that events are interconnected, ie they make reference and point to each other. This is a big subject in it's own right based around Causality etc. It seems the belief in causality is instinctive even before we see any kind of proper evidence for it.

Not only do Science seek the way actual events refer to each other. There is a deeper instinct in ALL humans that makes us act as if (if not believe) that events we observe also refer to other events that we do not observe and we can never ever observe. Examples of these events include Theories (scientific and otherwise), Laws (scientific and otherwise), concepts, abstractions etc etc etc.

Rocks fall to the Earth Means that there is something called Force that is pulling the Rock to the earth. Now, no one has ever seen a force, gravitational or other wise. We see events that Imply (point to) the existence of such a thing as force.

I feel like I'm rambling, but this guy is so wrong on such a basic level that it is hard to address any specific points. It is the whole general premise of his arguments that just leave me spinning.
I guess I should have stopped watching from about the 58th second where he talks about the meaning of life. Since the entirety of my existence and experiences is MY LIFE how can my life have meaning. What is left for life to be referring to since life is all I am? A part of one's life can have meaning but not Life in it's entirety.

Then he confuses things further when he says Meaning is something external that 'gives life purpose and content'. Please just what does that Statement mean?

I ain't watching any of the other parts.

I saw this and took and deep breath and a long sighed for the sheer vacuity of the above.

Meaning in this sense is synonimous with PURPOSE not linguistic meaning as in "What is the meaning of the word allegro". Let me simplify it for you with the following questions:

1) What is the purpose of the life of an ameoba or a lion or a kangaroo or a chimpazee? These organisms have life, I suppose. So what is the purpose of their life?

2) Amid the vastness of the cosmos, to what extend is life in the universe meaningful in the grand scale of the universe?

3) Wind the clock back 100 millions years when dinosaurs roamed the planet. What was the meaning of life then? If there was no meaning then, at what point did meaning emerge?

dalaman:
I can see that there are quite a handfull of atheist here,I'm very curious as to why you guys have chosen to accept this belief? there seems to be increasing evidence that the universe could not be as it is were it not for a supreme creator. Since I know I can not make you guys see any good reason to believe in the bible since most of you ridicule and make fun of the bible on a daily basis I will like to know how this belief system you have adopted helps in enhancing who you are and the society you live in? Without purpose and ultimate consequence, where do you guys think morality comes from? I believe in Jehovah the God of the bible, I also believe that he is the only Supreme Being who created the whole universe and actively takes part in it(there are stories and testaments of his goodness and blessing every where). He characterizes perfection and exits as a three in one being (the Trinity). He has existed before time and outside of the physical universe. I just want to know what prevents you from doing bad to the rest of the world or what prevents you from displaying the "me" attitude towards the rest of the world and what you guys are hoping to meet when you die?

Hello and welcome to the discussion.

I see you believe in Jehovah of the bible. Why don't you believe in Allah or Thor or Sango or the myriads of other gods that exist?

Looking forward to your response.

Thankz

What are you most proud of?

What is there to be proud about? What is there really?

davidylan:
I dont think attacking Darwin is the way to go. Those three "fatal flaws" wont really stand a rigorous scientific scrutiny.

Flaw 1 - Evolution does not require a mathematical formular . . . mutations are spontaneous.

Flaw 2 - While it is true that mutations merely alter existing genes . . . alternative RNA splicing can indeed generate a gene that is entirely different in function from the existing gene without affecting it at all (which mutation would do).

Flaw 3 - The "helpless baby" theory overlooks the fact that parents play an important role in helping their young survive and grow. A baby elephant isnt really "helpless" its got mother elephant to protect her from lions.

I am a christian but sometimes its foolish to attempt to rubbish science to justify the bible. The bible is true, a lot of science is also true. The bible doesnt need science to validate it.

Mired in cognitive dissonance, I wonder. If not, can you explain the bizarre "genetic engineering" model that Jacob used to breed sheep/goat in the light of the science you seem to be an "advovate" of.

At least one Nigerian pastor will be exposed as a charlatan and fraud before the year ends. I wonder how I know this!

.B.O.S.S.:
@Huxley

Great post. But we were born into this same delapidated structure and system, does that mean we should abandon it now?

The first step in addressing the problems is recognising them.  To pretend that these don't exist is not to address the problems.  That is why I asked "What does believe in Nigeria  mean?"  Should you suspend your belief but be hopeful  or  should you believe is a practical disfunctional state?

Well, Nigeria today is in a sorry state and only the deluded would deny that. That is not to say there is no hope of redeeming the country but such redepmtion is at least 200 years in the future. To live in Nigeria today one needs great tolerance and a pretty insensitive bullshit detector. Otherwise, how would you cope with;

1) The venal local and nation polical leaders
2) Intertribal and religious conflicts
3) The rampant spread of religious irrationalism, witchcraft, superstition and downright idiocy in civil live
4) 419ism
5) The stench from carbage, human waste, etc littering public places
6) Little or no public medical system and the rampant drug conterfeiting system
7) Broken public infrastructure like electricity supply
Civil disorder and criminality
9) Tenth rate education system

etc, etc.


If you can tolerate all of this, then I think you would find Nigeria a great place to live in.

Busy_body:
Please tell me you are joking

It is not clear exactly what I mean? What does believing in a country mean?

What does "believing in Nigeria"  mean?  Has Nigerian become a deity?    Have you got doubts about the existence of Nigeria?

Christian theologians are now realising the falsehood into which they are caught and are now seeking ways to redefine the role and faith to stay current. Read the following from a theologian to see the extend of the dissonance in the christian mind
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From Saturday's Globe and Mail

March 22, 2008 at 12:38 AM EST

Taken from here

That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah, this morning will rock the walls of Toronto's West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.

But at West Hill on the faith's holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”

Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity's central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.

Generally speaking, no divine anybody makes an appearance in West Hill's Sunday service liturgy.
REV. GRETTA VOSPER - March 20, 2008 - Reverend Gretta Vosper, of the West Hill United Church in Scarborough, has written a book titled With or Without God that discusses shifting the focus of Christianity from God and Jesus to values-based spirituality. (Photo by Yvonne Berg for The Globe and Mail)
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Reverend Gretta Vosper, of the West Hill United Church in Scarborough, has written a book titled With or Without God that discusses shifting the focus of Christianity from God and Jesus to values-based spirituality. (Photo by Yvonne Berg for The Globe and Mail)

I just don’t think we can placate those in the pews long enough to transition into a kind of new community that doesn’t keep people away.
Rev. Gretta Vosper

There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.

Ms. Vosper has written a book, published this week – With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe – in which she argues that the Christian church, in the form in which it exists today, has outlived its viability and either it sheds its no-longer credible myths, doctrines and dogmas, or it's toast.

She is considered one of the bright, if unconventional, minds within the United Church, Canada's largest Protestant Christian denomination. She holds a master of divinity degree from Queen's University and was ordained in 1992. She founded and chairs the Toronto-based Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity.

Other Christian clergy and theologians have talked about the need to dramatically reform the doctrines of a faith that, with the exception of its vibrancy in the United States, has lost huge numbers of adherents throughout the Western world it once dominated as Christendom. In Canada, where 75 per cent of the population self-identifies as Christian, only about 16 per cent attend weekly services.

Addressing those statistics, what Ms. Vosper proposes is not so much reform as a scorched-earth approach.

A number of leading theologians in Britain – where the decline in adherents is more dramatic than in Canada – are on the same path, people like Richard Holloway, former bishop of Edinburgh and primate of the Scottish Episcopal (Anglican) Church, who has likened the Christian church to a self-service cafeteria stacked with messy trays of leftover food urgently in need of being thrown out.

Like Bishop Holloway, Ms. Vosper does not want to dress up the theological detritus – her words – of the past two millennia with new language in the hope of making it more palatable. She wants to get rid of it, and build on its ashes a new spiritual movement that will have relevance in a tight-knit global world under threat of human destruction.

She says there's been virtually a consensus among scholars for the past 30 years that the Bible is not some divine emanation – or in Ms. Vosper acronym, TAWOGFAT, The Authoritative Word of God For All Time – but a human project filled with contradictions and the conflicting worldviews and political perspectives of its authors.

And yet, she says, the liberal Christian churches, including her own, won't acknowledge that it is a human project, that it's wrong in parts and that, in the 21st century, it's no more useful as a spiritual and religious guide than a number of other books.

She says now that the work of biblical scholars has become publicly accessible, the churches and their clergy are caught living a lie that few people will buy much longer. “I just don't think we can placate those in the pews long enough to transition into a kind of new community that doesn't keep people away.”

She wants salvation redefined to mean new life through removing the causes of suffering in the world. She wants the church to define resurrection as “starting over,” “new chances.” She wants an end to the image of God as an intervening all-powerful authority who must be appeased to avoid divine wrath; rather she would have congregations work together as communities to define God – or god – according to their own worked-out definitions of what is holy and sacred. She wants the eucharist – the symbolic eating and drinking of Jesus's body and blood to make the congregation part of Jesus's body – to be instead a symbolic experience of community love.

Theologians asked to comment on her book said they wouldn't until they've read it.

But one of her colleagues who knows her well, Rev. Rob Oliphant, the progressive pastor of Toronto's Eglinton St. George's United Church, said, “While I'm somewhat sympathetic to the aims of it all – getting rid of the nonsense and keeping the core faith – I think that there is something lacking in it all. Gone is metaphor, poetry, symbol, image, beauty, paradox.”

Ms. Vosper said she and her congregation have tried hard not to lose those elements in their search for the sacred and the transcendent in life.

She met with members of her congregation last Sunday to discuss what the impact might be of her book.

She said it would take only a single vote of a presbytery – a local governing body of the church – to bring her before the church courts if a complaint against her is made, and the courts could be interested in examining what it means to be in “essential agreement” with the church's statement of faith.

“I can find myself in there [the statements of faith] but there's whole parts of it where I go, ‘Oh my goodness, this is terrible.' If someone says to me, ‘Do you believe in God?' I can come up with an answer that would satisfy the courts of the United Church. But would it reflect what's stated in their statement of faith? I don't think so. But it wouldn't be very far from what my colleague down the street, and what his colleague down the street from him, would say. That's the problem.”

Watch here

In his sermons, Joel Osteen does not talk about God. Joel Osteen instead talks about almost everything except God. He has a television ministry, a massive church, $43 million a year in tithes and another $36 million a year in mailed in donations, but he won’t talk about God. He, like Pastor Kevin Gerald, talks about more pleasant topics, such as donating money to him and positive thinking. He has written two books, the second of which sold 3 million copies, but his books don’t really talk about God either. It’s just his bland and boring advice on how to live a happy life that has been thought of by other people first, “Think positively about yourself” and other such drivel. More here

Adultery, Divorce and Salary of Pastor John Hagee


“Christians don’t steal or lie, they don’t get divorced or have abortions.” - John Hagee

A megachurch televangelist like John Hagee who spouts outrageous beliefs and has millions of followers must lead an immaculate personal life to keep his congreg

ation listening to him, right? Wrong. People apparently will follow John Hagee blindly and will not question him even when details of his adulterous personal life are made public.

John Hagee was the leader of the charismatic Trinity Church in 1975 and was the father of two children. John Hagee had an adulterous affair with a woman and admitted to immorality in front of his church. Pastor John Hagee then divorced the mother of his two children and married a younger woman (Diana Castro, now Diana Hagee) from that same congregation. Pastor John Hagee willfully abused his position of trust and power to take advantage of a younger gullible woman and cheat on his wife.

So what happened after John Hagee admitted to cheating and abusing his power? Did he repent and pursue becoming a better person and living a life based on Biblical principles? Did people stop following his ministry? The answers are very obvious. John Hagee married the woman he cheated on his wife with and immediately became the pastor of another congregation- the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio Texas.

For more, read here .