Damnit! I prefer to think of the Old Testament as literal. God was so much more badass in the Old Testament. I mean... look! (Actually, don't look if you're easily offended by a man talking about the Back of the Bible with sarcastic seriousness.)

-- Griffinhart

obviously i choose the easy way out. i'm an agnostic =D

Just realized this thread does not belong in Onlink Banter. Moving it to General.

And then I'm going to bed... Modern World History and AP English exams tomorrow. >.<

-- Griffinhart

Ok just to say i'm atheist (or how ever you spell it) i was born a Christian Orthodox-Greek. But i got out of religion after a massive battle in my head between science and spiritual belief. In the end i concluded with the following.

As everyone should know the probability that god exists is 50-50
reason being that humans currently obey the law that matter is matter and 1 + 1 = 2. anything other than this or that goes outside this circle of knowledge is redeemed *Impossible* but there is something within our own knowledge that just confuses the god theory but makes it simple also.

what i have found is a simple word no one ever used. Fate. these 4 letters if used carefully could make everything calmer between religions. or not i just hope it can.

what is typed next is in neither favour that god exists or not its purley what i believe:

lets start simple. a man (or woman) says "i am gonna change my fate" in truth your not. reason being that it was your "fate" to decide that and the actions you will soon take has been decided by fate already. now what if we changed the person to god? wasn't it god's fate to create earth? wasn't it god's fate to become god? it was. in other words its not god that i point has the almighty power. its fate something that we quickly named is actually the true power in my belief. in anything that you may say otherwise fate or destiny is something that we redeem *possible* yet it has the same qualities as something that is *impossible* seeing that at any time a massive elephant for instance could appear in space above russia. thats *impossible* but it was suppose to happen cause it was its *fate* to happen.

I don't worry if god exists or not. i respect all religions in the fact that religion gives you a god figure so when your all alone you have company and you don't go insane by being lonely. Hell in other words.

In the end all i'm saying is. In the end its our Fate to find out if god exists. and a person in this day and age needs proof to put their heart into something. if god can grant second chances then i guess we'll all be doing this convo in about 10000000000000 million million million years time saying wow were back. so we can believe in god and live happily ever after. or we could face total darkness by dying. but we live forever because there are infinite factors.

Parralel universes. (spelling crap). there could be a universe out there that we think is heaven because it takes the souls of the dead here and puts them somewere else in another time period. or planet/ galaxy/ unierse. i know i'm completely off subject here but this is just what i've come to conclude.

Admin delete this if it becomes a Flame war. i was just typing this cause i'm just trying to see what people *HONESTLY* think.

A person who replies "thats bull" didn't think seriously.

Not really. I'm an existentialist so I think fate is bull (free will rules the day), and believe me, I have been thinking seriously about this sort of thing for quite awhile.

wasn't it your fate to think you have free will?

Wasn't it? There's no way to tell but I don't like to think so. And here's why.
If everything is fate, then that means all the horrible shit that happens has been set up to happen.
If there's free will, then if someone does something terrible, it's because they decided to.

I'd much rather believe that the 9/11 attacks happened because someone decided to do something evil rather than because it's all part of some divine plan.
Not to mention believing in fate surrenders all control of your life. You're basically an automaton. You might as well kill yourself because there's no point, and after all killing yourself would be fate anyway wouldn't it?

Y'know, if we bought into that whole "fate" thing, then we could all commit acts of "evil" and say that we were all "fated" to do it, rather than owning up to our actions.

I like that idea! A cult of victimhood! Now I can totally go off and drop out of highschool, never get into college, and play WoW for the rest of my mortal life - because that's my fate!

No, a free will system is, IMO, the better (and more likely) one, because I have a Calvinist/Hobbesian attitude when it comes to people. People suck. The only thing keeping them from sucking even more is other people sucking, and the thought of life sucking if they suck too hard.

-- Griffinhart

So there for fate and religion are nearly esactly the same all thanks to the fact people can use it to their own selfish means. but the only true true way to have total free will is time travel. but then it was your fate to do that (if you could) fate is anywere you look the only reason people believe in free will is because we don't know what will happen and believe by not knowing whats going to happen we have some power that we can have ourself but (just like religion) the belief is only there so that we don't feel powerless and feel all depressed because we were only born to be in fates big massive puppet show (kinda maybe how god feels)

So in other words, you do believe that all the bad shit that happens is set up and has to happen as part of some master plan?
I'm sorry. I just find the idea repulsive.

Orion, the idea of fate is retarded. If you can weigh decisions in your head, and make choices then clearly fate is false. Fates flaws lie in the fact that it pulls all control away from those that believe in it. Demonstrate your free will, be reading this paragraph, then choosing or failing to choose weather or not to lift your arm.

The problem with a fate/free will argument is that the pro-fate people (the fatalists?) can just as easily say that "I was fated to do this!" as the free will people (willers?) can say "you decided to do that!". There's no way to prove or disprove that one or the other is right.

So basically, the argument devolves into people calling each other (and each others' ideas) stupid.

Thank you for throwing the first stone, Gwanky.

Now, be less flame-y or I'll have to lock the thread.

-- Griffinhart

actually i was waiting for someone to write this:

"the future has not yet been writen"

thats what i was hoping. the only way you can beat any argument, weather it be fate, god or science is by saying simply
the future hasn't been writen yet.

god could one day just vanish
science could one day be redeemed as magic
and fate is always around but since we can't see into the future fate is replaced with free will.

I'm pretty sure that if anything it's the other way around...things that are viewed as "magical" are shown to have scientific explanations.

Since this appears to have deteriorated into a serious topic, I will give it a serious comment.

Religion is not evil, despite the claims of the many angry atheists in the world. There is no doubt that many awful things have been done in the name of religion: this doesn't mean that religion itself is evil; after all, if you tot up the number of rapes that have occured in the past you'll find it's a lot bigger than the number of crusades that have been run, yet I see a distinct lack of people calling for the banning of sex.

No, the proportion of crimes done by religious people to crimes done by non-religious people is high in the main due to the fact that historically, the numbers are in the same proportion - that is to say, there are many more crimes in history committed by religious people because there are many more religious people in history than non-religious. It's only in the last century or so that atheism has really come into its own.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not at all claiming that atheists and agnostics are bad people. Indeed, some of my closest friends are non-believers, but you'd be hard pushed to find more moral people than they. As I see it, that's not what this debate is about, whether religious people are good or bad, but rather whether the concept as a whole is good or bad.

So let's take a look at some examples.

From my own experience - being Christian - look at the letters of Paul, to start with. If you see the state of the parishes to which he wrote, and what he was doing for them, you must agree.

Look at — slightly closer to home this time — the introduction of the rights of the blacks in the USA. Martin Luthur King, a Baptist minister, whose faith led the African-Americans out of an era of oppression.

Look at - finally, in the present day - the protest of the monks in Burma against the military regime.

Yes, there have been some incidents in the past - specifically the Crusades. I doubt any of us would deny that they are wrong. Conversely, look at the suicide bombers of extremist Islam who terrorise us today. But consider this - the testosterone levels are the same, religion or not, and this violence would occur with or without religion, so blaming religion for it really doesn't make much sense.

Just my two cents.