god got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming
he had the balls to come the gall to die and then forgive us
though i dont wonder why, i wonder what he thought it would get us
-- Andy Prieboy

Of course, for any second coming to occur there would actually has to be a god, which there's not, and then that guy Jesus would have had to actually have existed, not to mention being god's son, and so on and so forth.

Really people, what's with the gullibility?

If someone came to you and told you "Your parents just died in a car crash" would you believe him right out, or demand proof?

Likewise, if someone else came and just said "Hey, you just won the Lottery!" would you believe him without proof of it?

Then why in blazes do you believe a person who comes and tells you there's "a god who created the whole universe and loves you very much but will still allow all sorts of shitty stuff to happen to you", and then refuses to give any amount of proof whatsoever, apart from brandishing around a book that's known to be full of mistakes, contradictions, and to have more versions and variants than anything else man has created?

Anyone?

err, well, a few points,

One, God never Brandished the bible.

People watched things happening and attempted to tell stories, the stories were collected by the early church, selected for consistency, and placed together. It has since gone through numerous edits, retranslations and apocryphal adjustments. Its an attempt at a history of peoples' experience with the divine.

As far as the man, Jesus himself?

I don't see him as a divine being which subjected itself to humanity to enable us to follow, but rather a man unusually in touch with the divine who desired us to emulate.

If you read the Gospel of Thomas, the idea of the divine existing everywhere is prevalent. (It's a collection of sayings of Jesus, considered apocryphal by the Vatican because Jesus says some pretty harsh stuff against organized religion).

I can imagine him standing, telling a congregation:

"...You are all children of the divine..." (remember, God is a translation)

and then a person standing up and saying:

"but you're his son!"

and Jesus shakes his head...

the only 3 rules in my personal belief system.

#1: GOD IS. only true thing that can be said if you believe in a higher being/power/pasta dish. - since GOD is a higher being any attempt to categorize what he wants from me, what his reasons are, and what he wants is an attempt to demean him*. trying to understand is an attempt to limit GOD by making him smaller than I am, for to understand something you have to be somehow greater than it.

#2 - My GOD is just that, mine. What -I- believe is only applicable to me, I am unique and what works for me is completely inapplicable to someone else. Any attempts to convince other people that I am correct and thier belief is wrong is the worst form of pigheaded stubborn assinine stupidity. since I ignore pigheaded assinine stuborn stupid people, I also get to ignore anyones attempt to convert me, but my only response to them should be I just dont see it that way, lets discuss something else .

#3 - It's what I do that matters, not why i do it or who I think i'm doing it for. I have to live with what I did, since GOD cannot be explained in no way shape or form can I claim he wanted me to do something in order to excuse my actions. If I hurt someone, it is my doing, not GOD's.

*(male pronoun used only because the english language doesn't have a good gender neutral one)

Due to rule #2 this is the only post I will be making in this thread. except for my allowed response.

PS- The bible is just a book.

The old testament is an excellent set of guidelines and fables geared towards a largely agrigarian society. As a series of instructions for living in a hunter/gatherer and early farming environment it works quite well. If viewed in the same light as Aesops Fables the old testement is simply a series of morality stories to teach people 'acceptable' behavior as defined at the time it was written.

the new testement is nothing more than a re-written and much edited political creation of the post-roman empire church that works mainly to justify thier right to exercise political power over the secular leaders of the time. The bible itself has absolutely nothing to do with GOD anymore in my opinion.

It might have at one time, but we have no way of truly understanding the political/economic/social connotations and usages of the time it was written, and without that understanding we can never translate it accurately even if we had complete 'original' texts.

/me nods with what spellcast is saying.

@jexkerome

Many a theory nowadays is nothing more but belief (and will probably stay that way until further notice).
If you demand proof for everything, next to nothing is actually existant, because you can't prove some things, only approximate them (and that is not proof).

Taking the logic approach to religion is just not going to work.

That said, I'm atheistic, but don't let it get to you.

I'm not gonna say much else in this thread except for that I agree pretty much with Spellcast, but with a little more faith thrown in for good measure.

I think religion can be summed up in one generalized rule:
1. Don't be a dick.

That being said, it's a lot like [Itan]. That's our one guild rule.

move along, move along, no sarcastic remarks about [Itan]'s rules here, none at all, nope...

underneath, a cold and gray november sky.
we can make believe that kennedy is still alive.
we're shooting for the moon and smiling jackie's driving by
they say good try.
tomorrow wendy youre going to die.
-- andy prieboy

Jexkerome is pretty much right on the money and toshiro sounds like he's been to
too many Tony Robbins seminars: "You can do ANYTHING if you just keep a positive
attitude!!!" Toshiro, many things can be proven. If they cannot, you MUST remain
sceptical. Religion and many other superstitions are believed in because we are
afraid of the unknown (read: death). Taking advantage of this knowledge down
through history, many clever people have gotten the women, money and power by
manipulating peoples fears. The fact that all religions insist that you "take it on faith" PROVES that there is nothing behind it.

sadly, rattman, all logic systems are built on faith; call them 'axioms' but they are faith none the less.

Ananzi is right. An extremely little known fact is that the mechanism of "faith" and the scientific method are almost identical. Faith is not just something you use with religion.

1. Observation of phenomenon
2. Formulation of hypothesis
3. Experimentation
4. Result

The proof never comes until the first three steps have been taken. In Jexkerome's example (I don't mean to single him out, but its just a good example), you 1) Hear (or observe) that someone is saying your parents have died in a car crash. 2) You form the hypothesis that what he is saying is untrue (you could also formulate the hypothesis that what he is saying IS true - it goes either way). Religious people call this beleif or hope. 3) You DO something to find out the truth. Call your parents, wait with patience until they arrive at home, go to the scene of the accident. 4) You make a conclusion based upon the result.

You hear, beleive, you act upon that beleif, and you find out if step one was correct or not.

Now, sadly humorous, your unbeleif (step two, or hypothesis) could be set so concretely in your mind, that your parents would come home, but you would deny that it was actually your parents. You would justify it by thinking they were impostors, figments of your imagination, spy robots sent to kill you, zombies, ghosts, clones, the effects of last night's bad pasta, etc.

You use faith to walk, breathe, buy a car, choose a girlfriend, or to kill Shape (in which case your faith would be wrongly founded).

Ah, but here you are speaking of a different type of faith: the one based on prior or related experiences.

As an example of this (yours are quite adequate too), if I hear Niki is going to fight, say, Pilot 13, I'll put my faith in Niki beating Pilot 13 because the only pilot I know who takes out Niki with any regularity is Eldrad. Now, the outcome of the match is still by no means certain, it COULD happen that somehow, by some bizarre ocurrence, Pilot 13 kills Niki, but my prior experience with Niki's fighting skills tells me otherwise, so I place my faith on Niki's skill, and go and bet on Niki winning the fight.

Religious Faith, on the other hand, bases itself on a book and the ramblings of a bunch of people that believe in that book, but NOT on any real, reproducible, proven, objective experiences, facts, or theories. In fact, when Religion tries to use the Scientific method it does it BACKWARDS (which is why the real scientits hate it when they do that):

1. There is a God that created everything (not even a theory for them, but rather UNDENIABLE FACT, like, WTF?)
2. All experiments, hypothesis, and observations they perform afterwards are based on 1, and since 1 MUST be true, why, then any theory or observation, no matter how lame, incorrect, contradictory, incomplete, or inconclusive, MUST be correct. Stupidity at its best.

In other words, while science goes "x and y and therefore The Earth Revolves Around the Sun and not the Other Way Around(to quote one example)", Religion goes "GOD therefore x and y". Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong!

Just go around, say, the Creatonists/ID sites and read about Dinosaurs in the Ark of Noah to see the kind of crap their "application of science" brings to the fore.

The second coming is slated for later this month. incarnate already mentioned we'd be able to beta it in this week's time frame.

Patience everyone. 2.0 is around the corner.

What bothers me about generalizations is the stuff like what jex just said:
In other words, while science goes "x and y and therefore The Earth Revolves Around the Sun and not the Other Way Around(to quote one example)", Religion goes "GOD therefore x and y". Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong!
Just go around, say, the Creatonists/ID sites and read about Dinosaurs in the Ark of Noah to see the kind of crap their "application of science" brings to the fore.

Now, I would say that most organized religion (perhaps excepting southern baptists in the United States - jab ) thinks "Intelligent Design" is a load of crap. Religion gets a bad name from folks like Pat Robertson and Pope Urban VIII (Who, in 1633, harassed an aged Galileo into retracting his theories and put him under indefinite house arrest). I routinely ridicule "creationists", yet I am in no way an agnostic/atheist.

This is the same as religious figures pointing out the fact that scientists "never get it right" because they are always revising and updating theories, demonstrating their ignorance of the scientific method, which allows for continuous improvement.

Scientists accept facts that contradict their theories and then they revise their ideas or scrap them altogether. Staunch religious activists cannot do that, and they blindly cling to statements/theories/wild accusations that are proven FALSE. Many folks who are not religious name this stubborn refusal to acknowledge truth as "faith." That's not what faith is.

why cant ananzi write his own stuff?

Right on the money, LeberMac.

Its not that there are different kinds of faith, jex, it is just that the examples of faith you defined stops at scientific method step #2.

Step #1: Person hears about the concept of God from another person or people or book (Koran/Bible/Bhagwad Gita/My Life by Bill Clinton/etc.)

Step #2: Hypothesis. This is usually the most important part, because you can go two ways. You can beleive or not beleive. But you won't ever get to step #3 (work/experiment) and thus will never reach #4 (conclusion/witness).

It isn't possible for you to reverse the steps. The steps ARE circular, (meaning - you can take the supporting evidence or facts from received from step #4 to start the process over again) but it is logically impossible to reverse them. But I can understand why you would think that. Many religious people, like many people everywhere, have a hard time explaining their feelings or why they beleive or work for something.

nope.. sorry, scientific method does not apply to religeon/faith. An integral part of the scientific method is that you MUST be able to formulate an experiment to test your hypothesis and a controlable and re-creatable manner.

Additionally step 2 in the scientific method is to generate a best guess of WHY something works, not to form an opinion THAT something is true or false. (thats step 4, and step 4 can ONLY be applied to the specific step 2 in question, and only AFTER experementation. (step 3))

the scientific method is used to describe the inner workings of OBERVABLE EVENTS, not to prove or disprove that they occur.

Step 1 is to observe, either directly or indirectly, an event.
Step 2 is to form a 'best guess' as to what CAUSES that event.
step 3 is to devise a repeatable experement to test your best guess.
step 4 is to decide if your experement proves, disproves or partially proves your best guess. At this point unless it was totally proved you modify step 2 based on the data you collected, redesign the experement to take into account your changes and rinse/repeat.

Spellcast is right, you can't apply the scientific method to love, faith, hope, fear, etc. (yet.)
For if we KNEW God existed, I mean, if he played poker with us every other Thursday, well, then a lot of things would fall apart:

Hey, God! Can you spot me $100 till payday? C'mon, you know I'm good for it! Awwww. please? Great! Thanks, you're the best!

<payday rolls around>

<knock, knock>
Yes? Oh, Hello God. No, no I can't pay it back in full, but you're a forgiving guy, right? I mean, your son died for our sins and all... don't wanna let THAT go to waste now, do ya? I can give ya $20 now and the rest next Thursday, OK? Great! Thanks, you're the best!

[God portrayed as male due to my own traditional upbringing. Feel free to substitute your own gender pronouns, or diety in place of "God."]

I didn't say it WAS the scientific method - I said it was extremely similar.

The -language- between the process of faith and the scientific method is different, yes, but the idea and the process themselves are almost exactly alike.

You cannot form a 'best guess' as to what causes an event unless you have witnessed that event. In faith, you cannot form faith in a supreme being unless you have heard about him and some quality he posseses (I.E. "Supreme Being"). --A closer example to the scientific method would be that you observe some event (like the complexity of nature, or a kind act done by somebody else), and you make a 'best guess' as to what caused it (some people would say "natural events" others would say "God."

Your 'best guess' is based upon a beleif. It is your beleif that sways to where your guess goes. You _beleive_ that such-and-such caused the event.

Step 3 is exactly the same. You have to investigate and try try try try and test test test test. Sometimes (extremely rarely) you get it right very quickly. Some scientific (and religious) experiments can take years.

Step 4 is also exactly the same as you stated, Spellcast.

I get what you're saying too, LeberMac. It would be great if faith were as easy as that, but in my expereince, religion is a much finer and intricate thing than our current understanding of science. Its not as easy as some lab experiment, mostly because there's so much confusion on the subject of religion. Especially about who God actually is.

I understand there may be some confusion as well. My definition of "faith" is probably a little different than most people's. In the everyday definition of "faith", the word is synonimous with "beleif." I see beleif as being included in faith - faith being a process, but there can't be any faith without beleif.

So to recap, even with the scientific method, you're proving two things with step #4 - what caused step #1, and also that whatever it is that caused step #1 actually exists. That's how humanity discovered that atoms exist - the atoms themselves weren't observed first, but their effects were. Study of the effects eventually led to the discovery that the existence of the atom was true. Although many things in science (and religion) are discovered by 'accident.'