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Yes there is God.



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super_etecoon said:
Rubang B said:
There is a G-d.

He is the way, the truth, and the light.

His name is Shigeru Miyamoto.


 YES!  Thank you!



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rickthestick2 said:

First of all i want to say that alot of the arguements going on now were done to death previously in this thread and that if people plan to continue posting in this thread they should read the previous posts in this thread. Just a suggestion. 

wareagle372 said:
Rath said:
Also I have made several very VERY christian people admit that god cannot be omnipotent. Omnipotence requires the ability to do ANYTHING, god is unable to destroy satan or come near sin and as such is not omnipotent.

that is a great arguement! this arguement has been around for thousands of years. I questioned it myself. If you come down to it, God created sin. Yes, God, the holy of holy, had to have to created sin. Why? Because if he didn't create sin. That would not make him God. God can be near sin, but he chooses not to because sin does nothing but destroy. Sin was made to show God's love for men, who accepted sin as a part of them. This section is a long story, so message me if you want to hear it.

To the God can't destroy satan, that is a lie. God has made everything according to a plan. God could have destroyed satan a long time ago, but did it to show his power. This section is a long story, so message me if you want to hear it.


 1. God did not create sin. God loves all that he creates, how could God create something and yet hate it? Is that God? No. Sin is an idea or concept; it is a rebellion against God and what he has created. It is a result of Free Will of which God gives his creatures. Sin wasn't created in the sense that it had a maker, it came from the Free Will, it is a rebellion against God and it came from Satan (from God's own household) and spread like the disease it is. Sin is the name given to the "dark" side of Free Will, but it is not of God and it is not from God, and it does not belong to God nor did God Create it. God cannot hate what he has created because that isn't God, what you end up with is an Idol who does great and mighty things, yet hates what he makes and kills people he loves for it.

2.  God can destroy anyone at any given point in time no matter what. Why? Because of his Eternal Omnipotence, Omniscience, and his Righteousness and Justice. Why doesn't he destroy Satan? Because that is not God. His Grace and Mercy is beyond human imaginations, and he does not deny his Grace and Mercy towards any of his creatures, and yet his Justice and Righteousness will purge the wicked and avenge the blood of his people. Vengence belongs to God not his Creatures. Therefore Satan will get his Justice hand delivered to him don't worry, but God's plan (as confusing as it may be) is unfolding, and if you read the bible you'd even here the Demons say it to Jesus "Do you come to torture us before the appointed time?" Why do they say this? Because the time is not yet. 

 Can God make something so heavy he could not lift it? -Dtewi

This is an erroneous statement that spawns from the misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the concept qualities and overall being that is God. God does not need to lift things as if he were a creature. Nor does he need to sleep or eat or think, walk, or stretch or any of those Creature-based activities. What your doing now is comparing God to Creature/Men. The God in your sentence is not God then, but an Idol wretched in the depths of your mind.

*** I want to recommend the book: Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer to all Christians and to anybody else who wants to know who the Christian God truly is. It is a book that goes along trying to grasp whatever the human mind can about God. *** 


i like your opinion, but there is one huge problem, if God did not make sin, how could he be omnipotent? God had to have created sin! Just like God made diseases, bacteria, and other parasites. God made both the good of this world, and after man sinned, he created the bad as well.



 

I can't believe in a G-d who created humans, gave them eternal life, gave them free will, tricked them into doing something bad, punished them for doing the bad thing he tricked them into doing by taking their eternal life away, destroyed the whole world except for one family, and then impregnated one of his creation with magic to give birth to himself to sacrifice himself to himself for the sins he tricked his creation into committing.

That's just one religion though. I don't believe in the rest of them either.

I believe that legally, the burden of proof is on the state, so until California proves that there is a G-d, I won't believe it.



Favorite Companies: Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve.
Recent New Favorites: Grasshopper, Atlus. (R.I.P. Clover.)
Heroes/Homies: Shigeru Miyamoto, Gunpei Yokoi, Will Wright, Eric Chahi, Suda51, Brian Eno, David Bowie.
Haiku Group: Haiku Hell.
Nemeses: Snesboy, fkusumot. 
GameDaily Article that Interviewed Me: Console Defense Forces.


God is a concept by which we measure our pain.


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Where in california rubang?

 

edit...nevermind...i checked your prof...i was arrested there once...for hopping a freight train.   



rickthestick2 said:

 

*** I want to recommend the book: Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer to all Christians and to anybody else who wants to know who the Christian God truly is. It is a book that goes along trying to grasp whatever the human mind can about God. ***

For that, I would like to recommend this book called  "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.

What a read.

 



your mother said:
rickthestick2 said:

 

*** I want to recommend the book: Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer to all Christians and to anybody else who wants to know who the Christian God truly is. It is a book that goes along trying to grasp whatever the human mind can about God. ***

For that, I would like to recommend this book called "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.

What a read.

 


- European Middle Age came to mind ...

- Arab's conquest, too...

- Human sacrifices of ancient agricultural society... 

 

I could be wrong but I see those as possibly being mentioned. May you give a brief description about the book? 



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tiachopvutru said:
your mother said:
rickthestick2 said:

 

*** I want to recommend the book: Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer to all Christians and to anybody else who wants to know who the Christian God truly is. It is a book that goes along trying to grasp whatever the human mind can about God. ***

For that, I would like to recommend this book called "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.

What a read.

 


- European Middle Age came to mind ...

- Arab's conquest, too...

- Human sacrifices of ancient agricultural society...

 

I could be wrong but I see those as possibly being mentioned. May you give a brief description about the book?


That, and many more. Seriously, if you are into this kind of theological / rhetorical / philosophical debate, you practically owe it to yourself to read this book. Caveat emptor, however: Be prepared to read the book more than once, and make sure you have an encyclopedia handy. This guy goes deep and likes to quote / cite things most people haven't even heard of.

The is the review from the Washington Post - I agree with some parts of the review, not with others; what the reviewer fails to realize IMO is Hitchens is writing as parody, as satire, as irony, while the reviewer seems to take the book quite literally. In any case, here is the review:

"A century and a half ago Pope Pius IX published the Syllabus of Errors, a rhetorical tour de force against the high crimes and misdemeanors of the modern world. God Is Not Great, by the British journalist and professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens, is the atheists' equivalent: an unrelenting enumeration of religion's sins and wickedness, written with much of the rhetorical pomp and all of the imperial condescension of a Vatican encyclical.

Hitchens, who once described Mother Teresa as "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," is notorious for making mincemeat out of sacred cows, but in this book it is the sacred itself that is skewered. Religion, Hitchens writes, is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." Channeling the anti-supernatural spirits of other acolytes of the "new atheism," Hitchens argues that religion is "man-made" and murderous, originating in fear and sustained by brute force. Like Richard Dawkins, he denounces the religious education of young people as child abuse. Like Sam Harris, he fires away at the Koran as well as the Bible. And like Daniel Dennett, he views faith as wish-fulfillment.

Historian George Marsden once described fundamentalism as evangelicalism that is mad about something. If so, these evangelistic atheists have something in common with their fundamentalist foes, and Hitchens is the maddest of the lot. Protestant theologian John Calvin was "a sadist and torturer and killer," Hitchens writes, and the Bible "contain[s] a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre."

As should be obvious to any reasonable person -- unlike Hitchens I do not exclude believers from this category -- horrors and good deeds are performed by believers and non-believers alike. But in Hitchens's Manichaean world, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Indeed, Hitchens arrives at the conclusion that the secular murderousness of Stalin's purges wasn't really secular at all, since, as he quotes George Orwell, "a totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy." And in North Korea today, what has gone awry is not communism but Confucianism.

Hitchens is not so forgiving when it comes to religion's transgressions. He aims his poison pen at the Dalai Lama, St. Francis and Gandhi. Among religious leaders only the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. comes off well. But in the gospel according to Hitchens whatever good King did accrues to his humanism rather than his Christianity. In fact, King was not actually a Christian at all, argues Hitchens, since he rejected the sadism that characterizes the teachings of Jesus. "No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism" in postwar America, writes Hitchens. But he's wrong. It was the prophetic faith of black believers that gave them the strength to stand up to the indignities of fire hoses and police dogs. As for those white liberals inspired by Paine, Mencken and Hitchens's other secular heroes, well, they stood down.

Hitchens says a lot of true things in this wrongheaded book. He is right that you can be moral without being religious. He is right to track contemporary sexism and sexual repression to ancient religious beliefs. And his attack on "intelligent design" is not only convincing but comical, coursing as it does through the crude architecture of the appendix and our inconvenient "urinogenital arrangements."

What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself.

Hitchens claims that some of his best friends are believers. If so, he doesn't know much about his best friends. He writes about religious people the way northern racists used to talk about "Negroes" -- with feigned knowing and a sneer. God Is Not Great assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naïf. To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition, that ordinary Hindus view masturbation as an offense against Krishna, and that ordinary Jews cheer when a renegade Orthodox rebbe sucks the blood off a freshly circumcised penis. It is to believe that faith is always blind and rituals always empty -- that there is no difference between taking communion and drinking the Kool-Aid (a beverage Hitchens feels compelled to mention no fewer than three times).

If this is religion, then by all means we should have less of it. But the only people who believe that religion is about believing blindly in a God who blesses and curses on demand and sees science and reason as spawns of Satan are unlettered fundamentalists and their atheistic doppelgangers. Hitchens describes the religious mind as "literal and limited" and the atheistic mind as "ironic and inquiring." Readers with any sense of irony -- and here I do not exclude believers -- will be surprised to see how little inquiring Hitchens has done and how limited and literal is his own ill-prepared reduction of religion.

Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant man, and there is no living journalist I more enjoy reading. But I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject. In the end, this maddeningly dogmatic book does little more than illustrate one of Hitchens's pet themes -- the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep."

That last paragraph is testament to the reviewer's inability to detect the humor within the book but I won't get into that. Suffice to say that for every coin there are two sides. I simple presented one of many flip sides to rickthestick2's coin. (And I'm not saying that rickthestick2 is wrong or that I am right)

I do, however, love this dialogue from the movie Dogma (and firmly "believe" in it, ironic as it may sound):

Rufus: He still digs humanity, but it bothers Him to see the shit that gets carried out in His name - wars, bigotry, televangelism. But especially the factioning of all the religions. He said humanity took a good idea and, like always, built a belief structure on it.

Bethany: Having beliefs isn't good?

Rufus: think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should be malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.




There's lots of good evidence that Rufus was an apostle.