Excellent point Footbag. Honestly you can't have a free society unless there is a separation of Church and State, but that is another topic all together.

I explained that in my second post already

Time is not a line, it´s a dimension like left -right, up-down, etc. We just can´t walk through it. It´s quite possible the universe always "was" and btw: You can create every sort of life from the material we had before the big bang. Yes, humans too. We consist only of Electrons, Neutrons and Protons. What defines a material is HOW MANY Neutrons/electrons/Protons does it exist of?

Theoretically speaking, you could take a stone and mix up his protons and you could create a human - this is nearly impossible of course, as we´re complex beeings, but in some billion years it is quite possible these neutrons (etc.) mix up in a way they can interact with each other. Everything is "information" and as soon as a building of electrons and protons and neutrons are able to "read" this is information you call it life.

You´re made of the same things as your computer is. Basically.

Hey dpmnymkrprez

none of those links on the link work

I love discussing religion and politics, just not on forums. (that's why I've stayed away from the Hugo Chavez thread as well). I just don't think the message board post system works well for these kinds of discussions. It's such a wide topic with such complexities that it's too easy to say the wrong thing or not convey your message properly when you have to type out your whole argument at once. I'll discuss religion for hours face to face, where we can easily interrupt someone to clear up points and where we can read a person's tone of voice and body language to better tell their meaning.

That said, I'm a strong athiest and an existentialist. And when I say strong athiest, I don't mean it as a really really big athiest! Their are two types of athiesm, strong and weak. A strong athiest does not believe in any religion, higherpower or creator being whatsoever, where a weak athiest rejects all organized religions, but still acknowledges that there might be some form of power or creator, just that we can't really know. Weak athiesm is often mistaken for agnosticism.

The thing with Hitler is abiguous, we really can't say if he was an atheist for sure, but what about the fact that the vast majority of his followers were Christains. Atheism has never made anyone evil or murderous, but religion certainly has. Atheists like Stalin who have become mass murderers were sociapathic, paranoid, and really just crazy, and that had nothing to do with their atheism. Religious doctorine and beliefs on the other hand has been used directly to turn poeple on the boarderline of being crazy into full blown pyschopaths. It has made people who otherwise wouldn't kill into murderers, and murderers into mass murderers.

You could line up 100 what to get that result, monkeys? Anyone with half a brain can copy down something word for word. Your analogy only works when the message is passed on verbally. And if you think the Bible had an entirely different message at first and got warped through the translation of careless people, what the hell are the chances that the Bible would still be as coherent as it is? There would be no defending the Bible at all if it was as flawed as you're suggesting it is due to translation. Would so many people be so moved by an incoherent text?

Again, notice that I'd never have to argue that the message of any other book translated between languages got warped beyond its original meaning. No other book seems to scare people based solely on its message the way the Bible does, which is funny since it's a message of peace and love. That's because, if the Bible is true, it changes everything - and for some reason it's frighteningly difficult to disprove.

And the Crusades (and other violence done by "Christians") is a paper-thin argument against Christianity; you can't point out the actions of certain Christians that don't follow the lessons of the Bible and then suggest that the Bible causes war. And if religion causes war, maybe that's because knowing the true meaning of life is just that important. (I would suggest that having a different religion, just like having a different skin tone or different anything, is another excuse for one group to hate another. That doesn't make religion bad; it makes prejudice bad, and prejudice is not a Bible-lesson.)

Lastly, don't get mad at people trying to share the Bible with you. Gee, what assholes; they care about your soul.

Edit - Oh, and you mention that a good deal of the Bible was written down after the fact. Uh... duh? What, if it's not a journal someone wrote in every night you don't accept it? Most historical texts are written after the fact; the Bible is written more closely following the events within it than most other historical texts, so if anything it's more reliable.

Before i post, PlagueOfLocust, i agree with you 100%.

But anyways, I think like this. The Universe is Everything. It is all of Matter, all of Space, and all of Time. There is nothing beyond the Universe, meaning there is nothing beyond Matter, nothing beyond Space, and nothing beyond Time. Therefore, time is infinate. But, time is only part of Enternity, where God Is.

Time has limited infinance. To explain, think of the numbers 1 and 2. 1 is the beginning of time and 2 is the end of time. Between 1 and 2, how many different numbers are there? An infinate amount. But there is still a beginning and end right? 1 is still the beginning and 2 is still the end. That's what i see time as. A limited infinance. Eternity is outside of time. Time moves forward, but Eternity doesn't move. It Is, and God Is. It Is because God Is, meaning that God alone is Eternal, and because of the Eternal Power of God, the limited infinity of Time came to be in exsistance. Understand? 

It is perfectly fine to ask where does God come from. When you raise a child in Christ he eventually will ask you, "Well, where did God come from?". That's good, becuase that means your child is thinking. It is then when you tell the child that God has no origin, which leaves the child challenging everything he knows to grasp this concept. But he can't. No one can. God has created Everything. Everything is the Universe. All we know of is the Universe, and so, all we know is of Everything, and because God has created Everything we come to understand that Everything has an Origin, so we think God has an Origin as well. But then, that is foolish. That is when you compare God to ourselves, comparing God to a Human, something blasphemous that a Thinker should not do. When we do that we eventually think up a being that is not God, making ourselvs an Idol in our minds, and worshipping that, therefore breaking on of the 10 Commandments. 

And so is Time, Eternity, and the God that is, who is all powerful, and in himself Eternal.  

I'm an athiest, and although I don't go around 'preaching' athiesm around like some people do with some religions, I will argue for a very long time with someone else that I am correct (although it is absolutly pointless and very few people change their religious status after they become 'devout' to it).

Anywho, I read some posts about not believing the Big Bang theory, you should look up the Large Hadron Collider. It's a project being set up by leading scientists all around the world. It's costing a lot of money and is incredibly large (it borders 4 countries - it's underground, btw). And it's going to try and simulate the big bang on a smaller scale. If it's successful, it could possibly create another universe.

My English teacher joked that we could all be living inside a giant Large Hadron Collider.

First of all I was not arguing against Christianity. I simply stating, factually, that Christianity isn't immune to violence as well. Its not the peaceful religion, in practice, that MrStickBall as making it out to be. The Crusades was just a commonly known example which is why I choose it. Are you contending that the Crusades weren't started by European Christians? A lot things work in theory but not in practice. Religion is just one of those things. People defend their religion with a fervor not seen on many other issues. Religious leaders use that loyalty to in their best interests. Not in the interest of the religions followers. I'm not even going to go into the different factions of Christianity that were formed for inane reasons or because of simple disagreements.

As for the accuracy of the Bible, you know what I'm wrong in all the thousands of years of reprinting and retranslation the Bible is exactly the way it was when first copied down. You are right. Besides we all know people live their lives by a random persons personal journal. I mean people die over personal journals everyday right? They fight over the meaning of the passage "It took a while for me to go to the store today" in a personal journal.  I mean even if I wrote my journal discussing my summer vaction from my junior year of High School last week, people would fly of the handle and get offended at the idea that it wasn't word for word accurate despite being written 11 years after the fact.

I am a Christian as I said before. I just want to tell you all. No one will never have enough evidence to prove whose religion is right. That is why we have to have faith that our religion is right. Oh, and all of you who said that Christians have killed lots of people, I am afraid that is true. About 1500 years ago, he Catholics corrupted the word of God to gain personal profits, and 800 years ago. The Protestants learned the corruption of the church and seperated from the church. The Catholics got pissed and killed many Protestants, but eventually the Protestants translated the Bible into English(which was prohibited by the catholic church because the catholic because only the priest and few others knew how to read in Latin). This does not mean that Christianity is evil, it means that men corrupt the truth for self-benefits