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religous question
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Bible seems to say that suicide would be theft from God; you are not your own and were bought at a price. To take your life is to damage God's goods.
Why don't you take a look at yourself?
The next time you attempt to deflect a question with an attempt to imply that someone is somehow being malicious take a look at it and see that you're stifling criticism - or in this case not even criticism but a simple open ended question - under the guise of insinuation the question giver has had a lapse of good character.
Ad hominem, straw man; fallacious.
Let's look around here... mmm... not here... nope, it's nowhere in any bill of rights I can find. It turns out that you have no innate right to have your beliefs respected or accepted without criticism. Turns out that any person can, when you present yourself into a public forum such as this internet forum, attempt to question the validity of your beliefs without any need to appeal for a special privilege to do so.
Why don't you take a look at yourself?
The next time you attempt to deflect a question with an attempt to imply that someone is somehow being malicious take a look at it and see that you're stifling criticism - or in this case not even criticism but a simple open ended question - under the guise of insinuation the question giver has had a lapse of good character.
Ad hominem, straw man; fallacious.
Let's look around here... mmm... not here... nope, it's nowhere in any bill of rights I can find. It turns out that you have no innate right to have your beliefs respected or accepted without criticism. Turns out that any person can, when you present yourself into a public forum such as this internet forum, attempt to question the validity of your beliefs without any need to appeal for a special privilege to do so.
Perhaps I should have rephrased my own question.
It is Christians who blame the evils that befall them on the Devil, however, if the devil runs free and does so on his own, then why?
If he is only allowed to be evil by God's command then he isn't evil, he is God's attack dog.
I once heard "God never gives you more than you can handle", which is a lie, if it were true then none of us would even consider suicide or have friends, family or ever heard of someone committing it.
It is Christians who blame the evils that befall them on the Devil, however, if the devil runs free and does so on his own, then why?
If he is only allowed to be evil by God's command then he isn't evil, he is God's attack dog.
I once heard "God never gives you more than you can handle", which is a lie, if it were true then none of us would even consider suicide or have friends, family or ever heard of someone committing it.
Perhaps I was rude to state something so brashly, but you in turn seem to go on the defensive the moment I raise a question you can't confidently answer, claiming I am jabbing at you.
Even now you use that as a shield rather than answer my questions.
I am willing, however, to start over and if you prefer, a more civil atmosphere, fine, but that means no stepping back and claiming I am jabbing and in turn I will do all I can not to jab or seem as if I am jabbing.
Even now you use that as a shield rather than answer my questions.
I am willing, however, to start over and if you prefer, a more civil atmosphere, fine, but that means no stepping back and claiming I am jabbing and in turn I will do all I can not to jab or seem as if I am jabbing.
Thank you. I am willing to answer your questions as it is my job to share what is in the Bible as accurately as I can. It is not my job to convert anyone, that is the job of the Holy Spirit.
Please bear in mind that I have a form of ADD called Sluggish Cognitive Tempo. Couple that with depression and my brain does not move fast at all.
Many times in these posts more than one question or point is stated. When that happens I will answer one of them. A lot of questions are not simple answers but it's difficult to explain to anyone that has little experience with the Bible. Many Christians, including myself, try to answer as simply as we can but it comes out sounding strange in it's simplified form.
When I haven't gotten back to a question, please ask it again.
The Bible is written conversationally and each concept is expressed in more than one event. Over time the student gets the sense of the mind of God. The complex, intricacy of the Bible is brilliant. That's why many cannot mess with the Bible in it's written form, but tragically, out in the world, it has been used to control others. This is especially true in an uneducated population.
However, in today's world there are many intelligent people who study the Bible at great length, therefore the common statement of "Christians are uneducated" tells me the atheist is speaking without real knowledge of what really takes place.
People have had religions for thousands of years. The atheists of today say religious people are mentally deficient which is ridiculous. These kinds of statements are unnecessary because the atheists could just stick to there statement of I don't believe in God rather than belittling others.
As far as evil and the devil are concerned there are statements and stories in several places in the Bible. This link will take you an online Bible. The scene is in Heaven and Satan is taunting God. http://www.blueletterbible.org/Bible.cfm?b=Job&c=1&t=KJV&q=job
Everything that Satan does is directed at God because Satan wants to be God.
Please bear in mind that I have a form of ADD called Sluggish Cognitive Tempo. Couple that with depression and my brain does not move fast at all.
Many times in these posts more than one question or point is stated. When that happens I will answer one of them. A lot of questions are not simple answers but it's difficult to explain to anyone that has little experience with the Bible. Many Christians, including myself, try to answer as simply as we can but it comes out sounding strange in it's simplified form.
When I haven't gotten back to a question, please ask it again.
The Bible is written conversationally and each concept is expressed in more than one event. Over time the student gets the sense of the mind of God. The complex, intricacy of the Bible is brilliant. That's why many cannot mess with the Bible in it's written form, but tragically, out in the world, it has been used to control others. This is especially true in an uneducated population.
However, in today's world there are many intelligent people who study the Bible at great length, therefore the common statement of "Christians are uneducated" tells me the atheist is speaking without real knowledge of what really takes place.
People have had religions for thousands of years. The atheists of today say religious people are mentally deficient which is ridiculous. These kinds of statements are unnecessary because the atheists could just stick to there statement of I don't believe in God rather than belittling others.
As far as evil and the devil are concerned there are statements and stories in several places in the Bible. This link will take you an online Bible. The scene is in Heaven and Satan is taunting God. http://www.blueletterbible.org/Bible.cfm?b=Job&c=1&t=KJV&q=job
Everything that Satan does is directed at God because Satan wants to be God.
Granted this is a generalization; there are certainly people out there that have read the bible back and forth and still believe it. That said a very popular study shows something interesting: Persons that identified themselves as atheists or agnostics got the best test scores by a significant margin on a test about religion.
http://blog.beliefnet.com/omeoflittlefaith/2010/09/atheists-know-more-about-the-bible-than-christians.html
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/09/28/130191248/atheists-and-agnostics-know-more-about-bible-than-religious
When roughly half of the Catholics don't know about transubstantiation, half the protestants don't know who Martin Luther is and 3/5 Jews don't know Maimonides was a Jew there's a case to be made that people within a religion tend to have a lacklustre understanding of it. If you got a group of physicists together and only half could even tell you the basics about Newtonian mechanics they'd be really bad physicists and you'd never hire them, no?
What if those physicists said to you "physics is my life! In runs in my veins and I can feel it! It controls all aspects of my life!" and then you found out they couldn't tell you the 3 Newtonian laws of motion? You'd call them pretentious idiots that don't really care enough to even read a basic physics textbook.
Again, I know that's not all of them but it is often a majority or near majority.
The other interesting thing shown is that people belonging to a certain religion tend to be most ignorant of other religios; the Christians had more trouble telling you to which religion the Dalai Lama belongs or similar questions. How can you honestly say that you believe in the Christian God when you haven't studied other religions to see if they make a better case?
What if it turns out that Pali Canon makes more sense then the Bible? What if the Rg Vedas makes more sense then both?
Having had something thousands of years is not related to whether it's ridiculous or not. We've had language for thousands of years and that's nice, but we've also had torture, rape, war, quackery, etc. There's no correlation between the age of a practice and sanity.
Furthermore religion has been in constant flux for those millenia; the only arguably consistent religion since pre-history is Hinduism which has the Vedic texts which have been around since... well, we don't even know. Looking in history we can see the rise and fall of all sorts of belief systems that are wildly dissimilar and mutually exclusive all of which had adherents and all of which had adherents that said it was the only true religion. To be proud about religion's long history would be to be proud of massive fragmentation of belief systems that each have insisted others are false!
Imagine this: I believe that the Earth has two moons, the other moon hides behind the first and cannot be seen. Also imagine it's 1800. Could you tell me that there wasn't a second moon there? No, but you could ask "Why do you think such is the case? It seems wholly unnecessary to say such a thing is true. It would not explain something that we can't explain nor does it have any useful application!
I respond that I simply have faith and that you need to back off; you leave me to it and conclude that, given no evidence, you don't believe that there is a second moon behind the first.
Let's move this scenario forward: It's today, year 2011. I'm saying there's two moons because my father and his father and etc. all believed it too. You meet me and find out I think there's two moons. What do you do? Well you could say: "That's demonstrably false! We've sent probes into space and they have looked; no second moon exists behind the first!" and having said that you feel the better for having removed a misconception from the Earth; you've helped someone understand the way the world is!
But wait, I tell you "Of course the probe saw no second moon, it's invisible!" You shrug off my inanity and then move on to a more complex way to disprove my second moon idea: "Even if it were invisible its gravity would distort the orbit of the first moon and the Earth!" So now you know that you've given an even better reason that no second moon exists.
I say back: "The second moon transcends gravitation pull."
etc.
Do you respect my belief in this second moon? Hmm? If you do you are against the promotion of a reasonable understanding of the world and the pursuit of verifiable truth and I consider that a disrespectful attitude - to not respect the truth above falsehood. If you do not then why should I respect your belief?
http://blog.beliefnet.com/omeoflittlefaith/2010/09/atheists-know-more-about-the-bible-than-christians.html
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/09/28/130191248/atheists-and-agnostics-know-more-about-bible-than-religious
When roughly half of the Catholics don't know about transubstantiation, half the protestants don't know who Martin Luther is and 3/5 Jews don't know Maimonides was a Jew there's a case to be made that people within a religion tend to have a lacklustre understanding of it. If you got a group of physicists together and only half could even tell you the basics about Newtonian mechanics they'd be really bad physicists and you'd never hire them, no?
What if those physicists said to you "physics is my life! In runs in my veins and I can feel it! It controls all aspects of my life!" and then you found out they couldn't tell you the 3 Newtonian laws of motion? You'd call them pretentious idiots that don't really care enough to even read a basic physics textbook.
Again, I know that's not all of them but it is often a majority or near majority.
The other interesting thing shown is that people belonging to a certain religion tend to be most ignorant of other religios; the Christians had more trouble telling you to which religion the Dalai Lama belongs or similar questions. How can you honestly say that you believe in the Christian God when you haven't studied other religions to see if they make a better case?
What if it turns out that Pali Canon makes more sense then the Bible? What if the Rg Vedas makes more sense then both?
Having had something thousands of years is not related to whether it's ridiculous or not. We've had language for thousands of years and that's nice, but we've also had torture, rape, war, quackery, etc. There's no correlation between the age of a practice and sanity.
Furthermore religion has been in constant flux for those millenia; the only arguably consistent religion since pre-history is Hinduism which has the Vedic texts which have been around since... well, we don't even know. Looking in history we can see the rise and fall of all sorts of belief systems that are wildly dissimilar and mutually exclusive all of which had adherents and all of which had adherents that said it was the only true religion. To be proud about religion's long history would be to be proud of massive fragmentation of belief systems that each have insisted others are false!
Imagine this: I believe that the Earth has two moons, the other moon hides behind the first and cannot be seen. Also imagine it's 1800. Could you tell me that there wasn't a second moon there? No, but you could ask "Why do you think such is the case? It seems wholly unnecessary to say such a thing is true. It would not explain something that we can't explain nor does it have any useful application!
I respond that I simply have faith and that you need to back off; you leave me to it and conclude that, given no evidence, you don't believe that there is a second moon behind the first.
Let's move this scenario forward: It's today, year 2011. I'm saying there's two moons because my father and his father and etc. all believed it too. You meet me and find out I think there's two moons. What do you do? Well you could say: "That's demonstrably false! We've sent probes into space and they have looked; no second moon exists behind the first!" and having said that you feel the better for having removed a misconception from the Earth; you've helped someone understand the way the world is!
But wait, I tell you "Of course the probe saw no second moon, it's invisible!" You shrug off my inanity and then move on to a more complex way to disprove my second moon idea: "Even if it were invisible its gravity would distort the orbit of the first moon and the Earth!" So now you know that you've given an even better reason that no second moon exists.
I say back: "The second moon transcends gravitation pull."
etc.
Do you respect my belief in this second moon? Hmm? If you do you are against the promotion of a reasonable understanding of the world and the pursuit of verifiable truth and I consider that a disrespectful attitude - to not respect the truth above falsehood. If you do not then why should I respect your belief?
To attack beliefs is not to 'bash someone'. It's to attack a belief. You are not your beliefs. To have one's logic corrected is a service, not an attack. I enjoy to go to math class and receive a better understanding of math by having my mathematical understanding be challenged as illogical when it's illogical.
If you believe that 0.9999999 repeating does not equal 1 then here's how you learn.
If 0.9999999 repeating isn't equal to 1 then mathematics is logically inconsistent because of this proof:
x = 1/3 and 1/3 = 0.3333333 repeating
3x therefore = 3/3 and 3/3 = 1
3x can also be calculated as 0.3333333 repeating multiplied by three, or:
3x = 0.9999999 repeating
So we can conclusively prove that 3x is both 0.9999999... and 1
To let someone persist in misconception is to do them a disservice because it will skew their logic.
If you believe that 0.9999999 repeating does not equal 1 then here's how you learn.
If 0.9999999 repeating isn't equal to 1 then mathematics is logically inconsistent because of this proof:
x = 1/3 and 1/3 = 0.3333333 repeating
3x therefore = 3/3 and 3/3 = 1
3x can also be calculated as 0.3333333 repeating multiplied by three, or:
3x = 0.9999999 repeating
So we can conclusively prove that 3x is both 0.9999999... and 1
To let someone persist in misconception is to do them a disservice because it will skew their logic.
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