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Tonetta
Jul 9, 2013

look mother look at ME MOTHER MOTHER I AM A HOMESTIXK NOW

**methodically removes and eats own clothes*
They believe because there is no god -

They can yell out hail satan

They can troll the faithful

They are more intellectually sound

They can have orgies and human being sex and what have ya

But what they dont know is that they are gonna burn in hell for wll eternity!!!

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Cucking Mama
Sep 27, 2013

Gold Medalist, 2014 shit post olympics
they want everybody to be miserable

Tonetta
Jul 9, 2013

look mother look at ME MOTHER MOTHER I AM A HOMESTIXK NOW

**methodically removes and eats own clothes*
This is true my christian brother. They're all just so negative all the time

Riot Bimbo
Dec 28, 2006


Homo for Hitler posted:

They believe because there is no god -

They can yell out hail satan

They can troll the faithful

They are more intellectually sound

They can have orgies and human being sex and what have ya

But what they dont know is that they are gonna burn in hell for wll eternity!!!

Well that first one isn't like a guaranteed or inborn trait of heathens. Catholics are pretty good at "human being sex" I hear too.

Troll Bridgington
Dec 22, 2011

Keeping up foreign relations.
hail satan

Weird BIAS
Jul 5, 2007

so... guess that's it, huh? just... don't say i didn't warn you.

Homo for Hitler posted:

They can yell out hail satan

this is pretty fun btw, sabbats owns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsd6Fjc9MVs

Moridin920
Nov 15, 2007

by FactsAreUseless
hail satan

ded
Oct 27, 2005

Kooler than Jesus
that worshiping any god other than allah is correct

Waltzing Along
Jun 14, 2008

There's only one
Human race
Many faces
Everybody belongs here
that peeing in the sink is uncouth

Dolphin
Dec 5, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
i'm pretty sure human being sex is more common amongst believers

Tonetta
Jul 9, 2013

look mother look at ME MOTHER MOTHER I AM A HOMESTIXK NOW

**methodically removes and eats own clothes*

hemophilia posted:

Well that first one isn't like a guaranteed or inborn trait of heathens. Catholics are pretty good at "human being sex" I hear too.

Homosex is strictly forbidden

Jackfruited Stormtrooper
Feb 15, 2007

master of his domain

Homo for Hitler posted:

Homosex is strictly forbidden

I'm out

Robo Reagan
Feb 12, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

hemophilia posted:

Well that first one isn't like a guaranteed or inborn trait of heathens. Catholics are pretty good at "human being sex" I hear too.

when i was raped by my catholic priest he was a terrible lay because they're not allowed endurance training just the odd rape here or there

Tonetta
Jul 9, 2013

look mother look at ME MOTHER MOTHER I AM A HOMESTIXK NOW

**methodically removes and eats own clothes*
Enjoy your stay in hell, which will be forever!!!! *cackles maniacally*

Donate your hard earned dollars to god!

Grondoth
Feb 18, 2011
"It's novello time, and it's about religion, so unless you're ready to deal with some views you may not agree with, switch off now. In the words of Illidan "You are not prepared".

Let's get this out here right now. I'm a 23 year old law graduate with an IQ of 155. My political beliefs are liberal and leftist, I listen to Metal and I enjoy violent movies, books and videogames, and I've been a Christian since birth. Baptised, confirmed of my own free will, son of a priest (who are pretty notorious for rebelling against their father's religious beliefs just for the sake of it). I'm part of the Anglican Church of England, which is pretty much the result of Henry the 8th getting pissed off with the catholics not allowing him to divorce his wife(s). We're the state religion of the UK, if you could even say the UK has one, we're pretty liberal about most things, women priests, gay priests, homosexuals in general, sex before marriage, contraception, we take the modern, reasonable way of looking at all of them. At the end of the day, the Bible taught us about forgiveness and being excellent to one another. It had a bit of a round-about way of doing it but what do you expect for a 2000 year old book written entirely by clerical males? It's gonna be a bit out of date, you've gotta read it in context.

I have no problems with anyone's beliefs. Be whatever you want, as long as you believe (or don't believe) for a good reason. But here's what I really don't like, trend-atheism/trend-theism (also referred to as e-atheism, since it seems to be most prevelant in the domain of anonymous blogspammers and Digg-users).

In my late teens, I spent a long time thinking. Yeah, just sitting around and thinking, thinking about faith. Thinking about what it is that I believe in. Rationalizing the various conflicts and contradictions that faith presents us with, looking at the viewpoints of other faiths, or those with no faith at all, taking into account the new things we discover every day and factoring in the influence of science. Some people would claim that, if I had indeed done that, I'd have come to the conclusion, as an intellectual, rational thinker, that God does not exist. They would of course, be wrong.

My beliefs center around several factors. Firstly, it is important for us as human-beings to realize our own limits, and the limits of our understanding. Centuries ago we believed the world was flat. "The Bible told us so!", would be the first cry. Wrong, it really didn't. In the Old Testament, Job 26:7 explains that the earth is suspended in space, the obvious comparison being with the spherical sun and moon. The Old Testament, you remember that one? The one with the fiery bushes, the pillar's of salt, the cool plagues and such? Even that managed to get it right. There's a few more references as well to the 'round' earth (and before you say anything, flat is not a shape, it could have been a flat octagon for all they knew) but I'm not going to go into that yet. We've had computers for less than a century, powered flight for just over a century and of course our amazing horseless carriages. Genetics, electricity, nuclear-bombs, toaster-strudel, the world is in the palm of our hands! And it didn't take us too long did it?

Reality-check, we're still primitives. In the great scheme of things this technology is a mere blip on the historical radar. We've got an awful long way to go before we're able to dissect and understand the mysteries of the universe. We haven't even put a man on Mars yet, let alone left our solar system to find out what exactly is out there. How can it be that we have suddenly, so recently, become so arrogant as to believe we know more than we really do? The Laws of Science are written by man, based on our understanding of how things work. They are theories that, while prove true today, may be debunked by another amazing discovery tomorrow. Which leads onto my next point.

Name this quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Arthur C Clarke, physicist and author, smart fellow. It also hilights the point I'm making. Our understanding of the universe is peerless only amongst ourselves. We are not as smart as we think we are. Just as fire wowed the neanderthals, what would it take to wow us? What would make our jaws drop and our minds boggle? Well, any sufficiently advanced technology of course. And what is technology after-all? Man-made machines. The concept of technology is a human concept, a concept that may, in other parts of the universe, not even exist, replaced by something even more advanced than that, so advanced that we cannot comprehend it. Not surprising really as we mammals only use 10% of our brains.

So where am I going with this? Simple really, take yourself off of your high-horse, you, and the human race, is not as smart as it thinks it is. Now, open your mind a little, and let's explore some possibilities.



The definition of a God. Let us turn to the good book.

Wikipedia.

"God most commonly refers to the deity worshipped by followers of monotheistic and monolatrist religions, whom they believe to be the creator and ruler of the universe. Theologians have ascribed a variety of attributes to the various conceptions of God. The most common among these include omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence. God has also been conceived as being incorporeal, a personal being, the source of all moral obligation, and the "greatest conceivable existent"

Hmm, a tall order one might think. Could such a being exist? Some argue that logically, he could not, however, there is very little logic in denying the possibility that a being or beings of such power and advancement exist that they could indeed, be considered 'God' within our definition. That's not to say that God is a small green alien with a flying saucer and a phaser though that would give some of the overzealous fundamentalists something to sweat over, much to our amusement. But what is this God? A creator? Sure, we create. We create technology, we're getting to the stage of being able to create life in one form or another, using the basic building blocks of nature. Could it not be surmised therefore that it is entirely within the realms of possibility that someone or something created those building blocks? Like a programmer creates a new program, someone must have also created the coding language in which he created it. We scramble for answers. We come up with theories. Some believe in the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. Some believe a man in the sky created it everything in 6 days and then mooched around on the 7th. Which is valid?

Neither, and both. They attempt to apply meaning to something where meaning may, or may not exist. Creationism and the Big Bang are in that sense, as bad as each other. They are both merely attempts for us to explain the unexplainable. The Big Bang contradicts our laws of physics (something most catalyse an explosion, therefore something must have been there in the first place, where did that come from, at which point your brain melts). The Creation Story contradicts our laws of physics (Same reasons, who created God after all?). Everything we've so far managed to come up with, from the sublime to the ridiculous, the complex to the simplistic, it's an exercise in desperate straw-clutching. At the end of the day, we don't know jack.

And that's ok. Someone once said that the journey matters more than the destination, it's not the winning, it's the taking part, at least ya tried sport. These explanations of where it all comes from, be they ancient or modern all boil down to the same need. To know. Who'd have thunk it, we've got brains for a reason, and they rather like being used. Those neurons like to be fired, the little grey matter likes a little exercise every once in a while. Just as the Creation Story was a way to explain an unexplainable concept, so is the Big Bang theory. If one were to compare the human mind to a computer, try feeding the Big Bang theory to the medieval man, and it's like trying to shove Bioshock into a Commodore Vic20. Good luck. And what will our children's children's children's grandchildren's children think of our Big Bang theory? My money's on exactly the same thing.

So what am I trying to tell you, stop asking questions, stop looking for answers and just believe whatever the hell suits ya? Absolutely not. Believe whatever suits you, but question it, never stop thinking, never stop asking or learning. In this day and age it seems people are way too willing to believe, or not believe. Belief, or non-belief should be a life-long arduous process and it should end involuntarily, when you fall over dead. Someone (there's a lot of talkative someone's aren't there?) once said 'Never stop believing', I say, "Never stop asking yourself what you believe, and why".

It's time to criticize, so let me load port and starboard cannon and fire a volley at both atheists and theists alike. Believing, or not believing, does not make you intelligent. Smart people do not come to a conclusion on the basis of insubstantial evidence. Smart people do not mindlessly attack other people's beliefs just because they don't conform to their own. Smart people do not assume that their own rigid, poorly formed definitions of logic and faith, reason and belief are mutually exclusive and that if one exists, the other cannot. Smart people think outside the box, not pick fights with those poor souls trapped in it.

What makes you intelligent, is knowing why you believe what you believe. Knowing that you are but one mind, and knowing that at any time you could be proven wrong, only for that person to be proven wrong ad infinitum as we as a race advance.

I suppose you're waiting for my personal beliefs, waiting for this to be some kind of sermon, preaching why my God is better than your God, or non-God. You'll be waiting a long time, because it's not coming. My personal beliefs are just that, personal, they're mine, they belong to me. You cannot take them away from me, only I can. What I can give you though, are my opinions.

Right now shots are being fired. They're not physical shots, they're bullets and shells of ignorance and bigottry. And it's no one-sided battle let me tell you that much. Factionalized camps everywhere you can imagine. Atheists, Theists, Satanists, Christians, Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, Communists, every group you can imagine, all shouting 'Your God/Non-God sucks, mine is better!'. These days, the internet's become their battleground. So much for sharing knowledge, we're sharing ignorance.

The bigottry and the condemnation has to stop. The sad thing is, I'm having to condemn the condemners. Isn't it lowsy how you generally have to be a hypocrite in order to make a point these days? Food for thought. We can look at the extremes and see the simplistic, secular vs sacred, trend-atheists vs fundamentalist evangelical christians, the most common stereotypes. But in reality, it's so much more complicated than that. It's this stereotyping and narrow-minded attitude that prevents us as a race from achieving the greatness we can. I could make as many decrees as I wanted till I was blue in the face, and I'm going to just to let off a little steam mind you,

"Trend-atheist Digg users, shove your agendas where the sun don't shine, refusing the possibility of a supreme-being does not make you a genius or a radical thinker, it makes you a bloody sheep hiding behind a cloak of anonymity"

"Evangelical Fundamentalist morons, get your overly simplistic, judgmental, dogmatic Crayola God out of my face, you have about as much understanding of the universe as a wet lettuce. That does not make you holy, pure, or guaranteed a private booth at the big game in the sky, it makes you a bloody sheep hiding behind a cloak of propaganda that you only believe because you're told to"

Wow, that feels good, I can understand why you internet-bound condemners like it so much. Gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling doesn't it? What, I'm not allowed to indulge in such a guilty pleasure every once in a while? Play fair Wink

Where's my conclusion? Hell if I know. Did you have the mistaken impression this was some carefully constructed plea for tolerance? Absolutely not, it's an angry slap in the face to my peers. Wake the hell up and use your brain, because my God/Non-god/Explosion/Man-in-the-sky/Vic20 gave you it for a reason.

Tonetta
Jul 9, 2013

look mother look at ME MOTHER MOTHER I AM A HOMESTIXK NOW

**methodically removes and eats own clothes*
:agreed:

Riot Bimbo
Dec 28, 2006


Grondoth posted:

"It's novello time, and it's about religion, so unless you're ready to deal with some views you may not agree with, switch off now. In the words of Illidan "You are not prepared".

Let's get this out here right now. I'm a 23 year old law graduate with an IQ of 155. My political beliefs are liberal and leftist, I listen to Metal and I enjoy violent movies, books and videogames, and I've been a Christian since birth. Baptised, confirmed of my own free will, son of a priest (who are pretty notorious for rebelling against their father's religious beliefs just for the sake of it). I'm part of the Anglican Church of England, which is pretty much the result of Henry the 8th getting pissed off with the catholics not allowing him to divorce his wife(s). We're the state religion of the UK, if you could even say the UK has one, we're pretty liberal about most things, women priests, gay priests, homosexuals in general, sex before marriage, contraception, we take the modern, reasonable way of looking at all of them. At the end of the day, the Bible taught us about forgiveness and being excellent to one another. It had a bit of a round-about way of doing it but what do you expect for a 2000 year old book written entirely by clerical males? It's gonna be a bit out of date, you've gotta read it in context.

I have no problems with anyone's beliefs. Be whatever you want, as long as you believe (or don't believe) for a good reason. But here's what I really don't like, trend-atheism/trend-theism (also referred to as e-atheism, since it seems to be most prevelant in the domain of anonymous blogspammers and Digg-users).

In my late teens, I spent a long time thinking. Yeah, just sitting around and thinking, thinking about faith. Thinking about what it is that I believe in. Rationalizing the various conflicts and contradictions that faith presents us with, looking at the viewpoints of other faiths, or those with no faith at all, taking into account the new things we discover every day and factoring in the influence of science. Some people would claim that, if I had indeed done that, I'd have come to the conclusion, as an intellectual, rational thinker, that God does not exist. They would of course, be wrong.

My beliefs center around several factors. Firstly, it is important for us as human-beings to realize our own limits, and the limits of our understanding. Centuries ago we believed the world was flat. "The Bible told us so!", would be the first cry. Wrong, it really didn't. In the Old Testament, Job 26:7 explains that the earth is suspended in space, the obvious comparison being with the spherical sun and moon. The Old Testament, you remember that one? The one with the fiery bushes, the pillar's of salt, the cool plagues and such? Even that managed to get it right. There's a few more references as well to the 'round' earth (and before you say anything, flat is not a shape, it could have been a flat octagon for all they knew) but I'm not going to go into that yet. We've had computers for less than a century, powered flight for just over a century and of course our amazing horseless carriages. Genetics, electricity, nuclear-bombs, toaster-strudel, the world is in the palm of our hands! And it didn't take us too long did it?

Reality-check, we're still primitives. In the great scheme of things this technology is a mere blip on the historical radar. We've got an awful long way to go before we're able to dissect and understand the mysteries of the universe. We haven't even put a man on Mars yet, let alone left our solar system to find out what exactly is out there. How can it be that we have suddenly, so recently, become so arrogant as to believe we know more than we really do? The Laws of Science are written by man, based on our understanding of how things work. They are theories that, while prove true today, may be debunked by another amazing discovery tomorrow. Which leads onto my next point.

Name this quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Arthur C Clarke, physicist and author, smart fellow. It also hilights the point I'm making. Our understanding of the universe is peerless only amongst ourselves. We are not as smart as we think we are. Just as fire wowed the neanderthals, what would it take to wow us? What would make our jaws drop and our minds boggle? Well, any sufficiently advanced technology of course. And what is technology after-all? Man-made machines. The concept of technology is a human concept, a concept that may, in other parts of the universe, not even exist, replaced by something even more advanced than that, so advanced that we cannot comprehend it. Not surprising really as we mammals only use 10% of our brains.

So where am I going with this? Simple really, take yourself off of your high-horse, you, and the human race, is not as smart as it thinks it is. Now, open your mind a little, and let's explore some possibilities.



The definition of a God. Let us turn to the good book.

Wikipedia.

"God most commonly refers to the deity worshipped by followers of monotheistic and monolatrist religions, whom they believe to be the creator and ruler of the universe. Theologians have ascribed a variety of attributes to the various conceptions of God. The most common among these include omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence. God has also been conceived as being incorporeal, a personal being, the source of all moral obligation, and the "greatest conceivable existent"

Hmm, a tall order one might think. Could such a being exist? Some argue that logically, he could not, however, there is very little logic in denying the possibility that a being or beings of such power and advancement exist that they could indeed, be considered 'God' within our definition. That's not to say that God is a small green alien with a flying saucer and a phaser though that would give some of the overzealous fundamentalists something to sweat over, much to our amusement. But what is this God? A creator? Sure, we create. We create technology, we're getting to the stage of being able to create life in one form or another, using the basic building blocks of nature. Could it not be surmised therefore that it is entirely within the realms of possibility that someone or something created those building blocks? Like a programmer creates a new program, someone must have also created the coding language in which he created it. We scramble for answers. We come up with theories. Some believe in the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. Some believe a man in the sky created it everything in 6 days and then mooched around on the 7th. Which is valid?

Neither, and both. They attempt to apply meaning to something where meaning may, or may not exist. Creationism and the Big Bang are in that sense, as bad as each other. They are both merely attempts for us to explain the unexplainable. The Big Bang contradicts our laws of physics (something most catalyse an explosion, therefore something must have been there in the first place, where did that come from, at which point your brain melts). The Creation Story contradicts our laws of physics (Same reasons, who created God after all?). Everything we've so far managed to come up with, from the sublime to the ridiculous, the complex to the simplistic, it's an exercise in desperate straw-clutching. At the end of the day, we don't know jack.

And that's ok. Someone once said that the journey matters more than the destination, it's not the winning, it's the taking part, at least ya tried sport. These explanations of where it all comes from, be they ancient or modern all boil down to the same need. To know. Who'd have thunk it, we've got brains for a reason, and they rather like being used. Those neurons like to be fired, the little grey matter likes a little exercise every once in a while. Just as the Creation Story was a way to explain an unexplainable concept, so is the Big Bang theory. If one were to compare the human mind to a computer, try feeding the Big Bang theory to the medieval man, and it's like trying to shove Bioshock into a Commodore Vic20. Good luck. And what will our children's children's children's grandchildren's children think of our Big Bang theory? My money's on exactly the same thing.

So what am I trying to tell you, stop asking questions, stop looking for answers and just believe whatever the hell suits ya? Absolutely not. Believe whatever suits you, but question it, never stop thinking, never stop asking or learning. In this day and age it seems people are way too willing to believe, or not believe. Belief, or non-belief should be a life-long arduous process and it should end involuntarily, when you fall over dead. Someone (there's a lot of talkative someone's aren't there?) once said 'Never stop believing', I say, "Never stop asking yourself what you believe, and why".

It's time to criticize, so let me load port and starboard cannon and fire a volley at both atheists and theists alike. Believing, or not believing, does not make you intelligent. Smart people do not come to a conclusion on the basis of insubstantial evidence. Smart people do not mindlessly attack other people's beliefs just because they don't conform to their own. Smart people do not assume that their own rigid, poorly formed definitions of logic and faith, reason and belief are mutually exclusive and that if one exists, the other cannot. Smart people think outside the box, not pick fights with those poor souls trapped in it.

What makes you intelligent, is knowing why you believe what you believe. Knowing that you are but one mind, and knowing that at any time you could be proven wrong, only for that person to be proven wrong ad infinitum as we as a race advance.

I suppose you're waiting for my personal beliefs, waiting for this to be some kind of sermon, preaching why my God is better than your God, or non-God. You'll be waiting a long time, because it's not coming. My personal beliefs are just that, personal, they're mine, they belong to me. You cannot take them away from me, only I can. What I can give you though, are my opinions.

Right now shots are being fired. They're not physical shots, they're bullets and shells of ignorance and bigottry. And it's no one-sided battle let me tell you that much. Factionalized camps everywhere you can imagine. Atheists, Theists, Satanists, Christians, Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, Communists, every group you can imagine, all shouting 'Your God/Non-God sucks, mine is better!'. These days, the internet's become their battleground. So much for sharing knowledge, we're sharing ignorance.

The bigottry and the condemnation has to stop. The sad thing is, I'm having to condemn the condemners. Isn't it lowsy how you generally have to be a hypocrite in order to make a point these days? Food for thought. We can look at the extremes and see the simplistic, secular vs sacred, trend-atheists vs fundamentalist evangelical christians, the most common stereotypes. But in reality, it's so much more complicated than that. It's this stereotyping and narrow-minded attitude that prevents us as a race from achieving the greatness we can. I could make as many decrees as I wanted till I was blue in the face, and I'm going to just to let off a little steam mind you,

"Trend-atheist Digg users, shove your agendas where the sun don't shine, refusing the possibility of a supreme-being does not make you a genius or a radical thinker, it makes you a bloody sheep hiding behind a cloak of anonymity"

"Evangelical Fundamentalist morons, get your overly simplistic, judgmental, dogmatic Crayola God out of my face, you have about as much understanding of the universe as a wet lettuce. That does not make you holy, pure, or guaranteed a private booth at the big game in the sky, it makes you a bloody sheep hiding behind a cloak of propaganda that you only believe because you're told to"

Wow, that feels good, I can understand why you internet-bound condemners like it so much. Gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling doesn't it? What, I'm not allowed to indulge in such a guilty pleasure every once in a while? Play fair Wink

Where's my conclusion? Hell if I know. Did you have the mistaken impression this was some carefully constructed plea for tolerance? Absolutely not, it's an angry slap in the face to my peers. Wake the hell up and use your brain, because my God/Non-god/Explosion/Man-in-the-sky/Vic20 gave you it for a reason.

so who wrote that

lite frisk
Oct 5, 2013
Moral relativism. :airquote:

Waltzing Along
Jun 14, 2008

There's only one
Human race
Many faces
Everybody belongs here

hemophilia posted:

so who wrote that

Cormac McCarthy

Sheng-Ji Yang
Mar 5, 2014


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnGVIf3VzLo

Waltzing Along
Jun 14, 2008

There's only one
Human race
Many faces
Everybody belongs here
i like hank3

Nastyman
Jul 11, 2007

There they sit
at the foot of the mountain
Taking hits
of the sacred smoke
Fire rips at their lungs
Holy mountain take us away

Grondoth posted:

"It's novello time, and it's about religion, so unless you're ready to deal with some views you may not agree with, switch off now. In the words of Illidan "You are not prepared".

Let's get this out here right now. I'm a 23 year old law graduate with an IQ of 155. My political beliefs are liberal and leftist, I listen to Metal and I enjoy violent movies, books and videogames, and I've been a Christian since birth. Baptised, confirmed of my own free will, son of a priest (who are pretty notorious for rebelling against their father's religious beliefs just for the sake of it). I'm part of the Anglican Church of England, which is pretty much the result of Henry the 8th getting pissed off with the catholics not allowing him to divorce his wife(s). We're the state religion of the UK, if you could even say the UK has one, we're pretty liberal about most things, women priests, gay priests, homosexuals in general, sex before marriage, contraception, we take the modern, reasonable way of looking at all of them. At the end of the day, the Bible taught us about forgiveness and being excellent to one another. It had a bit of a round-about way of doing it but what do you expect for a 2000 year old book written entirely by clerical males? It's gonna be a bit out of date, you've gotta read it in context.

I have no problems with anyone's beliefs. Be whatever you want, as long as you believe (or don't believe) for a good reason. But here's what I really don't like, trend-atheism/trend-theism (also referred to as e-atheism, since it seems to be most prevelant in the domain of anonymous blogspammers and Digg-users).

In my late teens, I spent a long time thinking. Yeah, just sitting around and thinking, thinking about faith. Thinking about what it is that I believe in. Rationalizing the various conflicts and contradictions that faith presents us with, looking at the viewpoints of other faiths, or those with no faith at all, taking into account the new things we discover every day and factoring in the influence of science. Some people would claim that, if I had indeed done that, I'd have come to the conclusion, as an intellectual, rational thinker, that God does not exist. They would of course, be wrong.

My beliefs center around several factors. Firstly, it is important for us as human-beings to realize our own limits, and the limits of our understanding. Centuries ago we believed the world was flat. "The Bible told us so!", would be the first cry. Wrong, it really didn't. In the Old Testament, Job 26:7 explains that the earth is suspended in space, the obvious comparison being with the spherical sun and moon. The Old Testament, you remember that one? The one with the fiery bushes, the pillar's of salt, the cool plagues and such? Even that managed to get it right. There's a few more references as well to the 'round' earth (and before you say anything, flat is not a shape, it could have been a flat octagon for all they knew) but I'm not going to go into that yet. We've had computers for less than a century, powered flight for just over a century and of course our amazing horseless carriages. Genetics, electricity, nuclear-bombs, toaster-strudel, the world is in the palm of our hands! And it didn't take us too long did it?

Reality-check, we're still primitives. In the great scheme of things this technology is a mere blip on the historical radar. We've got an awful long way to go before we're able to dissect and understand the mysteries of the universe. We haven't even put a man on Mars yet, let alone left our solar system to find out what exactly is out there. How can it be that we have suddenly, so recently, become so arrogant as to believe we know more than we really do? The Laws of Science are written by man, based on our understanding of how things work. They are theories that, while prove true today, may be debunked by another amazing discovery tomorrow. Which leads onto my next point.

Name this quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Arthur C Clarke, physicist and author, smart fellow. It also hilights the point I'm making. Our understanding of the universe is peerless only amongst ourselves. We are not as smart as we think we are. Just as fire wowed the neanderthals, what would it take to wow us? What would make our jaws drop and our minds boggle? Well, any sufficiently advanced technology of course. And what is technology after-all? Man-made machines. The concept of technology is a human concept, a concept that may, in other parts of the universe, not even exist, replaced by something even more advanced than that, so advanced that we cannot comprehend it. Not surprising really as we mammals only use 10% of our brains.

So where am I going with this? Simple really, take yourself off of your high-horse, you, and the human race, is not as smart as it thinks it is. Now, open your mind a little, and let's explore some possibilities.



The definition of a God. Let us turn to the good book.

Wikipedia.

"God most commonly refers to the deity worshipped by followers of monotheistic and monolatrist religions, whom they believe to be the creator and ruler of the universe. Theologians have ascribed a variety of attributes to the various conceptions of God. The most common among these include omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence. God has also been conceived as being incorporeal, a personal being, the source of all moral obligation, and the "greatest conceivable existent"

Hmm, a tall order one might think. Could such a being exist? Some argue that logically, he could not, however, there is very little logic in denying the possibility that a being or beings of such power and advancement exist that they could indeed, be considered 'God' within our definition. That's not to say that God is a small green alien with a flying saucer and a phaser though that would give some of the overzealous fundamentalists something to sweat over, much to our amusement. But what is this God? A creator? Sure, we create. We create technology, we're getting to the stage of being able to create life in one form or another, using the basic building blocks of nature. Could it not be surmised therefore that it is entirely within the realms of possibility that someone or something created those building blocks? Like a programmer creates a new program, someone must have also created the coding language in which he created it. We scramble for answers. We come up with theories. Some believe in the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. Some believe a man in the sky created it everything in 6 days and then mooched around on the 7th. Which is valid?

Neither, and both. They attempt to apply meaning to something where meaning may, or may not exist. Creationism and the Big Bang are in that sense, as bad as each other. They are both merely attempts for us to explain the unexplainable. The Big Bang contradicts our laws of physics (something most catalyse an explosion, therefore something must have been there in the first place, where did that come from, at which point your brain melts). The Creation Story contradicts our laws of physics (Same reasons, who created God after all?). Everything we've so far managed to come up with, from the sublime to the ridiculous, the complex to the simplistic, it's an exercise in desperate straw-clutching. At the end of the day, we don't know jack.

And that's ok. Someone once said that the journey matters more than the destination, it's not the winning, it's the taking part, at least ya tried sport. These explanations of where it all comes from, be they ancient or modern all boil down to the same need. To know. Who'd have thunk it, we've got brains for a reason, and they rather like being used. Those neurons like to be fired, the little grey matter likes a little exercise every once in a while. Just as the Creation Story was a way to explain an unexplainable concept, so is the Big Bang theory. If one were to compare the human mind to a computer, try feeding the Big Bang theory to the medieval man, and it's like trying to shove Bioshock into a Commodore Vic20. Good luck. And what will our children's children's children's grandchildren's children think of our Big Bang theory? My money's on exactly the same thing.

So what am I trying to tell you, stop asking questions, stop looking for answers and just believe whatever the hell suits ya? Absolutely not. Believe whatever suits you, but question it, never stop thinking, never stop asking or learning. In this day and age it seems people are way too willing to believe, or not believe. Belief, or non-belief should be a life-long arduous process and it should end involuntarily, when you fall over dead. Someone (there's a lot of talkative someone's aren't there?) once said 'Never stop believing', I say, "Never stop asking yourself what you believe, and why".

It's time to criticize, so let me load port and starboard cannon and fire a volley at both atheists and theists alike. Believing, or not believing, does not make you intelligent. Smart people do not come to a conclusion on the basis of insubstantial evidence. Smart people do not mindlessly attack other people's beliefs just because they don't conform to their own. Smart people do not assume that their own rigid, poorly formed definitions of logic and faith, reason and belief are mutually exclusive and that if one exists, the other cannot. Smart people think outside the box, not pick fights with those poor souls trapped in it.

What makes you intelligent, is knowing why you believe what you believe. Knowing that you are but one mind, and knowing that at any time you could be proven wrong, only for that person to be proven wrong ad infinitum as we as a race advance.

I suppose you're waiting for my personal beliefs, waiting for this to be some kind of sermon, preaching why my God is better than your God, or non-God. You'll be waiting a long time, because it's not coming. My personal beliefs are just that, personal, they're mine, they belong to me. You cannot take them away from me, only I can. What I can give you though, are my opinions.

Right now shots are being fired. They're not physical shots, they're bullets and shells of ignorance and bigottry. And it's no one-sided battle let me tell you that much. Factionalized camps everywhere you can imagine. Atheists, Theists, Satanists, Christians, Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, Communists, every group you can imagine, all shouting 'Your God/Non-God sucks, mine is better!'. These days, the internet's become their battleground. So much for sharing knowledge, we're sharing ignorance.

The bigottry and the condemnation has to stop. The sad thing is, I'm having to condemn the condemners. Isn't it lowsy how you generally have to be a hypocrite in order to make a point these days? Food for thought. We can look at the extremes and see the simplistic, secular vs sacred, trend-atheists vs fundamentalist evangelical christians, the most common stereotypes. But in reality, it's so much more complicated than that. It's this stereotyping and narrow-minded attitude that prevents us as a race from achieving the greatness we can. I could make as many decrees as I wanted till I was blue in the face, and I'm going to just to let off a little steam mind you,

"Trend-atheist Digg users, shove your agendas where the sun don't shine, refusing the possibility of a supreme-being does not make you a genius or a radical thinker, it makes you a bloody sheep hiding behind a cloak of anonymity"

"Evangelical Fundamentalist morons, get your overly simplistic, judgmental, dogmatic Crayola God out of my face, you have about as much understanding of the universe as a wet lettuce. That does not make you holy, pure, or guaranteed a private booth at the big game in the sky, it makes you a bloody sheep hiding behind a cloak of propaganda that you only believe because you're told to"

Wow, that feels good, I can understand why you internet-bound condemners like it so much. Gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling doesn't it? What, I'm not allowed to indulge in such a guilty pleasure every once in a while? Play fair Wink

Where's my conclusion? Hell if I know. Did you have the mistaken impression this was some carefully constructed plea for tolerance? Absolutely not, it's an angry slap in the face to my peers. Wake the hell up and use your brain, because my God/Non-god/Explosion/Man-in-the-sky/Vic20 gave you it for a reason.

speaking of only using 10% of your brain

Riot Bimbo
Dec 28, 2006


totalbiscuit only has 10% of his brain... imagine what such a person could... do... if he had 100%

Tonetta
Jul 9, 2013

look mother look at ME MOTHER MOTHER I AM A HOMESTIXK NOW

**methodically removes and eats own clothes*
At 69% of his brain he can travel back in time and impregnate the virgin mary

Necros
Jul 23, 2003

im 23 yeqr old law graduate with an iq of 155 and i review games on youtube

veilo
Jul 17, 2010

Never posts
That they are right.

Robo Reagan
Feb 12, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

hemophilia posted:

totalbiscuit only has 10% of his butt... imagine what such a person could... do... if he had 100%

HATECUBE
Mar 2, 2007

gonna lol when the aliens land and start handing out holo-tomes, telling people that Blorjjsk is the one true savior and prophet and all our dumb religions are just made up bullshit

and we roll our eyes and beat them to death with rocks

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BottledBodhisvata
Jul 26, 2013

by Lowtax

Same.

But it's a shame he didn't make this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwjnlBfKRZU

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