Many people here sought god at one time. However,when they found no evidence or effect,they realised they could better spend their time than talking to the ceiling.Even if one were to seek god,there's no reason to suppose the christian god would be the right one.

There is no reason to believe that the bible is anything but a bad fiction story,so quoting it won't affect many people here. Still,it was quite nice of god to send his son to save us from a punishment he implemented in the first place.

Insert in above any of the following: Anki. Ra, Zeus. Thor, El, Ba'al, .... The thing is many have prayed to the invisible sky god over the centuries, all have thought their way was the only right way. All have been found to be without truth, proof, and basis.

#2 is from John 14:6, which is contrary to the beliefs of the Jews which Jesus was. If the way was him, it wouldn't be contradicted by the basis of the belief system, Jewish belief. This statement put him in the position of blasphemy in the eyes of the Jews. It would require the legions of angels he expected to bail him out that didn't show up to prove this was a true statement. Out of context Bible sayings do nothing to prove your point.

Well said.Even when I was a xtian,I would beg god to talk to me.Everyone else said they heard his voice,but i couldn't. I put it done to my faith being too weak.I think it was maybe I have a naturally rational mind,so I just couldn't imagine I heard it.

I gave god ample chance to make himself known to me.Yet here we are...

Yes I am seeking the truth. I can read all of the educational (personal) information on both sides and it is up to me to decide.

I am however discovering much about myself in this journey. I hadn't planned on that. Just thought I'd read everything I could find and try to come to a reasonable conclusion. Since we are all humans there is something personal in everything I read. We all come with baggage of some sort which delivers us to the place we are. For some it is a relevelation for others it is a journey but we all believe what we believe due to our past baggage. Some seem to be angry that they reached out to God and he didn't answer. I can understand that. I can't read past that though so I move on to the next post and so it goes. There have been a couple of posters on this site that made a lot of since to me. Didn't seem angry or wanting to show christians by converting every person they find to atheisim. Just seem to learn and decide. All posts have been beneficial to me though.

For all the years I have assumed there was a God I can say I hadn't in the past called out to him to really talk or answer me. Sounds Dumb I guess. Now I guestion whether I didn't really expect him to be real. Who knows. It is like a circle that goes around and around.

I'm sure I have bored you all by now. I however find the dialogue intersting and helpfu.

As for the homosexuals and the term of marriage. I am done with that. Believe what you will. It doesn't make a crap to me what it is called if ya want to believe I'm a racist ok. I still say let them have their term give me and my partner our rights and we will call it what we call it. If ya can't understand my way of thinking I understand.

hunter

Knowing yourself is wisdom.

It's senseless to try and convert people. The best we can hope for is an honest discussion in which each side considers the other. The only one who can convert you is you. If you are not ready to give up God and be a heathen with us, then you have made the right decision for you. If you decide you are ready to give up belief in God, then that too is the right decision for you.

Your judgement is the only one that matters.

Unless you are married to a Christian. Then this also affects your spouse. I have seen marriages dissolve when one spouse gives up belief, and the other does not.

I give out advice like a street-corner pusher gives out meth samples, and of about the same quality. Here's a suggestion, though: Give God an honest shot. Try to talk to him, in whatever way that means to you. Otherwise, you'll always wonder.

There's an often-used fallacy here, when an atheist says they were once a Christian, and then turned to atheism for their truths. The fallacy runs like this: "If you turned your back to the Lord, you didn't really give God a chance." This is the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, in that the implication is, the Christian-turned-atheist was never a real Christian.

If you're not sure you haven't given God a fair shake, you'll always wonder if you were a true Christian, to have turned your back on God.

Or maybe not. I really don't know you that well, so you might not. I'm just projecting myself into your shoes.

That prayer was deliberately not aimed at the Christian God, but at any god that happened to exist. You might want to say "God or gods." It is basically asking whoever is out there, if there is someone out there, to reveal himself/ herself/ itself to you. I then presented you with the Christian point of view on seekers. Just straightening that out.

Part of the wonder and mystery of life is that we should always be questioning our assumptions and our old conclusions. That's how we grow. As Penn Jillette once said, "I love finding out I'm wrong. It means I'm learning."

Absolutely. 100% on the money.

A bit about marriage, if you're interested.  It doesn't deal exactly with homosexual/heterosexual issues, but it does give some perspective on just how little claim Christians can make on the sanctity of marriage.

I want to make sure you get something exactly correct from a while back, Hunter.  Deludedgod made a good point about judging the difference between "right for me" and "empirically correct."  What many atheists, myself included, believe is that the thing about theism -- any theism -- that is so extraordinarily dangerous is that it encourages people to find truths that don't line up with reality.  If you fly this plane into a building, you'll get to have 72 virgins.  Yeah, your body will be mangled and burned, and you'll be dead, but you won't be dead.  Just believe it.

That kind of thinking is not confined to such drastic situations, though.  There are a lot of things that aren't as pretty as culture, or folklore, or self-help gurus would like us to believe.  There are other things that are not necessarily better or worse, just different.  The thing is, if you find a model of reality that just 'feels right' to you, you have no better chance of being right than someone who does rain-dances instead of instituting good water conservation measures.  (Just a little FUCK YOU to the governor of Georgia.  Pardon me.)

A while back, you said something like 'science is right until proven wrong.'  This is not true.  Science, at every stage, must prove itself correct.  It's not just science.  The way knowledge works is that anyone at all, under any circumstances, who claims something bears a burden of proof. 

Here's the most important thing you can ever learn about knowledge:  Everything is assumed false.

Read that as many times as you need to until you get a grasp on it.  In day to day life, there are many things we say we assume to be true, but in reality, we have judged the evidence to be so overwhelming that it is certainly true.   The burden of proof has been met.  There is no such thing as assuming something is true and then trying to prove it false.

Science, religion, philosophy... EVERYTHING must prove its own truth.  Those things which fail the burden of proof must presumed false if we are to be on epistemological footing.

To prove this to yourself, imagine for a minute that the opposite is true.  Everything is assumed to be true until it is proven false.  Now, consider this:  I have an invisible gnome living in my refrigerator.  He vanishes into the ether a second before anyone looks for him, and he always knows when someone is about to look for him.  Twice a day, my gnome takes a field trip to your house and poisons your drinking water with a magical elixir that makes you see and hear everything incorrectly. 

Now.  Prove me wrong.  You can't?  Then you must believe in my invisible gnome, and you must live every day as if everything you perceive is wrong.

Here's another trick to demonstrating the burden of proof.  Assume again that everything must be proven false.  I submit to you that the sun around which the earth apparently rotates does not actually exist.  I also submit to you that the sun exists.  Until you can prove either statement false, you must believe that the sun both exists and doesn't exist.  Go ahead.  Believe it.  I'll give you some time to think about it...

You think you can prove that the sun's nonexistence can be disproven, right?  It's more difficult than that.  Remember, you haven't proven that my gnome doesn't poison your water.  The fact that you see it is proof that it doesn't exist, because everything you see is wrong.

Of course, since you're reading what I'm typing (SO YOU THINK!!) you can only assume that I do not exist, since you are always wrong.... but if I don't exist, then who told you about the gnome??!  (Oh yeah, and while you're thinking about this, how were you going to prove that the sun doesn't not exist?  You were going to prove that it does exist.  You were going to meet the burden of proof!  See how unavoidable it is?)

You see how fast it gets into nonsense?  There is no such thing as a burden of disproof.  Everything must prove to be true before we can believe it.  So, as you're searching for your own truth, you have two choices:  Find something that you feel good about, and believe it until its proven false, or believe only that which you have good reasons to believe.  One way will get you a lot of suitcases full of snake oil, and the other, while it may be a little harder to stick to, will tend to yield real truth a lot more often.

This is why it is so important to follow the evidence. First off, do NOT put 'faith' in science. Don't believe it because someone told you to. Believe in it because it *works* and is based on evidence. When you have evidence that something works, you don't need faith. Faith is only needed when you don't have good evidence.

So, when you see two scientists arguing, don't believe one or the other based on your 'faith' in one versus the other. Dig deeper and look for (or ask for) the evidence. The scientist with the best evidence wins, not because he's an authority, but because he can show you evidence.

And yes, science is fallible, but here's the great thing about evidence versus faith. When there are conflicting sides, the more faith you throw into the argument, the more *divided* the sides become. But, the more evidence you throw into the argument, the more *agreement* the sides will reach (assuming both sides are rational). Faith leads to disagreement, evidence leads to agreement.

Why do you think there are 30,000 sects of Christianity and only one theory of evolution? Because Christianity is based on faith, and evolution is based on evidence. Before the evidence was found, there were dozens of explanations for the diversity of life floating around. Once the evidence began to be found, it all consistently pointed to one explanation. And the MORE evidence that rolls in, the more agreement there is in the scientific (rational) community. Of course, there's still faith-based intelligent design. Adding faith just adds to disagreement.

One other thing is that perhaps these scientists were arguing over speculative hypotheses, and not evidentiary theories. It is natural and good for scientists to discuss and argue over speculation. But they don't (or shouldn't) represent their speculations as well-supported fact. There are lots of competing models for things like string theory or whatever, and scientists will discuss and argue these, but they are not claiming that they are necessarily true, they are just poking holes in other people's ideas to see how well they stand up to scrutiny. But when they start looking for and finding evidence, then the evidence will support one hypothesis over the other, and the more evidence rolls in, the stronger the support will become.

Don't take science on faith, look for the evidence.

Hey, Hunter. Both Loc and Natural have made some excellent points. I'd like to add to that, if I may.

First, let me say that science is actually three things. As the scientific method, it's a philosophy -- specifically, it's an epistemology, a way of learning. So far, it's the only epistemology we have that gives practical and consistent results. This is the bedrock of what we know about the universe today. It's assumed that the scientific method works, and works all the time. We assume this because it has worked, in every case.

Second, it's the practice of that epistemology. It's the gathering of data, the drawing up propositions to explain the data, and then testing the propositions. There is room for error here, because we are human. Like the "cold fusion" fiasco of the late 1980s, some scientists are sloppy, or come to the wrong conclusion. But, just like in the case of cold fusion, every claim may be checked by others. And so it goes when something truly novel is claimed, like in the case of the cold fusion results. Labs and scientists across the world started looking into the claims, and the experiments that produced the cold fusion.

And it turned out to be wrong. Although the practice of science is flawed, the scientific method is designed to correct those flaws. This is why I claim the scientific method has worked, and worked in every single case. Bad knowledge is always found out.

Finally, science is an ontology. It's all the data gathered, and all the relationships between that data. It's the knowledge we have gained from the application of the scientific method, and it's also our understanding of that knowledge. And sometimes portions of our ontology are wrong. Thomas Samuel Kuhn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn) first wrote about this back in the 60s. We've known about it for a long time, though.

Here's an example of how it works:

Back in the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton developed some of the most-tested theories in science. These were his laws of motion and dynamics. They were called "Laws" because they were simple, and they had wide-ranging effects throughout the rest of the sciences. It caused a fundamental shift in the way we thought about he universe, and affected philosophy and society well beyond their scientific implications.

Newton's Laws described the universe as a clockwork, where you could calculate the position and velocity of every object in the universe at any time in the life of the universe.

This view held for over 200 years. Then, in the early part of the twentieth century, two things happened: Einstein came up with his special relativity, and some strange data started popping up, mostly dealing with the study of radioactive decay. One thing led to another, and scientists discovered that they universe fundamentally is not a clockwork. You can't calculate the position of every object in any system over the course of long timespan, let alone for the universe. This caused a change in the way we look at the universe.

This didn't invalidate Newton's laws. But, it bounded their effectiveness. They aren't as universal as we thought for so many years. It turns out the laws hold for objects larger than the atomic, and smaller than.... well, very large objects. And objects not travelling very fast in relation to each other. And for relatively short timespans (say, no more than a couple dozen thousands of years). So, Newton's very elegant laws are really just a specialized subset of the new ontology.

Anyway, all I'm getting at is this: all our knowledge is contingent on our ability to understand our knowledge. As we gain new knowledge, our understanding grows, and sometimes changes. And strangely, as we start to see smaller and smaller things, and larger and larger things, and more distant things, we begin to understand we don't understand as much as we thought. It's not that our knowledge is reduced. It's just that we get a better idea of  how much more there is to know.

Science (the practice) has often been proven wrong. The interesting thing is, though, it's only been proven wrong by more science.

As has been said: don't put your faith in science. Put your trust in your own ability to reason. Scientific disagreement is part of the process by which the scientific method searches for truth. Conflicting ideas are evaluated, challenged, compared, and in the end, the theory that best fits observable data, and which makes the most accurate predictions is accepted... unless proven wrong at a later point. If that happens, then we again look at the observable data, including the new information, and attempt to come up with a new theory that matches the data and makes testable predictions that we hope will be borne out by continued observation.

The very act of challenging those theories, the very notion that it's ok to disagree as long as both sides match the data... is the very heart of what makes the scientific method work.

Again,glad to see you still around.It's understadable you'll want to think things over carefully. Your questions aren't that unusual or strange,after all most of us were at some  point in your position, and probably thought as you currently are. It seems we still can't convince you we aren't all boiling with anger though..we'll work on that.

True and my easter had no religion involved so that was good. And Happy Autumn Equinox to you(actually Spring since you're in the northern hemisphere)

Damn straight I can't.

Funny how that works, eh?

Here is something funny to think about if all the religious really really seriously believe this entire then why are they sad after their loved ones died ??? The question is why are all thus people claming tho be absolutely shore there is a after life and every believer gets to haven then why are they so crushed buy believers going into the best place ???

You can think about it yourself however the truth is no one of the religious is believing their dogma not one of them ! The point is theists are composed of :

con_artists/Most_Prechers : they don’t believe in god are ling and they wont jour money end of story

Followers/Sheep : Simple people actually deluding them self’s thinking “hey every body in my grupe is believing I must conform to the hive mind ” , however since every body is simply believing that no one is doubting in their head they follow this self created illusion of “me the ode on”.

Schiso/Insane : People who are on drugs or absolutely insane we name them naturally religious. They have a instability and often see unicorns talking to them or see invisible people , invisible friends (inset is silly that I never head know or heard of people having invisible friends in my country and its weary agnostic/hidden_atheistic ) most of them are in funny rooms with soft walls. However if they clime to see Satan/Angels/Hell/Haven/GOD/Jesus they get a sanctuary in religion or churches.

So your Preacher can be a weak person (sheep) , a simple thief (con artist) where you get simple tricked buy him , Insane this is dangerous you can follow a complete madman who can kill all of you because god told him or promised he will revive the followers writ after their death (sadly enough I read a post of some parents believing their darter gets revived after death they are still waiting.)

ZOMG it is possible make a weary specific civil contract like “Person A obligates himself to not engage in sex with other persons the person B … if this is broken sanctions followe..”.
Simple it is possible just like making a trans national corporation and digging the progressive tax creating a corporation in a country having a flat tax for “legal persons” (corporations) I propose Poland with its 17% corporate tax and a S.Z.O.O (limited liability ) type corporation. Most people have no idea how they can build or use the legal system I’m frustrated buy countries not educating their citizens how in the most fundamental functioning in the country its like not telling people how to get food in the concrete jungle 

Well, from what I've seen, it's the same reason the rest of us are sad when a loved one dies: that person isn't in your life anymore. They're gone, no more talking to them, seeing them, spending time with them, etc. When a friend of mine moves to another city, I don't celebrate them leaving... I might wish them well and have a going away party, but it's not a celebration, it's a way to say goodbye and balm the sadness some.

Just because the theists belief their loved one is moving to a nicer city doesn't mean they shouldn't be upset at losing touch.

Of course, its odd that many Theists believe God can speak to them from heaven but to claim their loved ones can do the same is (to about half of the theists) a crazy idea.

Yes, you are sad that a friend leaves for another city, but you are happy for them that they are living a better life (presumably) unless you are a selfish bastard. PLus, you can always call and write.

The fact that there is no documented proof of people talking to the dead in Heaven should give every Heaven-believing Theist a cold chill. They should realize that it doesn't make sense in their concept of how the supernatural interacts with the world.

Either God doesn't want any contact (which makes him cruel) or there isn't a heaven and supernatural in the way Theists claim.  Not to mention, Satan (or some other rougue spirit) should be able to contact the living - unless God doesn't allow free will in Heaven, which is then a cruel joke, since he allows it here (and it supposedly causes evil - but he feels its absolutely important for people to have free will) but doesn't allow it in Heaven - or Hell.  After all, why doesn't Satan send people from Hell to disrupt Gods plan? Because God is more powerful? Why doesn't God wipe out Satan? Cruelty.

Lets face it. most of theism is a sham, fraud and despicable fear-mongering money-extracting enterprise. Theism is a con job.

Well there is all ways the possibility of going to them . I mean suicide if there is a after life then why don’t just catapult yourself to your best friend ? I remember reading Christian suicide were ramped before the renesonse I’m not sure about it however it makes perfect sans. If your friend goon on the best vacation then why not join him ?

Well, for Catholics, suicide's a mortal sin, and if you die with a mortal sin on your soul, you go straight to hell. So that's not really much of an option. Of course, the reason suicide's a mortal sin is entirely political in origin, as suicides in the middle ages deprived the nobles of labor from serfs and rents from freemen, and deprived the Church of tithes from those same serfs and freemen, and the additional tithing that the nobles would've been giving if they'd collected those incomes. So the nobles complained, and the pope ruled suicide a mortal sin.

Exactly. Which is what I've always seen from them at funerals. So in the end they aren't much different other than they hope for the afterlife with their loved ones while we acknowledge there isn't one.

I am an Atheist.

Being a long time atheist (35 years or more) tends to color my perceptions and at times impinge on my objectivity... (What do you MEAN you believe in invisible sky fairies??!!!)

That being said, in the real world, 9-5, 24/7 reality, I don't really CARE if someone believes in a diety. I have no agenda, no reason to prostelize as I see us all being on the same bus, bound for the same destination.

It's all about me, you see. Only when religious belief interferes with my chosen lifestyle, does it matter. I'm not out to save you, I'm out to protect myself and my own interests.

I do enjoy discussing things, it keeps me sharp and being proven wrong (on rare occasions   ) helps me refine my world view. And, being the curmudgeonly sort, a good argument filled with ad hom invictives gets the blood churning once in a while.

Welcome to the forums, evolve a thick skin, and enjoy.

LC >;-}>