I already said that! Exodus 34, read the whole thing, I did. The 1st commandment listed is abbreviated from the nastyness of Exodus 34:12-16. The archaic English indicates KJV...

PM,

Again you are missing the point.

Not everyone believes in your god. On top of that, many of the "rules" you say are universal, by nature cause division(because of the sectarian book you pull them from), even amongst people of the same label because not everyone interprets their god the same way.

On top of that people outside your label, and people with no religion can do decent things and are capable of not harming others and do not assign those "NO DUH" statements to your god.

We have government laws written by humans that are universal. That is why we can arrest a Muslim, Jew or atheist for murder. That is why we can arrest an Christian or Buddhist for theft. Because WE, dispite our differances, CAN agree that there are things in society we don't want happening.

You merely have it stuck in your head that your god is the author of morality. We don't care. We do care that people who believe in your god want to gang tag government property with their sectarian logo and claime that their god owns our government.

Why not just obey the laws on the books? Why do you need a religious symbol on government property? Are there a lack of churches where you live?

"Don't steal", "Don't murder", are evolutionary traits that have nothing to do with magical bearded man in the sky. People of all labels and long before the Hebrews had laws against those sorts of things. Neither Christians or Jews invented morality.

I am quite sure if you got caught stealing from your neighbor in ancient Egypt, you would be punished, but that did not mean Ra, the sun god was real or that Ra told the Egyptians not to steal.

 

You don't need a god to be good, you just think you do.

 

 

Ok, Kingdo...I mean pm9347, I'll tell you what the answer is that you are seeking.

I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church.  I went every Sunday morning, evening, and Wednesday evening.  And I truly believed.  I read and studied the bible, went to summer bible camp, etc., etc.  I grew up believing in the bible.  Then, in my 20's I got into an argument over whether salvation could be lost or not.  Well if you just check out the bible it has verses that hint at opposing views.  So I put my bible down and started to think critically about the bible and what really made sense.

And that's all it takes from someone to become atheist.  To put your bible down and think on your religion with intellectual honesty.

So there is your answer to No. 1.  People that actually think about what the bible says instead of just accepting it blindly.

We've already heard that crap.  A thousand times.  And we did listen.  That's why we don't believe it.  We listened very carefully.

double post

i feel that there are natual reasons to explain gods existence look around you and you can see it .

Yep - Just look around you.

Floods, tsunamis, tornadoes (just got an all clear minutes ago - storm tracked south), hurricanes, earthquakes, wars about whose god is better, wildfires caused by lightning.

That son of a bitch Yahweh is all over the place.

I find it a hell of a lot easier not to believe in god or his word, that way i don't have to answer to the most egotistical being that ever existed and his clergy cronies, they're wicked.

Jesus violates this commandment:

 

o "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26).
o "I am come to set man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household" (Matt. 10:35-36).
o "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" (To his mother) (John 2:4).

 

god orders stealing:

"...and ye shall spoil the Egyptians" (Ex. 3:22).

"...and they shall spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them, saith the Lord God" (Ezek. 39:10).

"As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies" (Deut. 20:14).

 

pm9347 the common thread might have something to do with the fact that it is what you requested in your original challenge:

I'm sure that the rules made up by individual posters would just as surely have possessed the common thread of being ten guidelines for a great defensive chess strategy if you had requested it, too. Anyhow, sorry but your observation is valueless.

That's most likely because most of the ten commandments are vague or general, while rape has very specific rules of conduct.  Check out Deuteronomy 22:28.  A passage like that in the middle of the list would just kill the flow of things.

Welcome.

I agree with you, George Carlin covered it in this routine. All we need is 3 commandments.

1-Thou shall always be honest & faithful to the provider of thy nookie

2-Thou shall try really hard to not kill anyone unless they pray to a different invisible man than you do.

3-Thou shall keep thy religion to thyself.

 

ok , some natural proof of god exsitence , i was going to refer all to st. thomas aquinas 5 rational proofs of gods existence but i have to be honest , it gave me a headache, im new to the idea of logic , but if your still interested , sit down with a bowl scoops and some salsa , and read on , well onto it then , im sure some of you might have heard this already, but our enviroment shows an intelligence designed it , we all live in a very narrow 50 mile wide area of habitat , if you go higher then 50 miles you will freeze, the earth sits at  exactly the right distance from the sun to warm us, the size of the earth is perfect allowing gravity to hold mostly nitrogen and oxygen and us for that matter here , our planet is comprised mostly of salt water, yet we drink fresh water as the condensation cycle causes water for us to drink,finally the earth sits at an angle so its heated and cooled at the right time all year. almost like we are all in a hugh teraium, made just for us to live in, check out basic 1st year college physical science, but look at it from a builders point of view , (just suspend athiestic thinking for a moment ) all of this  was made by accident??? its very complex to have just happened,

None of this is an accident in any imaginable way and neither was it designed.  The Earth is not at all even remotely perfect for life (50 miles? WTF? Humans live more than 5000 miles distant North to South).  Aquinas' proofs fail miserably.

All of which had been shown to fail miserably, based on unsupported assumptions and lack of knowledge of the true nature of the Universe as has been developed since his time by scientific enquiry.

you need more than logic, you need the knowledge based on careful study of reality, looking at ALL the evidence, not just seizing  on scraps of 'evidence' which can be interpreted to support your already firm belief in God.

Any attempt to explain our existence as thinking beings by assuming we were 'created' by a much greater conscious being is logically faulty, because you then have to explain how that greater being was created. If you assume such a being somehow didn't need to be created, then you are being logically inconsistent.

We now know that there are almost certainly billions (at least) of planets in the universe, at all different distances from their stars, so it would be incredibly unlikely that none of those had conditions suitable for life, and obviously there was at least one, and here we are. Your argument is invalid at a very basic level, sorry.

All such arguments have been thoroughly addressed elsewhere on this site as well by many writers who were at least as clever as Aquinas and much better informed due to the progress in science  and mathematical and logical analysis since his time.The Universe is a mix of randomness and order, and complexity emerges from the combination of random processes ('accidents') limited by basic physical laws and and what already exists.

For example, the solar system was initially highly chaotic with lumps of rock and other material going round the Sun in very erratic orbits, which meant they kept colliding with each other and either shattering into smaller fragments or sticking together, until the only major chunks left were those moving in nearly circular orbits.  Such orbits as we see now are which are the only ones which can last for a long time without crossing that of another planet and eventually risk colliding with it. Even so, none of the planets go in perfectly circular orbits. But still that is an example of how a really random mess of rocks can settle into what we see as a (relatively) ordered and tidy pattern.

We have many such examples at all levels from the cosmic to the atomic of order and pattern coming from initially random stuff, it only requires a flow of energy so it doesn't violate the Laws of Thermodynamics.  No separate conscious 'designer' required.

You should read more widely.

i would guess that the rule for not having sex with children would be found in the same place as the homosexual rule , or possibly sex with animals if its sexually immoral dont do it , you might not get an exact rule for it , but you should get the idea,

sorry i guess i should clarify myself better , i forget that other people are reading this are trying to understand my points, i meant 50 miles up or down. for example your standing on the ground and if you went 50 miles up in the sky, as for the planet being perferct for life  i disagree, no where else in the entire universe has intelligent life been found, every planet we have found so far couldnt sustain life , yet here on this planet we exist, and i agree with aquinas proofs  he shows gods existence rationally even if it gives me a headache,

ill check it out thanks, 

No one said finding other intelligent life in the universe would be easy. The universe is huge, never mind our own galaxy! let's say a civilization on the other side of this galaxy just sent its first radio wave transmissions out into space right now. since they're on the other side of the Milky Way, we'll assume that they are at least 90,000 light years away (one light year is the time light travels 6 trillion miles in one year) now since they just sent those transmissions, it will take them 90,000 years for their transmissions to reach us. You and I will not know about their existence in this lifetime.

 

Your rationale about Earth being the only world with intelligent beings is narrow sided and invalid. Plus, the fact that we don't know everything about how life can come to be in this universe also proves you wrong. you are right about not finding intelligence at the time, but looking at the astronomical level, you're bound to be wrong. ( we barely scanned a fraction of the universe for intelligence, and like my example, it took take a LONG TIME before we notice anything.) And maybe some of those planets we've found sustain life right now, maybe not in the past in which we see, but those light waves will come around eventually, like 90,000 years from now.

 

I would not be so arrogant as to list ten things which all people should live by. I am but one person, with one life and one set of experiences. How can I possibly fathom the conditions and situations of every human being ever to live? Confining so many conditions, so many people, so many situations, to 10 rules is a gross oversimplification.

If this were not true, lawyers would be totally out of a job.

 

So what you're saying is.. you don't even know the bible well enough to tell me where I might find this verse.  It's your own sacred scripture.

Allow me....It doesn't exist !  Your make-believe god was so opposed to shellfish that he decreed a specific prohibition against it.  Your ten commandments are so precious that they forbid that you coveting your neighbor yet nowhere do they suggest that it would be wrong to rape an innocent child.

These aren't great rules to live by.  They're a cruel joke if you expect that these 10 (idiotic) commandments are somehow all-encompassing or that they could make better people.  No one needs a commandment from some make-believe deity to tell them not to kill.  Good people don't need that commandment.. They just know not to, which by the way makes a non-believer infinitely more superior to the bible believer in terms of morality.

Sometimes I get really frustrated by people that just seem to feed on ignorance like it was candy.

And by the way, "Go and sin no more" is no more a commandment not to rape a 3 yr old than "they were all in one accord" describes the disciples travelling through the desert in a Honda, before you try to make crap up..  

Additionally, there were far better commandments to live by centuries before the ten commandments supposedly came about.

Oh, and forcing innocent children to have sex hasn't the slightest correlation to two adults engaging in any kind of consenting relationship, sexual or otherwise, whether male or female.

 

Ok for 1 billion years, life on this planet was non existant....after that for 2 billion years life was pretty much cell based, amoeba based lifeforms....for the past 1 billions years we have had mammals, fish, lizards etc live on this planet, for the past 100,000 years modern man has existed......think about that for a bit, it took roughly 4 billion years for us to get to our present state, and everything wasn't perfect, we are just the product of this enviorment.

The earth's distance variation from the sun is about 3 million miles, what keeps the planet warm isn't just the sun (although it is a good part of it), but greenhouse effect, as well as geological events (remember the earth has an internal heat source) which many planets actually do have, some are just hotter than others.

Now for life on other planets, it is foolisht to believe that no life can exists except on planet earth.  Scientists are starting to find many planets that are similar to earth in distance and size. The other thing you want to keep in mind, is that our part of the galaxy has 10 billion solar systems, the universe has roughly 100 billion galaxies each with 10 billion solar systems (some have more other less but this number is nice and round to work with). Now how many solar systems is that, that's 10 followed by 20 zeros

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

The chance of life in this galaxy 1 in 10,000,000,000 so if you really look at what we have and know, there is a 1 in 10 billion chance of life in the universe so there is a good possiblity there is life on other planets, we may never find them, ever (you know it's a large large universe) but you cannot say that there is no life, just because we haven't found it doesn't mean it's not there, the numbers are there to back up the idea.

A couple of comments on your points:

- If you go higher than 50 miles, you're in orbit, and would need a serious source of thrust to get there.  Claiming we exist in this 50 mile-high Goldilocks zone is proof of god is to discount the effects of gravity.

- The condensation cycle results in fresh water for purely physical/chemical reasons: rocks (of which salt is one) do not evaporate, water does.  Check out http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/may05.html for a neat explanation of blood salinity and the environment.

- Please define "the right time" in your statement about the planet's axial tilt.

In short, you have the cart before the horse; it is because of these conditions that we exist in our current state; our current state did not dictate the conditions we required of the planet.

You are making a fairly common error in the basis of this argument.  Yes, we have found no other planets so far that have earth-like life on them, let alone intelligent.  This says nothing, however, about life that is NOT like our own, which is a likely probability.  Sulfur and methane are both possibilities for the basis of metabolism.  If a chemical reaction releases heat, a form of life may use it in its metabolic cycle.

No, not so rationally.  They're full of circular reasoning, special pleadings and non-sequitirs.  If they were proper arguments, he'd be taught in every high school between Pythagoras and Newton.  Many of his proofs take the form of "Assume god exists.  If god didn't exist, then something that happened couldn't happen.  But it happened, so therefore god exists."  They make a lot of unfounded assumptions (if it is possible for something to be the "prime mover", you also have to prove that this thing is also the ONLY prime mover, which was not done.).

To deduce that a god exists, you would have to prove (at least; experts, what have I missed?) the following:

- that any of the qualities this god is supposed to have were possible (i.e., prove that omniscience, etc.,  was actually possible as a quality)

- that they were possible for a something to have (i.e., prove that this entity you're talking about was capable of omniscience, etc.)

- that this entity had the necessary qualities (i.e., that this entity actually was omniscient, etc.)

- that this entity you're describing is the entity you're considering (i.e., that this entity you've proven is omniscient, etc., is actually the god you're talking about and not something else)

No one in the history of thought has been able to do this.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence (meaning just because someone hasn't proven a given proposition does not necessarily imply that a proof is impossible), but absence of evidence is evidence of absence (meaning that if there is absolutely no evidence of a claim, the odds of that claim being true are slim to none).  We have no evidence that any god exists, and so therefore it is reasonable to not believe that any god exists.

sorry for the absence, im putting my hardwood floor in this weekend, and even now im sitting on my concrete floor , trying to figure out how this works??  but im reading all the responses, and looking into the arguments , some ive found jut really amazing well thought out responses from people who are really seeking the truth , and others just angry assholes who dont even consider other peoples point of view. ill have the floor in by monday, and ill try give better reasons for gods existence through nature ,and by our current situation, sorry but im really looking foward to the new floor...