cuchulain

i think its very important to speculate, or using scientific lingo, 'hypothesize'. its also important to attemp to verify or falsify that observation and hypothesis. a big difference between most science and most religion seems to be that one tests and then accepts or rejects a claim, while the other claims its initial hypothesis as fact without observation or apparent testing...often even if shown to be wrong. Galileo comes to mind...although eventually(though too late for Galileo) they acknowledged the truth that they were wrong.

he says we are blind, don't have an understanding of the truth, have meaningless existences. he gets a bit of pushback, and WE are the one's attacking? o.k....i've gotten the same from moderators...but o.k.

Yes...I agree. The spin on any "theory" or determinative truth...the bane.

I wouldn't say the "I" goes away...merely changes. If water is heated, is "goes away" as well...by changing into something else.

There are many MANY museums that support scientific belief, so we don't provide "nothing". There are dinosaur bones, there are pieces of archaeology in abundance showing faiths OTHER THAN CHRISTIANITY throughout the entirety of history.

You asserted elsewhere that man is fallible(paraphrasing). That man is flawed. You are a man. Therefor, if all men are fallible and flawed, it is given that you as a man are flawed. Perhaps you are flawed in your vision of the world?

i dont know. are all brains wired the same, does the rest naturally compensate for missing pieces, are thought patterns changed in the loss? and am i evolving regularly enough that i am different even without brain damage?

i wonder where the line is between clean and dirty dirt? also it seemed very zen like to me...

On my way home from the store today, I saw an advertisement sign on the side of the street kind of like the politicians use, it read "for sale clean dirt".

I don't know a lot about evolution. I simply knew that pit bulls did not previously exist and that seems like SOME evidence of evolution to me, be it micro or macro. I have read the bible. It says a lot of things. There are some things in the book which are true, historically, such as city locations. So in a sense, that is SOME evidence of biblical truth. But along the same lines of logic you are using on evolution, that SOME evidence doesn't prove the whole either. And I see theists using speculation and conjecture MUCH more than I see science using such...although there is nothing inherently wrong with speculation and conjecture, when they are used as tools.

consider the wiki on the pit bull. it didn't exist as a species until man bred it into existence. we used our knowledge to evolve the specific traits in this breed. doesnt that prove at least some of evolution?

i get stuck on that concept. if i lose my hand, i am still me.

no apologies needed on my part. you share what you perceive to be truth, and we share our perspectives. nobody 'must' change, it is enough to give what we see as the truth and let us each decide . at least from my perspective.

wants are often irrelavent to the truth.

you really believe that life without your scripture is meaningless? i think using a need for meaning to determine whats true is...false.

I can certainly see that it's not a book of science, nor of history. That is my point, however...that many MANY of its followers insist it IS, and that we should operate the world on the "Science" contained within. You are correct in pointing out that I am making bad generalizations about ALL Christians, however. I am sorry for that. There are so many different groups of Christians with so many different beliefs about their book that I really should do better about that, and I try. But sometimes I fail.

Don't they all? "In the beginning..." and all that? Where their God is directly talking to them? I mean, if they believe in Adam and Eve literally, wouldn't that have made them the first "Christians"? I know I am using the term lightly, as Christians are technically followers of Christ who didn't live back then and all that, but I am talking about that prime source, if you can see where I am aiming. I am wondering what happened from direct knowledge of God, from Adam and Eve, that led their people to descend into worshipping different beings, when their parents KNEW God was real(that is, if any of it was real).

No. It requires that there is no unaccounted for variable on the part of the believers, who insist that they know God. I can logically look at their conclusions as wrong because the God they follow does not appear to follow the rules they have laid out for their own deity, and I can rightly say I do not believe in their God as a result.

I didn't think there was anything, but I had hoped to see if I was right or wrong. It just strikes me that believers so often tell me there is so much archaeological evidence supporting the biblical claims that there just had to be something I didn't know about or hadn't found.

Surveys have many areas, a large one is demographics. See...they could have surveyed my home town when I was a kid and asked how many black people were Atheists, and gotten an absolute 0% response that was accurate. That's because in my home town when I was a kid, we didn't have a single black person living there. I wonder where the pew report got its information from? Did they do broad research, was it a specific city, town or region? If they asked around here, they would find not very many atheists at all. Then there is the way the question is phrased. Usually pew does a fair job of trying to keep things on an even keel, so to speak. But even the best worded questions can be misinterpreted by someone, as exemplified numerous times on this forum. And some people deliberately jack with the results of things like this. I have personally known people who enjoy doing that sort of thing. And there are those who are simply biased against the subject matter and will attempt to sabotage it. There are numerous ways a study can fail.

I understand the concept of oral tradition being transmitted, I was a Druid I appreciate your response, but what I am aiming at is archaeological evidence for that time frame that backs up the religion that supposedly existed from the beginning of time. Shouldn't there be SOMETHING in a 2500 year span before the beginning of Monotheism? I understand that the bible claims this that and the other happened during that time frame, I am aiming at something extraneous of the bible to go along with the bible, you know? There should be some surviving evidence of the faith in archaeological terms over such a long period of time FROM BEFORE THE FLOOD. But I am not finding anything. Now, I fully admit my investigative skills are not top notch, so I come here in the hopes that somebody might be able to point out some pieces from that time frame, some evidence other than a book says so. But I really do appreciate the response.

I think it is simple logic and deduction to assert that IF the Christian version of God exists, that is all powerful all knowing and all loving, AND he behaves like he did in the bible, then the evidence would be clear in the first place without our having had to ask for it. So...evidence NOT being blatantly in our faces, contrasts with the ideal God of the Bible, in my mind negating the idea altogether.

I don't KNOW what to expect, to be honest I have a feeling that this particular member might be more open minded than many others, and so I am kind of testing the waters to see how my responses might be taken. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I often find myself trying at least to give people the benefit of the doubt and hoping. Maybe he is legitimately curious about how we as Atheists can NOT believe in the things that he has accepted as basic truths of the world. Maybe he hasn't had a whole lot of contact with Atheists in his every day life and just doesn't know that much about it, and he might even be reaching out to see what kinds of doubts resonate with him. It might all be just like Johnathan thinks, too. My mind isn't made up yet.

i was looking for archaeological confirmation from that 2500 year gap of christianity...you know they claim to have existed from the beginning, so there should be SOMETHING around the times of adam and eve, or close at least. there are writings that old, so there should be something christian like that old since they had direct dealings with god and his NEW creations...or one would think, anyway.

not trying to open that, just trying to find evidence of things from the beginning, where there appears to be a gap.