fahrvegnugen,
You simply must get a name that resembles something at least close to the English language and away from something that sounds like a beer! Or maybe a fatal disease!
I thought this topic was relevant enough for its own thread. I've been wrong before, but with all the ice cream topics and crappy music topics and what kind of bra does Brtittney Spears wear topics spouted daily from the mental giants who are posting lately, I thought it deserved its own hearing.
Here's the subject. Fava beans (with a nice Chianti) , er fahverbunging (I cannot comprehend that name, whatever it is) made some comments which intrigued me. I said:
favhenberger, er favoritebergen, er, nevermind. May I call you "fav?"
You said:
:I'll add my two cents on this subject. While I can't prove that no god exists, I find it very unlikely.
This was 'favs' assertion, but what does 'fav' based that assertion upon? This was my response:
This assertion is perfectly acceptable, but all the drivel you wrote that follows is nonsense. Here's why. You are hitching your argument on the Bible. Yet, you haven't considered the possibility of the existence of God, period. That means, FORGET THE BIBLE (it is a piece of dangerous shit) and forget all the other "Holy Books", too. They are pieces of shit; perversions and man-made perceptions of the Creator.
God (if God does indeed exist) is bigger and wiser and more benign than all those human pieces of shit who try to make Him in some sort of human image.
You made these very nice and correct, if I my add, observations:
:Thanks to my JW upbringing, I was always very interested in biblical history and studied it voraciously. When you look honestly at biblical texts in the light of their historical setting, it eventually becomes apparent that they are the product of the time and place where they originated. They are not "inspired of god" but simply human products filled with all the tell-tale signs of human manufacture. Later when I attended a college course on comparative religious studies, I was amazed to see the parallels to this in the world's major religions. If you investigate the origins of all these religions, the stories of how they were founded never quite jibe with the historical facts. They are all the product of man, rather than any divinity. Also, the similarities between them far outstrip the differences. This is because they stem from the same basic ideas, namely attempts by people of 2 or 3 thousand years ago to make sense of the world around them. As societies became more advanced and the old explanations were not sufficiently satifying, they were reworked into more sophisticated explanations and philosophies. But the concepts that they entail have changed very little--various ideas of a soul or spirit, a heaven or hell, demons and devils, sin and righteousness, etc.
:Along comes science and suddenly there are viable, provable explanations for why things in the world around us are the way they are, which do not involve the old oft recycled concepts of religion. Furthermore, these scientific explanations often contradict the former ideas and expose them as false. Now if you really want to believe that god exists, no doubt you can rework your traditional belief system to accomodate known scientific facts, as many do including some scientists. But from my perspective, it is merely clinging to an outdated way of looking at the world which has been clearly exposed as invalid. One thing I learned as a JW--an insatiable desire to get at the truth of a matter. I see no reason to go through life laboring under illusions or false realities, and at this point I see no evidence to support the existence of any diety.
My reply:
But, comma, those accurate nice observations should have absolutely nothing to do with your decision to be a skeptic, agnostic or atheist. You cannot make a decision for or against a supreme Creator based upon the Bible, the JWs, or any other religion. In otherwords, don't use shit to formulate your opinion. Do you think that if a Creator does exist that He fits in a box defined by Man? NO!
Take a deep breath and a fresh piece of blank paper and make your decision without the blinders of the Bible, the dubs and the other psychos who tell us what we should believe and what we shouldn't believe. We have freedom of thought and freedom of choice and that is inalienable (God/Source/Creator-given and therefore no one on this planet can take it away from us)
Trust your observations and experiences first and foremost. Don't trust religion. They are human scum whose sole purpose is to remove all moral ambiguity from our lives while defining morals for us as they see it, which cannot be and are not the absolutes they say it is. Life is not as simple as religion tells us it should be. Only we can deal with moral ambiguities, and there are many we face in the course of our normal lives, my friend.
And don't give up on a Creator. After all, the Creator hasn't given up on you. How do I know? You're still living and posting here, aren't you? You still breath that free air, and the butterflies are still a wonderment and the stars still shine and the sun still warms us and the rains still water us. The earth still gives us an abundance of food and there is beauty on this planet everywhere you look. Smell a flower. Watch an ant colony. Play with a cat. Watch a dog act like an idiot JUST BECAUSE HE LOVES YOU.
I'll be quiet now.
"So let it be spoken. So let it be dung." - With apologies to Yul Brynner in the classic movie "The Ten Commandments" of which the 5th one is most curious. Children are worthless pieces of crap in most of the whole of the Bible. I detest the Bible and I know it well enough to detest it.
Farkel