Can Anyone Explain Christianity?
- Thread starter Anonymiss1969
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Anonymiss1969
Active Member
fish601
Active Member
Ugh... Just trying to rationalize that gives me a headache.
i believe in god so i believe he just exist and he made everything
now think of all the people who dont believe in god how did everything get here?
me = god exist made everything
athiest = earth,humans.. just appeared
is it easier to believe god appeared or earth and all in it just appeared?
One thing i am sure of is there is a god
just do your best to figure out which one
fish601
Active Member
MagicA
Well-Known Member
No offense to those who commented on my initial posting but all you have to do is dig a little and read a little and learn a little and the premise of God just doesn't stand up.
To those who said that Atheists believe the earth and humans just appeared.. umm not quite as simple as that
And again no offense but evolution is only called the theory of evolution by religions and religious people nowadays.. the rest of humanity has accepted it as a scientific fact 
If you read or even watch a few documentaries anyone can understand it. See Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, hell for that matter check out James Burke he has a ton of series out there that will blow you away (The day the universe changed, connection 1, 2 and 3) and they don't touch on religion much at all but show how we have progressed through the ages.
How I came to become an atheist like I said before was at a very young age having a massive curiosity about it all and truthfully how I felt when I "unwrapped the present" was a bit disappointed and lost. I very quickly realized what a fantastic and marvelous place the universe is without a god and even to this day when I think about "stardust now gazing at stardust and wondering" is just as amazing and wonderful as if there were a deity sitting waiting for me to die. In case your stoned *cough* what I mean is that most atheists believe that through evolution we evolved initially as nothing more than bits of a star into humans.
As for the paranormal; when I was a kid I saw something that I believed was a ghost. Scared the shit out of me obviously but as I got older I was extremely curious and wanted to learn as much as I could. The paranormal (in regards ghosts, psychics etc.) turned out to be nothing more than 95% bullshit with 5% waiting to be explained through things like infrasound - this is pretty cool btw and worthy of checking out, basically extremely low sound frequencies that can create everything from a feeling of fear and dread to full blown apparitions - (seriously, google it or Vic Tandy (amazing story)), matrixing (humans want to make order of chaos - think ink blot test, lying on your back looking at clouds etc. and any of our UK visitors who know who Derren Brown is will hopefully have seen his amazing show Psychic (youtube him he is amazing) and how he has spent a lot of time debunking psychics and proving he can do the exact same thing only way better and at the same time debunk "real" psychics.
Other UK folks might remember when the parapsychologist on that horrible TV show Most Haunted busted their own psychic so much so that the governing body got involved (offcom?) and had to rule the show was for entertainment purposes lol. That is a really funny read google derek acorah and I guarantee you will get some laughs! Orbs as ghosts - wtf came up with that? Either way it is dust particles and the vortex's that some people try and explain as ghosts is 99.999% of the time, the camera strap blurred in the shot!
I'm not going to get into all the nonsense involving temperature gauges and ghost meters and the utter tripe about EVP - electronic voice phenomenon which amazing enough become very popular after the movie White Noise lol.
I'm gonna shut up now because I am a newbie here and the last thing I want to do is get embroiled in a god/no god debate and piss off someone who might have otherwise helped me That and I can be a majorly long winded bastard as well
If you want some delicious irony though I am a legally ordained minister in the first church of atheism.. mind you.. so is my cat google that and you and your cat/dog/plant? lol can be too.. oh and it's free!
To those who said that Atheists believe the earth and humans just appeared.. umm not quite as simple as that
And again no offense but evolution is only called the theory of evolution by religions and religious people nowadays.. the rest of humanity has accepted it as a scientific fact If you read or even watch a few documentaries anyone can understand it. See Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, hell for that matter check out James Burke he has a ton of series out there that will blow you away (The day the universe changed, connection 1, 2 and 3) and they don't touch on religion much at all but show how we have progressed through the ages.How I came to become an atheist like I said before was at a very young age having a massive curiosity about it all and truthfully how I felt when I "unwrapped the present" was a bit disappointed and lost. I very quickly realized what a fantastic and marvelous place the universe is without a god and even to this day when I think about "stardust now gazing at stardust and wondering" is just as amazing and wonderful as if there were a deity sitting waiting for me to die. In case your stoned *cough* what I mean is that most atheists believe that through evolution we evolved initially as nothing more than bits of a star into humans.
As for the paranormal; when I was a kid I saw something that I believed was a ghost. Scared the shit out of me obviously but as I got older I was extremely curious and wanted to learn as much as I could. The paranormal (in regards ghosts, psychics etc.) turned out to be nothing more than 95% bullshit with 5% waiting to be explained through things like infrasound - this is pretty cool btw and worthy of checking out, basically extremely low sound frequencies that can create everything from a feeling of fear and dread to full blown apparitions - (seriously, google it or Vic Tandy (amazing story)), matrixing (humans want to make order of chaos - think ink blot test, lying on your back looking at clouds etc. and any of our UK visitors who know who Derren Brown is will hopefully have seen his amazing show Psychic (youtube him he is amazing) and how he has spent a lot of time debunking psychics and proving he can do the exact same thing only way better and at the same time debunk "real" psychics.
Other UK folks might remember when the parapsychologist on that horrible TV show Most Haunted busted their own psychic so much so that the governing body got involved (offcom?) and had to rule the show was for entertainment purposes lol. That is a really funny read google derek acorah and I guarantee you will get some laughs! Orbs as ghosts - wtf came up with that? Either way it is dust particles and the vortex's that some people try and explain as ghosts is 99.999% of the time, the camera strap blurred in the shot!
I'm not going to get into all the nonsense involving temperature gauges and ghost meters and the utter tripe about EVP - electronic voice phenomenon which amazing enough become very popular after the movie White Noise lol.
I'm gonna shut up now because I am a newbie here and the last thing I want to do is get embroiled in a god/no god debate and piss off someone who might have otherwise helped me
That and I can be a majorly long winded bastard as well If you want some delicious irony though I am a legally ordained minister in the first church of atheism.. mind you.. so is my cat
google that and you and your cat/dog/plant? lol can be too.. oh and it's free!
MagicA
Well-Known Member
fish601: sorry.. you asked me earlier about how mind boggling it is. It certainly can be but there are a few shows out there that can really help. I forget the name of the documentary but it was with Stephen Hawking and his explanation of how it all began.. when I was done I totally got it and it was less than an hour. I will try and dig it up and either post it here or PM you if you want? mvgroup.org is a torrent site (not sure if that is a no-no) that has some amazing documentaries on it.. well worth your time to have a look. To get your head around the beginnings it might be worthwhile for folks to watch a documentary on black holes so that they can understand density of mass and anti-matter (yes it's real) so that you can get your head round some of the other stuff.
As an aside, Stephen Hawking has also theorized about the *possibility* that once the universe has finished expanding it will then contract and there is a possibility that we would go through this all again only backwards.. oh and again a possibility that the universe would then expand out once more either exactly as before or maybe not! That stuff is far more mind boggling that any deity imho!
Last but not least, check out this video - If you have ever been accused of not having any common sense you should watch it too! And taking a lesson out of that video for myself.. my beliefs are mine and mine alone. All I can do is try and help people understand my views if they are so interested.
As an aside, Stephen Hawking has also theorized about the *possibility* that once the universe has finished expanding it will then contract and there is a possibility that we would go through this all again only backwards.. oh and again a possibility that the universe would then expand out once more either exactly as before or maybe not!
That stuff is far more mind boggling that any deity imho!Last but not least, check out this video - If you have ever been accused of not having any common sense you should watch it too! And taking a lesson out of that video for myself.. my beliefs are mine and mine alone. All I can do is try and help people understand my views if they are so interested.
GibsonIconoclast
Active Member
I have to say this thread's kinda cool, the question is so simple but so deep.
The first place u should start with this is to decide whether or not u wanna believe in something that doesn't have concrete evidence. It seems like ur asking for a scientific study to be presented to u with lots of facts, evidence, and then u make the call like a judge. I don't think any christian that believes christianity is concrete is a christian worth talking to. If someone believes there's solid evidence to prove christianity is real then they haven't got any faith. You really have to acknowledge that there's incomplete evidence to prove christianity (as they say in court cases) "beyond reasonable doubt".
But when athiests suggest that I consider how much i'm wasting time if christianity is wrong, i think like this... First of all I wouldn't know there wasn't an afterlife because I'd be dead and I would have lived my life happily because I would have already decided I believed in God and would be happy for the rest of my life If I died my soul would turn into nothing which to me seems much more impossible than the big bang which I actually believe is pretty likely. I don't believe the bible is all there is to know in life. I believe it's the logical place to start but then continue learning and applying reason to questions like "Why are we here? How did we come to be? What is God?" These are all very debatable and really depend on ur perception of life the answers will only seem true to u if u really understand them and don't just accept them as ur told.
I think God wanted to feel responsible for happiness so he created the universe and in one way or another us, you have to admit that more people would rather live forever than commit suicide, so people must enjoy life. When u give a little kid a toy don't you enjoy knowing you made that little kid happy and he enjoyed the toy even though he cried when it broke or needed fixing?
"How did we come to be?" Is when u get deep into philosophies of knowledge and learning. Atoms aren't explained in the bible but it doesn't mean atoms don't exist. Eventually we learned atoms existed. The only reason creationism is argued so much is because it was put in the bible and not left out. Personally I think creationism was just the beginning of the answer, it was just someone who-wrote-in-the-bible's best guess with what litle information was provided. I believe it's more origin mythology or insanely figuritive language. I think it's ok to follow science toward an anwer, who's to say God didn't inevitably create science? I believe in the idea of the big bang because they've discovered much more about subatomic particles than just protons neutrons and electrons. They have smaller particles when you go into particle physics and people still aren't sure what caused the big bang. It fits into the general idea that God created the universe, I don't think people will ever find an answer to what brought us into being or what caused the big bang before the big bang there were (supposedly) particles called quarks and an inbalance caused the big bang, so what created the quarks, people will learn or surmise ideas further back down the sequence of events that lead to this moment now and there will never be an end. For like the past 3 hours I was sidetracked from writing this and I got hooked into reading about quantum mechanics on wikipedia and I've heard most of it before but I love to imagine in the hierarchy of subatomic particles an interaction between particles that answer the question of where or what God is.
I remember I first thought it was much more likely a god existed than a guy coming back to life. I imagined how people's souls could effect other souls more importantly I tried to figure out what a soul was, I decided my soul was me. I believe the framework in my brain is separate from my soul because my brain is, metaphorically, a computer with so many complicated connections between neurons and the transmission of signals to communicate within the brain. A computer is useless without a person because it can't do anything unless it's told to do something. Where does the initiative to do something random come from? It comes from a soul. It's the only way to explain how anybody can do something completely and truly random. So I concluded my soul was separate from my brain, I don't know which came first though. (this was the closest idea to how a god could exist that I could think of so of course it's esoteric) I mainly thought of it because I was looking for a possible way a god could exist. So then after I rationalised the existance of a god I started wondering how a guy can come back to life. The only way I can believe a guy came back to life AND his body disappeared would have to be linked to quantum mechanics in a way that probebly nobody understands yet. But if there is a god then this is within his power for all we know. The thought of someone coming back to life is simpler though because people have been declared clinically dead before and then like an hour later they come back to life. I've heard a few stories from close friends in which people have these near death experiences after they're declared dead. Someone's grandpa after a surgery died and he left his body and followed the doctor into the waitng room, i think he was floating in air, and he heard the doctor notify his family he died and when he came back he repeated the conversation they had. There was also one where some lady died in a hospital and there was a shoe on top of the roof in a position that couldn't be seen from the ground and she hovered above the hospital and then returned to her body and told ppl about the shoe and they found it where she said it would be (the grandpa one is more believable, cuz theres less possibility of corruption in the story).
My dad's an episcopal priest and if u don't know episcopalians, they don't talk about god and jesus in everyday conversation, those people are usually evangelicals, there aren't many episcopalian evangelicals. I get pretty sick of talking to jesus freaks but after a while I figure out they only talk about all that religious stuff if u do something that prompts them to, otherwise they're actually pretty normal, just a little more happy and upbeat than most ppl.
To put the whole thing in a nutshell, Believing in christianity is something you should do because you want to, I can't pursuade you to have faith, thats up to you, I worry I don't have enough of it sometimes, but I've known what it's like to have none and I hated it, so I got some and I wonder if theres such a thing as too much, but for some reason it makes ppl happy so I doubt it, probebly only in the perception of our peers can we have too much faith, lol.... those jesus freaks with their hands in the air like human satelite dishes looking for a scrambled signal.... theres really bad reception here on earth huh?). Trying to go through explaining and rationalising something that seems so impossible is so difficult and you should try to find you own way to believe in something regardless of what it is. Nobody believed man could fly until the wright brothers made an airplane, but the airplane itself wasn't what was amazing, the design of the wings took it off the ground and all of a sudden the world changed at that because everybody was like "o we get it now". Whether theres an afterlife or not I'm concluding now that i'll be happy as a christian looking for answers, even if I don't get them.
"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary formsit is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man." - Albert einstein
sry that was so long
The first place u should start with this is to decide whether or not u wanna believe in something that doesn't have concrete evidence. It seems like ur asking for a scientific study to be presented to u with lots of facts, evidence, and then u make the call like a judge. I don't think any christian that believes christianity is concrete is a christian worth talking to. If someone believes there's solid evidence to prove christianity is real then they haven't got any faith. You really have to acknowledge that there's incomplete evidence to prove christianity (as they say in court cases) "beyond reasonable doubt".
But when athiests suggest that I consider how much i'm wasting time if christianity is wrong, i think like this... First of all I wouldn't know there wasn't an afterlife because I'd be dead and I would have lived my life happily because I would have already decided I believed in God and would be happy for the rest of my life If I died my soul would turn into nothing which to me seems much more impossible than the big bang which I actually believe is pretty likely. I don't believe the bible is all there is to know in life. I believe it's the logical place to start but then continue learning and applying reason to questions like "Why are we here? How did we come to be? What is God?" These are all very debatable and really depend on ur perception of life the answers will only seem true to u if u really understand them and don't just accept them as ur told.
I think God wanted to feel responsible for happiness so he created the universe and in one way or another us, you have to admit that more people would rather live forever than commit suicide, so people must enjoy life. When u give a little kid a toy don't you enjoy knowing you made that little kid happy and he enjoyed the toy even though he cried when it broke or needed fixing?
"How did we come to be?" Is when u get deep into philosophies of knowledge and learning. Atoms aren't explained in the bible but it doesn't mean atoms don't exist. Eventually we learned atoms existed. The only reason creationism is argued so much is because it was put in the bible and not left out. Personally I think creationism was just the beginning of the answer, it was just someone who-wrote-in-the-bible's best guess with what litle information was provided. I believe it's more origin mythology or insanely figuritive language. I think it's ok to follow science toward an anwer, who's to say God didn't inevitably create science? I believe in the idea of the big bang because they've discovered much more about subatomic particles than just protons neutrons and electrons. They have smaller particles when you go into particle physics and people still aren't sure what caused the big bang. It fits into the general idea that God created the universe, I don't think people will ever find an answer to what brought us into being or what caused the big bang before the big bang there were (supposedly) particles called quarks and an inbalance caused the big bang, so what created the quarks, people will learn or surmise ideas further back down the sequence of events that lead to this moment now and there will never be an end. For like the past 3 hours I was sidetracked from writing this and I got hooked into reading about quantum mechanics on wikipedia and I've heard most of it before but I love to imagine in the hierarchy of subatomic particles an interaction between particles that answer the question of where or what God is.
I remember I first thought it was much more likely a god existed than a guy coming back to life. I imagined how people's souls could effect other souls more importantly I tried to figure out what a soul was, I decided my soul was me. I believe the framework in my brain is separate from my soul because my brain is, metaphorically, a computer with so many complicated connections between neurons and the transmission of signals to communicate within the brain. A computer is useless without a person because it can't do anything unless it's told to do something. Where does the initiative to do something random come from? It comes from a soul. It's the only way to explain how anybody can do something completely and truly random. So I concluded my soul was separate from my brain, I don't know which came first though. (this was the closest idea to how a god could exist that I could think of so of course it's esoteric) I mainly thought of it because I was looking for a possible way a god could exist. So then after I rationalised the existance of a god I started wondering how a guy can come back to life. The only way I can believe a guy came back to life AND his body disappeared would have to be linked to quantum mechanics in a way that probebly nobody understands yet. But if there is a god then this is within his power for all we know. The thought of someone coming back to life is simpler though because people have been declared clinically dead before and then like an hour later they come back to life. I've heard a few stories from close friends in which people have these near death experiences after they're declared dead. Someone's grandpa after a surgery died and he left his body and followed the doctor into the waitng room, i think he was floating in air, and he heard the doctor notify his family he died and when he came back he repeated the conversation they had. There was also one where some lady died in a hospital and there was a shoe on top of the roof in a position that couldn't be seen from the ground and she hovered above the hospital and then returned to her body and told ppl about the shoe and they found it where she said it would be (the grandpa one is more believable, cuz theres less possibility of corruption in the story).
My dad's an episcopal priest and if u don't know episcopalians, they don't talk about god and jesus in everyday conversation, those people are usually evangelicals, there aren't many episcopalian evangelicals. I get pretty sick of talking to jesus freaks but after a while I figure out they only talk about all that religious stuff if u do something that prompts them to, otherwise they're actually pretty normal, just a little more happy and upbeat than most ppl.
To put the whole thing in a nutshell, Believing in christianity is something you should do because you want to, I can't pursuade you to have faith, thats up to you, I worry I don't have enough of it sometimes, but I've known what it's like to have none and I hated it, so I got some and I wonder if theres such a thing as too much, but for some reason it makes ppl happy so I doubt it, probebly only in the perception of our peers can we have too much faith, lol.... those jesus freaks with their hands in the air like human satelite dishes looking for a scrambled signal.... theres really bad reception here on earth huh?). Trying to go through explaining and rationalising something that seems so impossible is so difficult and you should try to find you own way to believe in something regardless of what it is. Nobody believed man could fly until the wright brothers made an airplane, but the airplane itself wasn't what was amazing, the design of the wings took it off the ground and all of a sudden the world changed at that because everybody was like "o we get it now". Whether theres an afterlife or not I'm concluding now that i'll be happy as a christian looking for answers, even if I don't get them.
"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary formsit is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man." - Albert einstein
sry that was so long
wm2009
Member
Finally a new argument ! 
Well You are not considering that, anything in the "sacred books" may be seen as messages. The creation, as long as Adam and Eve, the tree of discernment etc. are symbolic messages. Christians says that Moses was only inspired by gOD as he could not know the truth
The only true message was the one of Jesus and Jesus did not wrote any book...
I think it's bullshit but well, trying to kill christianity by disproving the bible will not work...
Well You are not considering that, anything in the "sacred books" may be seen as messages. The creation, as long as Adam and Eve, the tree of discernment etc. are symbolic messages. Christians says that Moses was only inspired by gOD as he could not know the truth
The only true message was the one of Jesus and Jesus did not wrote any book...
I think it's bullshit but well, trying to kill christianity by disproving the bible will not work...
Anonymiss1969
Active Member
The only real criticism I have of your post is the quoted above. It's not the only way to explain it, its the extremely lazy way to explain it. You don't have the knowledge or technology to explore this further, so you decide to believe the first idea you are given.
I don't think anything we do is really random. Theyre are a set amount of environmental factors that lead to us making decisions (if my brother smashes my toe intentionally, I'll punch him. Factors: my relationship to him, how much pain is caused, my mood that day caused by things that have happened to me that day, chemical imbalances in my brain (emotions))
I'd equate our actions to the game of mouse trap. If you look at each individual piece of the trap, it looks like a ball is randomly hitting a see-saw (or some other piece of the trap), but if you are able to step all the way outside and examine the entire thing, you can see there are many calculated things that cause a tiny ball to capture a mouse.
I hope that makes as much sense to you as it does to me.
Operation 420
Well-Known Member
Don't worry about how "we" got here, worry about how your spirit got here. You wouldn't be asking these question unless you had a feeling deep inside that there is something out there. Think about it and do research. Everything has a connection.
P.S.: The Bible is real, but translated wrong by many people (for their greed or just not having the knowledge). Put the pieces together and you'll understand it. Remeber the bible is just mans interpretation of god's words and their visions. We associate god with an old bearded guy because we're human, that is our physical reality. Concentrate on the spiritual reality.
P.S.: The Bible is real, but translated wrong by many people (for their greed or just not having the knowledge). Put the pieces together and you'll understand it. Remeber the bible is just mans interpretation of god's words and their visions. We associate god with an old bearded guy because we're human, that is our physical reality. Concentrate on the spiritual reality.
Anonymiss1969
Active Member
The point of this thread isn't for you to post something fague that is supposed to move someone into believing solely on faith.
I understand the Bible is a real document, but it is just as real as every other fictional piece of writing that has ever existed. Everytime someone points out a problem with this book, christians immediately disprove it, using faith as the sole proof.
The biggest problem I have with the Bible is that christians assume that it is a non-fiction document. All it took was a group of people more intelligent (or just insane) to write a bunch of books and put them together to trick the people of that time, who then passed down their "knowledge" to their children (and that knowledge eventually made it to you and I).
What kind of all powerful god creates people just so he could watch his creations that he "loves" suffer in hell?
Operation 420
Well-Known Member
It's because you're only looking in the bible for answers. Real history, art, architecture etc. links everything together. God didn't create this hell, man did, and god gave us freedoms to make our own choices, right or wrong. Does god propel man to kill, or does greed and hatred? Who created greed and hatred? Why are children not born to hate and it is instilled in us by other men?
If you're really interested, read about Shinar and Nimrod.
Mindmelted
Well-Known Member
All religions are total bullshit.
Fairy tales to make you feel better about being born and then you start to die.
Fairy tales to make you feel better about being born and then you start to die.
Anonymiss1969
Active Member
According to Christianity, God created us. Everything we are comes from him, including our ability to kill or feel greed or hatred. When we created something, it is not able to go outside of what we create it to do.
Being all powerful, God has the ability to take away the evil in the world. If there is a God, I see him as an immature child for not intervening in our world as it is now.
shnkrmn
Well-Known Member
If god is eternal and uncreated, when did he get the idea to create everything? And what was keeping god busy before the creation? Was he busy writing the bible? Does god get bored? Can god have an idea he hasn't had before? How come god doesn't have a girlfriend? If god was in your reading group what books would he like?
Mindmelted
Well-Known Member
He would read fiction like the bible is...lol
Operation 420
Well-Known Member
What about spirituality? You just think you're flesh and blood, no spirit? Forget religion, it's been poisoned by man.
Anonymiss1969
Active Member
If god is eternal and uncreated, when did he get the idea to create everything? And what was keeping god busy before the creation? Was he busy writing the bible? Does god get bored? Can god have an idea he hasn't had before? How come god doesn't have a girlfriend? If god was in your reading group what books would he like?
Excellent questions that will probably have no real response.