Does God exist?

[Disgruntled Goat]

Is that a 'Father Ted' sketch? It should be.

 

[llllllll]

If religion attracts the nutters and gives them something to hide behind when they want to blow people up, should we consider if religion should be allowed?

At the risk of defending the god botherers, should we also consider banning oil?

 

[byegad]

JIm all you needed for the perfect comedy sketch was a good punchline. Maybe, 'Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!' What do you think?

 

[Dayvo]

Nothing, obviously. Or to put it another way ... if god created the world and everything in it, who created god?

His mum and dad, of course!

This offers an interesting slant on the subject of 'origins and meaning of life'!

http://rael.org/rael_content/rael_summary.php

but unfortunately I expect the bloke is a multi-millionaire, which seems to rubbish the claims.

 

[Jaded]

At the risk of defending the god botherers, should we also consider banning oil?

snake oil, definitely.

 

[Mr Pig]

What I can never understand is WHY does the devil want my soul ?

He doesn't. Satan can't take or get your soul or anybody else's. He's a created being, as we are. He just hates God and wants to keep us from him as he knows that God loves us. The devil's only interest in people is in how they relate to God.

Plus, he has no power over where a human soul goes. That is between God and man alone.

 

[col]

If religion attracts the nutters and gives them something to hide behind when they want to blow people up, should we consider if religion should be allowed?

There could be a number of things that attract nutters,its not just religion,and those that claim religion are using it for their own ends,and not representative of it i think.

 

[Jaded]

There could be a number of things that attract nutters,its not just religion,and those that claim religion are using it for their own ends,and not representative of it i think.

Everyone who is in authority in religion and everyone who tries to persuade others that their belief is good and should be followed is using religion for their own ends.

 

[yenrod]

Clearly not.
No self-respecting, loving, all poweful superbeing would have invented flies, wasps or Bonj.
I rest my case.
Thank you for listening.

Im sure I was reading a forum in my dreams about how irritating a Rich P was was cause he got in the way of an afternoon flight !

 

[spandex]

 

[col]

Everyone who is in authority in religion and everyone who tries to persuade others that their belief is good and should be followed is using religion for their own ends.

The genuine ones really believe it would help,they are doing no real harm.Its the ones that want someone to do something bad for them that are the con men,and i dont believe religious in any real way.

 

[Jaded]

The genuine ones really believe it would help,they are doing no real harm.Its the ones that want someone to do something bad for them that are the con men,and i dont believe religious in any real way.

I'm afraid I disagree there.

Putting the fear of a god into someone, trying to make them believe that they'll live forever, telling them that the dark-skinned person next door's religion is all wrong

these are doing real harm.

 

[col]

I'm afraid I disagree there.

Putting the fear of a god into someone, trying to make them believe that they'll live forever, telling them that the dark-skinned person next door's religion is all wrong

these are doing real harm.

They are

 

[jonesy]

not at all. as i've said. i'm a physics graduate. i don't know either. but for people to dismiss a creator god due to scientific evidence is in my view unsubstatiated.

but to quote george smoot
"The observations were "evidence for the birth of the universe" and Smoot said on the importance of his discovery that "If you're religious, it's like looking at God."[8][9]"

Tut tut tut. If you are a scientist then you most certainly should know not to use either the "you can't disprove it so it must be true" or the "what came before the Big Bang?" (first cause) arguments.

The infinite set of things you can't disprove includes Bernard Russell's teapot and the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Parmesan Be Upon Him!). Hence the idea that scientific theories need to be falsifiable; if a god can only be hypothesised, but there is no testable evidence for its existence, then the theory cannot be regarded as scientific, so doesn't belong in a discussion about the origins of the physical universe.

Likewise your ultimate cause argument simply gets you into the deep water of untestable theories. You can't simply say "We don't know what came 'before' the Big Bang, therefore God must exist" because one could equally propose an infinite number of other untestable explanations for the Big Bang. IIRC, both Dr Who and Red Dwarf have started the Big Bang! Maybe it was time travellers from our universe, or another one? Maybe it is a simulation in a computer, an explosion in someone's particle accelerator, or an artifact from somewhere else, or produced by a cosmic biological process like the continuous creation beings in Terry Pratchett's Strata.

Why does the ultimate cause have to be anything like your god? Why does it have to be sentient, or even if sentient, remotely interested in human beings, let alone demanding 'sacrifices' from them? The point is that the best we can do may be to say "we don't know what the ultimate cause is", maybe we can never know because it is outside our universe. But that doesn't give us licence to invent one to our particular liking.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Thank the FSM for some sanity on this thread...