The whole pig and shellfish thing is Jewish/Hebrew tradition and it is because both are bottom feeders and eat unclean things which can make you sick. It is a health concern, though not nowadays (possibly like getting your boys circumsized). There are many that still eat kosher for health and not religious reasons.

If I were to compile y'all's definitions of "god", "church", and "christian", I would be as against them as you are. Similarly, if I asked a bunch of Republicans to describe the Democrat agenda (and vise versa) I would agree with the wrongheadedness of the "other side". Anytime you have a group defining their opponent the definition is going to be a caricature. But let us who claim those labels define ourselves.

Add to the mix people like Keith who think their experience, in his case a rigid Catholic background, is the only version of a broad group and who seemingly can't think outside of that box, you are going to get a skewed view. Not all christians operate like Catholics, in fact many christians don't count Catholics as real christians.

My experience as a christian proves to me that god is pro-gay-marriage. I think god is love and expressions of love are expressions of god. Personally I think we should follow the model many other nations do and have the state sanction a civil marriage for contract, property, insurance, and other legal reasons, and have the various religious groups provide for their own blessings as they see fit. Separate church and state.

I am pro-choice but anti-abortion. I wish there were no need for abortion but the decision should be the woman's, and if she so wishes in consultation with her partner, doctor, spiritual adviser, or whoever. Keep it legal, safe, and rare. I once saw a video of pro-life protesters being asked, once abortion is illegal, what should be the prison sentence for a woman who gets one. They all just stumbled and said we should pray for them. Think through your argument, sheeple; if it's illegal, it's a crime and we send people to prison for crimes. It cannot become illegal again. Our society owes it to women who find themselves in a crisis pregnancy many avenues of support so that the pregnant teen doesn't have to live in fear of her parents and the working poor woman doesn't have to live in fear of losing her job if she has to take maternity leave. And the "people of faith" on the sidewalks with the huge posters of aborted babies have a greater responsibility by dint of the commands in the bible they adhere to to assist the needy.

I believe the theory of evolution and the big bang theory. I just happen to believe that these are the tools god used to create the world.

The first five books of the Hebrew scripture were written centuries after the fact and were not meant as historical documents. Their purpose is to convey Truth, not Facts, just as Aesop's fables do. No six day creation, no snake with a piece of fruit for Eve. And by the way, it doesn't say the Hebrew slaves built the pyramids. It says when Abraham got to Egypt they were completed for hundreds of years already. The slaves worked on other building projects.

I have learned over the years and through lots of pain and loss that the only honest way to pray is to say "please help". If I tell god what I need or ask him for something specific, that's just dumb. If he's who I believe he is, he already knows what I need better than I do. "Not as I will, but as you will."

Why do the innocent suffer? What about huge natural disasters? I don't know.

You can throw a bunch of "oh yeah, what about..." stuff at me and I don't care. Yes, the church(s) through the years have been made up of sinful people doing shitty things. Every group of humans has that same track record. Jesus never said "My church will be perfect, or even good", he just said "the gates of Hades will not overcome it."

Like Jeffrey Joseph said, what matters to me is I love Jesus and he loves me, and you.

Oh, and I don't donate money to general funds because I don't want my money going to things I don't approve of.

I'm constantly amazed how people who are seemingly normal, intelligent, and/or of the same community, can believe in horse shit like organized religion.

Look into the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, because you just employed it with your post.

I grew up Christian, in the Methodist faith. My father was very active in our church, taught Sunday School, performed the liturgy, etc. Then he died, and my congregation freaked the fuck out. They had no idea how to deal with a 40 year old widow and her young kids. So they chose to not deal with us -- by effectively ostracizing us. Because we made them feel weird.

By that point I was already approaching agnosticism -- I was that annoying kid in Sunday school who asked where the dinosaurs fit into history, and where did Cain find his wife if he and Abel were the first kids on the planet? I still remember how truly terrible I felt as a child when I was informed that all of life's hardships were the fault of women, because of Eve. Church is what turned me into a feminist (that and realizing that my mother worked all day and then came home every night and worked again, until late in the evening).

So by that point I wasn't much of a believer, but church to me was community -- a group of people who support each other in times of need. And our community tossed us out rather than be inconvenienced by us when we needed them the most. That was the final straw for me, and I haven't looked back since. My mother has since changed churches, and the one she goes to now seems pretty open-minded. But I'm done. Organized religion hasn't been good for the world and it wasn't even good on a personal level for me. And my story is mild in comparison to people who have been kidnapped and forced into anti-gay programs, or told that they can't get married in the church because they are black (which just happened last month, by the way).

innocence is a human construct and means nothing in the universal grand scheme. events happen to people. nature doesn't take into account your heart situation or provide divine protection. a wolf will happily eat your baby alive. as for disasters, our atmosphere provides us relatively calm planetary weather patterns. when they come around it's likely the combination of pressure, temperature, and wind.

I'm with Myq about not getting arbitrary communities. I had my programming club when I was a kid, so I didn't need church.

Join a tennis club or something, it'll be a much better way to spend your time.

First off, I think the thought that humans came out of primordial soup is just as rediculous as saying a spiritual being created everything. I don't think either have enough backing to be called a fact. Both require faith of some sort.

Secondly, I don't think God is pro gay marriage. I think he is obilivious to that. Marriage is something humans came up with. A biological creator is simply concerned with procreation so the species continues. Christians are brought up to believe that a kind God cares about every little thing, and that is fine as well...but there is as little Biblical evidence that he is for gay marriage as he is for straight marriage.

THIRDLY, Aesops Fabels, in NO WAY are fact. They are cautionary tales. And there are plenty of Christians that believe every word of the Bible is God ordained and therefor happened exactly the way they said it happened. Though I'm definitely inclined to believe they were tales passed down over the generations. That also being said, I do love when historians find proof of the stories.

Fourthly, I don't know many Christians that don't consider Catholics Christians. The only Christian sect that I don't consider Christian are the mormons because their beliefs go completely against the stated Christian ones. I don't consider the Catholic faith right on the money, but I also know that in general, they believe the same things other Christians do. From holy roller evangelical to the most strict Wisconsin Synod Lutheran, they all believe in the same main things.

And what Sparrow said about the innocent suffering. She is on the money.

The difference is we can sketch out the process of biochemical formation out of a primordial soup, test the likelihood of such events, and estimate the plausibility of that chain of events. We can investigate the consequences of our assumptions to come up with predictions, test their validity, and either reinforce our belief or invalidate it. We can then take the resulting framework to better understand our world.

If we go the spiritual being route, we close off any possibility of intellectual investigation and progress.

So alright, both require "some sort of faith," but one is much more useful than the other. UMN has pretty strong research science programs, you should go sit in on some lectures.

One can argue that having some sort of religion can help you better understand the world as well...that person would proabably be a Bhuddist =)

I'm not negating science at ALL. Evolution DOES exsist, but humans used to be sludge? That part requires just as much faith as religion does. We have more chromosomes alike to a starfish and more skeletal similarities to a dolphin rather than some apes. I feel some have pushed the humans came from apes story as hard as others have pushed that we started as Adam and Eve.

I also think spirituality has become this evil buzz word and gets completely ignored. There is value to both sides. Meditation has proven to lower blood pressure when medicine couldn't. People have been miraculously healed. Scientists have become Christians while they were trying to disprove religious theories.

Can't both sides just admit that there is so much unknown? Why is science more useful than spirtuality? I think they can coexsist nicely.

Yeah, I think in gradeschool our pastor even did a Catholic joke in a sermon, it was pretty rediculous.

The main things Lutherans don't like about Catholics is that they have to pray through a saint to get to God, and that they used to make the church unaccessable to normal folk. There is also some back and forth about communion. I have heard the iconography argument, but not the timeline of the Bible one. Do they not believe in the literal Bible? I thought they did?

My saddest moment as a wedding photographer was when this young Catholic couple got married. They had a baby already and refused to have the baby in their wedding pictures. They wanted to ignore that the baby was born out of wedlock. I finally convinced them to do one picture, I can't imagine being that kid and being brought up as a mistake. So sad. Not that Lutherans are any better with out of wedlock, a girl from my Lutheran high school got expelled for being pregnant while the father just got to go on like nothing happened.

Humans didn't use to be sludge, and we didn't come from apes. Humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. But humans were always humans, as apes were always apes.

"We have more chromosomes alike to a starfish and more skeletal similarities to a dolphin rather than some apes." I'll need to see the source to properly put in context.

There are no atheists in the trenches. But you also can't build a bridge on faith.

Also, the "humans come from apes" trope is a willful misrepresentation of evolution that is pushed by creationists.

Dolphins have thumbs, two legs that make up their tail, a belly button, their blowhole is two nostrils, they even have hair, and they have sex for pleasure. They are a lot more physically similar (especially in body to brain ratio) than most apes.

The chromosomes with a starfish will be harder for me to find, I wrote my research paper over a decade ago. (I'm editing here...adding that a lot of the starfish/human studies are based on limb regrowth...there are enough similarities between the two species that scientists are really researching it. Though science also says that horses and bats have more similar dna than horses and cows...so...)

The big bang theorists totally believe that all life came from primordial sludge, and where did the common ancestor come from then?

My sister was taught this in public college...I totally believe evolution exsists. I'm saying, though, that teaching our beginnings with evolution is the same as teaching it started from a heavenly being. Neither can be proven or disproven.

That just demonstrates that a posteriori knowledge is not certain. Constructing an ancestral tree requires some guesswork and IRL we only get degrees of certainty.

John Locke called...

There is a difference between "came from" and "used to be"

This is one of the most interesting reads I've had on here since picking XrabbitX's brain for saying he was a Gnostic Christian(they still live?!). I have a whole new respect for stulagu and even wanna pick her brain on this lol. I'm also surprised to see so many people actually understand where the Old Testament came from and some of that other inside baseball bullshit. Shit, I may have to read more posts on here. :o

I'm not used to seeing this on a regular; not in this state atleast lol. Hell I was asked this morning what I thought about the Democratic Convention. And was promptly told how the parties are identical and the Illuminati controls them both.

Yep.

only one or two monkey species have sex for pleasure, not all apes. one of the big similarities between apes and dolphins are the brain to body ratio, proportion of limbs and bones, they have large brains and the communication sections are very similar. How they raise their young is similar as well. The bones in the hands are more similar to humans than an ape as well...and humans are very different from apes with how their neck and facial features are. Yep, the dolphin nostrils are on the back of their head, but they are right next to each other seperated by tissue like a humans, not two seperate nostrils away from each other like an ape.

Dolphins act more like humans than apes and are extremely intellegent, we get more communication out of them than the apes we spend years teaching sign language...we just need to learn how to read a dolphin. Dolphins can put together complex sentences and show compassion as well as problem solving. And yes, a few apes can do, but on a much lower level.

I'm not negating apes at all, just trying to show likenesses because it shouldn't just be "humans and apes come from the same ancestor" if your arguing similarities between species.

Yes, they point at cards and put together sentences. Apes can put together basic sentences with sign language...we can't read dolphins in this way because we can't comprehend their language.

they can solve complext problems, too. it is just harder to judge their intellegence. does that clear it up?

Sorry to interrupt the primate discussion, but does anyone know where to find the books of the Bible that were omitted? [I'm kinda sorta looking at you, Stulagu...]

Creationists say that the world is 6,000 years old. That is easily proven false right there.

Carbon-Dating and Mitochondrial DNA: both have often been called a "MotherFucker" by religious followers, worldwide.

There are many texts that are not considered Biblical canon. You might want to start with the Gnostic Gospels:

Gnostic Gospels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Well yeah, because it disproves their fairy tales.

Thank you, Blitz. I'm hoping there is a collection, in english, somewhere out there...

The ancestral tree as compiled by biologists describes a "similarity" between species as defined by Biologists. It's useful for them, but their concept of "similarity" may not be useful for you.

I would say deadliness is a more useful measure of similarity in real life than percentage of shared genes. Thus, lions and HIV are more similar for practical purposes than lions and cats.

Nothing can be proven (beyond some theories in mathematics). A specific theory of evolution can be disproven (which means it will have to be revised to account for new evidence). "Evolution" is a description of the general framework, so it can't be disproven per se. If somebody finds another mechanism to explain biological diversity that has better explanatory/predictive power, we can scrap Evolution in favor of that new framework.

It's more about having a consistent world-view and seeking to resolve inconsistencies that arise.

But ultimately, I study math and science because it makes my brain feel fuzzy and connected. And I avoid scripture because it throws me back to the days of "You must do _____ because we're your parents and we're telling you to" which makes me feel bad.


But I guess if you got a sense of awe and might out of that, then I could see why you'd be drawn to religion.

http://memearchive.net/memerial.net/3161/physics.jpg

Oh my goodness, so many...I'd have to go write a couple pastor friends to know the whole amount. If you look up the First Council of Nicea (where the Nicene Creed comes from) that is when the books that made it in the Bible were decided for the most part.

and Creationists come back with the Old Earth argument. there is also no proving it is 460,000,000,000 years old either...carbon dating past a couple thousand years is pretty fickle.

I'm not saying it IS 6,000 years old, just to be clear. I'm also not saying dinosaurs were on the ark as some Christians claim. There is a whole branch of schooling called Apologetics where Christian scientists do logically explain things just as reasonably as aethiest scientists.

I have experienced a couple very horrible evil things that have solidified in my mind that evil exsists...and have experienced things that can only be considered spiritual in nature. Yes, I could go into exploring that it was my instinct and the 90% of my brain I don't use playing tricks on me, etc...but I feel that in general humaity is spiritual, and that for me tells me that there is more out there.

I get emotional when alone in nature, and emotional in church sometimes. Maybe it is awe, maybe it is hope, I don't know.

The Gnostic Gospels have definitely been published, I have a copy at home. You could probably start digging around the internet to find other stuff. It's pretty overwhelming, because there is a lot of stuff out there.

yeah, that is why you need four years of schooling to shift through it all. crazy!

OK. So, I just had a discussion with my friend who got a church related degree and is married to a pastor. Wanted to make sure I had things straight before I wrote it here. (I only had a couple years of education on this not the 8 plus she has)

SO...the Council of Nicea met in the 300's and that was to unite all of the small churches that were spreading like crazy throughout Europe. They decided on basic doctrine and agreed on the books collected being the books of the Bible. These books were already in place, but this was the confirmation of setting the books as canon.

From my friend: "the Catholic church includes the apocrapha which has 1 and 2 Maccabees as books, among others. There are also Peter and Stephen, which were never considered by 1st century Christians to be worth anything at all"

The New Testiment was made up of letters written by the followers of Jesus to the churches to help guide them in living the way Jesus taught. The Peter and Stephen letters, when read by people who knew them, were deemed fake. The others were authentic...once again, because the people they were written to knew these men personally.

The letters were written to specific congregations, who passed them around to each other, and that basically makes up the New Testiment. The Old Testiment has been around obviously much longer and pieces are in Muslim and Jewish faiths as well.

My friend doesn't know much about the apocrapha because she is Lutheran, not Catholic...but says the gnostic books are throwaway, like the books of Mormon. They were meant to supplement the Bible, but aren't "God's Word" and most were discredited early on.

So that's what I've got. Christianity was very much a grassroots oganization to start with and, as usual, humans ruined it and turned it into a political power way back when and have been abusing it every since.

How do you discredit one piece of fiction from another?

Zing!

The problem is that there is never a shortage of people who claim that their words are divinely inspired. And I'm sorry, but just because a body of men with authority decided that this book is "real" but this other book is "fake" doesn't make any of it true. How did the dudes in the year 300 personally know the dudes who wrote the gospels -- that means they were written hundreds of years after Jesus was dead.

Nope, the authenticity of the books were decided shortly after Jesus' death, and, like I said, the Council made it canon (official). And they personally knew the men that wrote these letters, so yeah, it was easy for them to decide.

And no matter who you think Jesus was, he WAS a real person, and the disciples were real people and really died horrific deaths for their religion. There are many historic facts, you can't discredit everything just because you don't believe the spiritual parts. That is like saying Cleopatra wasn't real because you can only find her likeness and story in a couple historical references.

Any book that outright makes shit up at least half the time is high on the list of suspicious bullshit.

I meant quite the opposite. Keith posits that fallacy when he states christians are all X because his experience of Catholics is X. I was pointing out that not only are Catholics not the prime example for other christians, but that some of your more fundy types don't even consider them real christians.

I was lazy; god-who-is-love wants people who love one another to be happy together. Procreation is a lovely benefit if that comes of it but if you say that is the reason for mate-pairing then you are reducing us to breeders.

Read more carefully; I wrote that Aesop and parts of the bible convey TRUTH, not fact. Grimms Fairy Tales and Shakespeare's sonnets tell truths but very few facts. I believe that much of the bible teaches truths through storytelling, history with editorials, and poetry.

Like Keith, just because you haven't experienced it, you don't believe it to be true? Just Google "are Catholics christian" and you'll see. e.g. http://www.born-again-christian.info/catholics.htm

(Full disclosure: I'm a liberal Catholic Christian who doesn't go to church because my priest is an ass who didn't want to deal with my questions.)

It's a starting point, but here is a pretty good Wiki article about the development of the canon of the bible (list of books). I know it's just Wiki, but it follows what I know from my own studies. Development of the Christian biblical canon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Proto-Evangelion of James is entertaining. I believe that is the one where little toddler Jesus and his buddy make clay birds. His buddy's is prettier so Jesus makes his own come to life and fly around.