You don't sound like a nut to me. We disagree on some issues, but the important thing is that we agree that it's okay if other people don't share our beliefs.
I still have a fever, so I won't be tackling all this in order. Forgive me.
Sorry, though--Whether you like it or not, insisting that gay couples not call their unions marriages is every bit as bigoted as insisting that blacks and whites have separate drinking fountains. They had their fountains, and we had ours, so wasn't that "equal but different?" No, it wasn't equality to say, "You can't use this because it's for white people." To say that the right to use the word marriage should be exclusively for heterosexual couples is exactly the same sort of thing. "This is ours, and we won't have you fouling it."
If gay couples are not allowed to marry, then neither should heterosexual couples be allowed to.
Now before I get into this next part--I agree that if everyone followed the teachings of Jesus the world would be a better place. But the whole gay marriage thing has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. (In fact, as we'll see later, the formation of and purpose behind the formation of the New Testament was in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus.)
Saying it's wrong because the Bible says so doesn't wash. You can try to justify bigotry with passages from the Bible all you want, but if you want to talk about context, do some research into attitudes toward anything (like homosexuality) associated with Greece in Paul's day. Anything Greek was "bad." Homosexuality was considered Greek. Haven't you ever wondered why "Greek sex" is a euphemism for anal sex?
There is very little room for interpretation when he writes that anyone who teaches that a woman should be allowed to cut her hair is eternally damned--UNLESS we look for a social context. This was actually a cultural thing, as well, referring to women considered to be, shall we say, "loose."
The point is that times change. If homosexuality still isn't okay, then neither is it okay for a woman to cut her hair. Well, the other point is that Paul was a bigoted asshole who should have been lion food. He, with the help of the Nicean Council, pretty much took Christianity down an entirely different path from the one Jesus laid out.
While we're on passages of the New Testament, its very origins disqualify it as any sort of moral authority.
Were you aware that the canon of the New Testament was codified by a committee called the Nicean Council under the Emperor Constantine because he felt that having so many different versions of Christianity was disruptive? Once they put it together, it was illegal to practice any other form of Christianity. Those caught with other Christian writings--those that the Nicean Council did not want in the canon--were arrested and their books burned.
Yes, the New Testament was put together for the sole purpose of having a set of justifications for persecuting those of differing religious beliefs. So you'll pardon me if I don't buy hook, line, and sinker into a book created by evil men for the purpose of ostracism and persecution.
And by the way--They left out some of the teachings of Jesus to make more room for Paul. And burned copies of those teachings when they found them. Does that tell you anything? The modern church is not the church of Jesus; it is the church of Paul, and of Constantine.
Haven't you ever wondered why, if the things Paul was talking about were such a big deal, that Jesus never mentioned them that we know of?
On the church/school thing, that was my point. They are two different things. School is not for teaching religion, and church is not for teaching science. If a church wants to bring religion into schools, then we should have a right to bring science into churches.
I apologize for making assumptions about your belief, or lack thereof, in evolution. At the same time, though, you discount parts of it.
And yes, evolution, like all theories, is incomplete. We know for a fact that it is real--it's just the details we're working on now. (Talk to me sometime about Punctuated Equilibrium and "junk" DNA. Fascinating stuff.) The thing is, yes, frogs and giraffes do make sense in evolutionary terms. Faith is not a requirement. Unless you call it faith when I assume that the sun will come up tomorrow because it has done so every other day I've been alive. I say that when you observe something happen in the same way over and over again, that expecting it to happen the same way next time is not faith, but reasoned belief. When you keep approaching problems in a particular way that ends up yielding answers, it does not require faith to believe that the same approach will, eventually, work again.
Faith is faith and science is science. The only conflict is when religious kooks like the RR decide that reality threatens their religion and must be stopped. Then they cry persecution because we refuse to spend taxpayer dollars to teach that black is white and up is down. When faith takes on science, it has and will always lose, because it is fighting against reality itself. Science is smart enough not to tackle faith, because it already knows that they're too different things. It's like, "Which is true--Apples or purple?" That's how much sense the whole thing makes.
It sounds like you've been fed a lot of horse-shit, buddy. I was a divinity student for a while and got fed the same lines of garbage. Believe it or not, a LOT of scientists believe in god, and many of them are Christians. Yes, despite what you've been taught about scientists being against god, many of them believe BECAUSE of the wonders and elegance they discover through science. Including human evolution, the mysteries of the big bang, and the tantalizing idea of the quantum foam with all of these unique bubble universes (This ties into the big band thing.).
My friend, I'm sorry--it isn't just harder to find evidence for ID than for actual scientific theories--So far it has proven undoable. No one has ever found a single piece of evidence for ID. As I said, though, that doesn't mean ID is wrong, just that it has nothing to do with science.
Religion is a matter of faith, as it should be. If humans evolved from older classes of hominids--which we've pretty much proven--that doesn't disprove ID; it would simply mean that your god chose a method of creation that was not yet understood by the people writing. All religious texts are attempts by humans to come to grips with the ineffable. As such, they are all flawed.
(Oh, another line of bull you were fed is the bit about other religions being exclusive--some are, but many allow that other religions are just as "right" as theirs.)
As for the Big Bang, I'm afraid you're in error there, too, or rather, in possession of only the factoid that opponents of the Big Bang theory want known, without the context. One of the conclusions come to using mathematical formulae that heve been tested over and over again is that when things are compressed to a singularity, physics as we know it breaks down, so we cannot say, "this can't happen," or, "this would have to happen," because of the laws of physics. Just like Newtonian physics breaks down at the subatomic level and we have to use quantum physics instead, we are now seeking what laws of physics may apply to singularities. Oh, and by the way, the background microwave radiation of the universe is about what was predicted by Big Bang proponents.
There are some exciting theories now that may help us gain an understanding of just what happens to physics as we know it at the point of singularity. The math of it all would make my head explode.
The difference between science and non-rational belief systems (That is not a pejorative term--a non-rational belief system is any system that does not rely upon proof.) is that science keeps trying to understand, and pushing the boundaries further and further back. Religion says, "Science cannot yet give a perfect explanation of things, therefore God."
Many ID proponents want taxpayer dollars to fund the teaching of religion in our public schools, and that is a bad idea for several reasons. One of the things the more extreme RR people don't seem to get is that when you start mixing government and religion, it may start out with religion ruling the government and the people, but it ends with the government running religion. And that, my friend, is a scary thought.
Fever's getting worse, so I'm going to lie down. Let me leave you with a snippet from a Sherri Tepper book, though. In the book, God is speaking, and says (I may not get this word for word),
"I have created a universe based on change, and a Very Small Being speaks to me of eternal verities? Listen, what is true is what is written. In every rock, in every star, and in every blade of grass. Problems arise when Very Small Beings write books, then claim that I wrote the books, and the rocks and stars are lies."
You don't sound like a nut
You don't sound like a nut to me. We disagree on some issues, but the important thing is that we agree that it's okay if other people don't share our beliefs.
I still have a fever, so I won't be tackling all this in order. Forgive me.
Sorry, though--Whether you like it or not, insisting that gay couples not call their unions marriages is every bit as bigoted as insisting that blacks and whites have separate drinking fountains. They had their fountains, and we had ours, so wasn't that "equal but different?" No, it wasn't equality to say, "You can't use this because it's for white people." To say that the right to use the word marriage should be exclusively for heterosexual couples is exactly the same sort of thing. "This is ours, and we won't have you fouling it."
If gay couples are not allowed to marry, then neither should heterosexual couples be allowed to.
Now before I get into this next part--I agree that if everyone followed the teachings of Jesus the world would be a better place. But the whole gay marriage thing has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. (In fact, as we'll see later, the formation of and purpose behind the formation of the New Testament was in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus.)
Saying it's wrong because the Bible says so doesn't wash. You can try to justify bigotry with passages from the Bible all you want, but if you want to talk about context, do some research into attitudes toward anything (like homosexuality) associated with Greece in Paul's day. Anything Greek was "bad." Homosexuality was considered Greek. Haven't you ever wondered why "Greek sex" is a euphemism for anal sex?
There is very little room for interpretation when he writes that anyone who teaches that a woman should be allowed to cut her hair is eternally damned--UNLESS we look for a social context. This was actually a cultural thing, as well, referring to women considered to be, shall we say, "loose."
The point is that times change. If homosexuality still isn't okay, then neither is it okay for a woman to cut her hair. Well, the other point is that Paul was a bigoted asshole who should have been lion food. He, with the help of the Nicean Council, pretty much took Christianity down an entirely different path from the one Jesus laid out.
While we're on passages of the New Testament, its very origins disqualify it as any sort of moral authority.
Were you aware that the canon of the New Testament was codified by a committee called the Nicean Council under the Emperor Constantine because he felt that having so many different versions of Christianity was disruptive? Once they put it together, it was illegal to practice any other form of Christianity. Those caught with other Christian writings--those that the Nicean Council did not want in the canon--were arrested and their books burned.
Yes, the New Testament was put together for the sole purpose of having a set of justifications for persecuting those of differing religious beliefs. So you'll pardon me if I don't buy hook, line, and sinker into a book created by evil men for the purpose of ostracism and persecution.
And by the way--They left out some of the teachings of Jesus to make more room for Paul. And burned copies of those teachings when they found them. Does that tell you anything? The modern church is not the church of Jesus; it is the church of Paul, and of Constantine.
Haven't you ever wondered why, if the things Paul was talking about were such a big deal, that Jesus never mentioned them that we know of?
On the church/school thing, that was my point. They are two different things. School is not for teaching religion, and church is not for teaching science. If a church wants to bring religion into schools, then we should have a right to bring science into churches.
I apologize for making assumptions about your belief, or lack thereof, in evolution. At the same time, though, you discount parts of it.
And yes, evolution, like all theories, is incomplete. We know for a fact that it is real--it's just the details we're working on now. (Talk to me sometime about Punctuated Equilibrium and "junk" DNA. Fascinating stuff.) The thing is, yes, frogs and giraffes do make sense in evolutionary terms. Faith is not a requirement. Unless you call it faith when I assume that the sun will come up tomorrow because it has done so every other day I've been alive. I say that when you observe something happen in the same way over and over again, that expecting it to happen the same way next time is not faith, but reasoned belief. When you keep approaching problems in a particular way that ends up yielding answers, it does not require faith to believe that the same approach will, eventually, work again.
Faith is faith and science is science. The only conflict is when religious kooks like the RR decide that reality threatens their religion and must be stopped. Then they cry persecution because we refuse to spend taxpayer dollars to teach that black is white and up is down. When faith takes on science, it has and will always lose, because it is fighting against reality itself. Science is smart enough not to tackle faith, because it already knows that they're too different things. It's like, "Which is true--Apples or purple?" That's how much sense the whole thing makes.
It sounds like you've been fed a lot of horse-shit, buddy. I was a divinity student for a while and got fed the same lines of garbage. Believe it or not, a LOT of scientists believe in god, and many of them are Christians. Yes, despite what you've been taught about scientists being against god, many of them believe BECAUSE of the wonders and elegance they discover through science. Including human evolution, the mysteries of the big bang, and the tantalizing idea of the quantum foam with all of these unique bubble universes (This ties into the big band thing.).
My friend, I'm sorry--it isn't just harder to find evidence for ID than for actual scientific theories--So far it has proven undoable. No one has ever found a single piece of evidence for ID. As I said, though, that doesn't mean ID is wrong, just that it has nothing to do with science.
Religion is a matter of faith, as it should be. If humans evolved from older classes of hominids--which we've pretty much proven--that doesn't disprove ID; it would simply mean that your god chose a method of creation that was not yet understood by the people writing. All religious texts are attempts by humans to come to grips with the ineffable. As such, they are all flawed.
(Oh, another line of bull you were fed is the bit about other religions being exclusive--some are, but many allow that other religions are just as "right" as theirs.)
As for the Big Bang, I'm afraid you're in error there, too, or rather, in possession of only the factoid that opponents of the Big Bang theory want known, without the context. One of the conclusions come to using mathematical formulae that heve been tested over and over again is that when things are compressed to a singularity, physics as we know it breaks down, so we cannot say, "this can't happen," or, "this would have to happen," because of the laws of physics. Just like Newtonian physics breaks down at the subatomic level and we have to use quantum physics instead, we are now seeking what laws of physics may apply to singularities. Oh, and by the way, the background microwave radiation of the universe is about what was predicted by Big Bang proponents.
There are some exciting theories now that may help us gain an understanding of just what happens to physics as we know it at the point of singularity. The math of it all would make my head explode.
The difference between science and non-rational belief systems (That is not a pejorative term--a non-rational belief system is any system that does not rely upon proof.) is that science keeps trying to understand, and pushing the boundaries further and further back. Religion says, "Science cannot yet give a perfect explanation of things, therefore God."
Many ID proponents want taxpayer dollars to fund the teaching of religion in our public schools, and that is a bad idea for several reasons. One of the things the more extreme RR people don't seem to get is that when you start mixing government and religion, it may start out with religion ruling the government and the people, but it ends with the government running religion. And that, my friend, is a scary thought.
Fever's getting worse, so I'm going to lie down. Let me leave you with a snippet from a Sherri Tepper book, though. In the book, God is speaking, and says (I may not get this word for word),
"I have created a universe based on change, and a Very Small Being speaks to me of eternal verities? Listen, what is true is what is written. In every rock, in every star, and in every blade of grass. Problems arise when Very Small Beings write books, then claim that I wrote the books, and the rocks and stars are lies."
Cheers, bud. TTYL.