Okay ATHEISTS <rolls sleaves>

For someone who is so critical of Christianity, you don't seem to have even read the first chapter of the Bible. If you had, you wouldn't come out with such ignorant guff as you have in this last paragraph. It's in fucking Genesis, right near the front!

If you're going to rip on a religion, at least know something about the tenets of it. Or just carry on, doing what you do.

 

I don't know where you came up with this but it has no basis in reality.

 

What you say is nonsense not because it goes against the Bible but because it goes against all common sense.

 

misfeed.

 

To elaborate on why what you say is nonsense, no Christian, or Jew for that matter,has ever believed that we are the biological offspring of God, complete with His DNA. "Image and likeness" doesn't mean that, never has, never will. I don't know how it gives you any satisfaction to make up something about a group they don't believe and then criticize them for believing it. It just makes you look foolish. When someone makes a big deal about their superior reasoning ability and analytical prowess and then comes up with something like this, it tends to make them look pathetic--an ignoramus who thinks he's a genius.

 

you make absolutely no sense at all, and you have shown yourself to be more fallicious than ANY christian I have ever come across.

I sincerely hope you are not really 50 years of age....

 

I was thinking the same. If he's not some over-sugared little 14 year old tosser in Arkansas who hasn't been given enough homework/been kicked shitless enough, there's something seriously wrong with the world.

 

Is there any significance of the square bracketed comments? I ask because one of them is a slur; if someone prays against those they resent, they are a bad Christian, and that is made pretty clear in the Bible.

I guess, but on the other hand, anyone who claims that Christianity is intolerant of those who do not share its beliefs can check out his example and then go fuck themselves with a railroad spike.

 

He does believe in God in Tillich's sense of "the Ground of All Being" (i.e., a concept or abstraction), but not in a personal God who answers prayer. If Tillich is considered to be a leading Protestant theologian, I guess Spong can be considered to be a prominent Christian cleric. Yes, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus.

 

There's equivalents in science. Theories of parallel universes have been criticised for been "anthropocentric"; in a similar way that those who believe in a certain god use the ambiguity over the possible existence of a god as "proof" of theirs, all kinds of silly theories emerged concerning parallel universes that were totally baseless, or at least not evidenced or even particularly implied by the theory. I kinda see in Spong a logical midpoint between believing and not allowing oneself to get carried away.

 

This man speaks the truth! If a God existed, he would be EVIL to DENY 4 Opposite Corner Days Simultaneously within a 4 Quadrant Earth Rotation. It's Simple Math, IF NOT FOR Academic Lobotomy. 1 Day 1 God equates Religious and Academic Organized Crime - of deifying a Queer Male as a God - extracting $Billions from educated Stupid and the Gullible, for Eons. You worship a Queer as Your God. There is no Womanless Creator, for Creation occurs as Opposites. All that money you gave to Queers and Lesbian Sisters - Criminals.
Education destroys analytical brain, reducing mentality to android level.

 

Hmmm...one toke over the line, maybe?

 

Kind of thinking the same thing myself.

 

I think one toke is an understatement. Multiple tokes I'd say.

 

So, like, on topic: we're talking about inspiration having a divine origin, yes?

 

Well, existence itself is one of only two possibilities. We (and our particular universe that evolved and produced us within it) could exist or not. Our not existing is rather uninteresting philosophically. That we do exist is rather unremarkable given that we are here pondering our existence. Yes, it's a tautology, but those are the only parameters that exist for, well, our existence.

I still think you are looking back at an event ad hoc and trying to rationalize it with inapplicable probability theory. I'll address this further later in this post.

True, but for all we know there could be multiverses, or a succession of linear trials of who knows how many universes "before" this one (before is a concept which is inadequate linguistically, because it really has no meaning outside the context of our own brand of space-time and its own brand of logical causality).

I don't understand your support for this statement. Even assuming it is true, it certainly does not imply a divine creator. This "extra" intelligence, assuming arguendo its extraneousness, could simply be an emergent property of the kind of intelligence we evolved over generations and which allowed us to prevail as the predominant great ape. It is a byproduct of the intelligence we evolved as the surviving descendents who adapted to their environment best.

I take issue with your usage of "than needed for mere survival." This, I think, reflects a widely-held misconception of evolution by means of natural selection as it is understood by evolutionary biologists today. Survival isn't a factor in causing genetic mutations. Instead, it's genetic mutations that lend a survival or adaptive advantage to a population which tend to lead to long term survival of the species. In other words, if not for those mutations which allow for adaptation to changing conditions, a population eventually dies, leaving no survivors. Over successive generations, those mutations survive and mutate further, making the progeny carrying those "better" genes the ones left. Thus, if we are here, obviously our ancestors are the ones who survived and who carried the genetic mutations that allowed them to develop the kind of intelligence we find in humans today.

Furthermore, natural selection isn't the only pressure on genetic evolution. Sexual selection is also a pressure on genetics. For instance, it is widely accepted today that permanently swollen female breasts among humans is a trait which provides no survival advantage. Instead, it was bred into today's humans by our ancestors because apparently males preferred to mate with females with prominent (not to be confused with large) breasts. Over enough generations, breasts became more and more prominent. Indeed, breast size in any individual woman is largely determined by heredity, more so than any other factor.

For all we know, the same may be true of intelligence. It could be that males and females, or perhaps one or the other, found intelligence to be a sexually attractive trait. It is thus that sexual selection could have played a role in humans developing a great degree of intelligence. If unscientific surveys among young persons of dating age are reliable at all, one might point to the results of so many of them and conclude that intelligence in a potential mate is indeed a sexually attractive characteristic.

It's not a fluke, as in pure chance. It's a result of development, or the evolution if you will, of the universe itself, and of life once it began, within the constraints imposed by matter/energy, the four fundamental physical forces, and the derivative laws of physics and chemistry of which we know. In other words, there are only so many ways things can be arranged within those parameters, and the way they arranged themselves happened to lead to the world we find ourselves in today.

Had they arranged themselves differently, we wouldn't be here. Perhaps some other life form would be in another universe, however. It reflects a kind of lack of imagination to presume that only carbon-based life forms are possible, for instance.

This is just the argument from ignorance again. If we don't know how it all came about, then it must have been the work of a Creator. No. That is a possibility, but not the most parsimonious one. Occam for the win.

Also, rather than seeing the universe as being fine tuned for the eventual emergence of intelligent humans, perhaps it makes more sense to regard intelligent humans are being fine tuned by this universe. We are shaped by the forces of the universe, not the other way around, and it was bound to produce something like an Earth with conditions conducive to life. As Gould noted, however, perhaps if we could rewind the universe and start it over with the same initial conditions, it might play out slightly differently the second time.

For all we know, just as in The Matrix, we could be on the nth iteration of "the universe," not the first and only one. These notions are beyond the realm of science, however, and are metaphysical questions.

I'm familiar with the argument. I find it to be less than persuasive. Again, if the parameters didn't allow for the existence of stars, etc., then we wouldn't be here. So what? It would be a different universe, perhaps one that was rather short lived, perhaps one with different kinds of life, or no life at all. We happen to be in this one.

As for the argument from probability that is the "fine tuned" argument, Victor Stengel, a professor of physics and astromony at the University of Hawaii, answered this well in 1993. Rather than try to reiterate or summarize his arguments, I'll point you to a site with an article he wrote about this topic. His explanation is more eloquent and better than anything I could write.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/cosmo.html

I prefer the explanation that the laws of physics were created with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, such that they are every bit as much an inherent part of it as matter/energy and space-time. Our universe wouldn't be our universe without them. To me, their evolving while our universe was already extant doesn't make much sense, given the Standard Model of the Big Bang.

 

it seems to me that so many miss the fundamental point of Christianity... to become Christ-like... and end up worshiping Christ instead of emulating him.

 

Zilla

Emulation is better.
Done with effort it results in a better life
Worship is sniffing someones shit in hope the smell sticks.

Occam.

 

As androids would be smarter than you.. you have a problem
Or dont you believe we can creat an android with an IQ of higher than 4

Occam

 

SelfControl

What rubbish .. It's multiverse time.
WTF does that have to do with humans.
Its like saying neutron stars are anthropocentric.
total crap
Ignor those turkeys.. they can only gobble.
[spit or swallow]

occam