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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[origamiscienceguy]

Terrible is a bad way to put it. More like, everybody is messed up.

[TD1]

Everybody is messed up = terrible

In my book, anyway.

[Bohandas]

You know what's a lot more difficult than 'hurrhurr Christians are dumb' or 'Some christians think this way, therefore all Christians are terrible people'?

Where did you get that from?

That Wolf for the first part. Second part just seemed to be kinda the general sentiment about religion by some of the people here.

Ah, and DwArfy1? I would posit that what separates divinity from humanity is humanity's inability to become divine.

Though I also really like the idea that a god is defined as something capable of existing in two places at the same time, which comes from a book series. If you try and dissect the words or whatever, then it becomes meaningless, but that's what happens when you try to pull language out of context and dissect it.

An electron can be in two places at once

Also possibly existing on a different level of dimensions than we do, which is so far beyond the way our brains have been made to understand the world it is difficult to physically conceive of in a meaningful way.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

No; duplication is not the same as a single object or being existing in two places simultaneously.

I can replicate, even duplicate, a chair, and have it be identical down to the atomic level, to the subatomic level. It is still two chairs, not a single chair.

Although if you want to talk about what makes you worthy of being worshipped, that's another matter, and a more utilitarian one; a supremely powerful being exists that rewards those who pay homage to it, and punishes those who do not. Which is the more logical of the two actions, speaking from a standpoint of self-interest?

Divinity just happens to mean that such a being rewards or punishes infinitely, and thus no suffering or reward that is physical can compare to or dissuade your action of paying homage to it.

This sounds like the Banach-tarski paradox

I think Banach-Tarski is more relevant to the feeding of the multitude

EDIT:

Here's something I just wrote for a Yahoo Answers question challenging people to disprove the Christian god.

There's nothing quite as boring as arguments for/against God's existence.

Especially ones that have been presented a million times before and rejected by a noticeable proportion of the vocal Christians in the thread.

Could someone please post a link to one of the counterarguments that have been presented? I've heard that argument brought up quite often, but I've not seen a reasonable counterargument yet.

Hoo boy D4E, you have just committed one of the biggest possible errors regarding thinking about infinity and probability. There's infinite real numbers between 1 and 10 but none of them are 11.

What? My logic was pretty much infinity * random small number = infinity, albeit a smaller one than the first one.

You're assuming there is a chance of it at all. For all you know it could be literally impossible. It could also be entirely inevitable. Depending on the types of universes that can exist (since we're already assuming there's every possible one, which might also not be a thing) and how you define 'god-like' (Since AFAIK there's no dictionary limit besides being worshipped).

Eh, I'd define it as simply a being of a power level of the kind associated with Greco-Roman type gods. Like being able to spontaneously generate lightning, having the ability to tell when people are talking about you, arbitrarily long lifespan and maybe nigh-invulnerability. Definitely possible, although not particularly likely to naturally occur.

This ties into what I said before about technology delivering miracles. Throwing lightning bolts is basically a simple parlor trick now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-vz82dx6gQ

You know what's a lot more difficult than 'hurrhurr Christians are dumb' or 'Some christians think this way, therefore all Christians are terrible people'?

Where did you get that from?

That Wolf for the first part. Second part just seemed to be kinda the general sentiment about religion by some of the people here.

Wow, no.  Nobody is saying that Christians are bad people.  We're criticizing ideas, which is utterly different.
If you have a problem with that "general sentiment", keep in mind that one of the underlying ideas in Christianity is that *all* people are terrible.  Most atheists disagree with that, claiming that humans are generally moral without requiring divine intervention.

Personally I believe that everything's empty and meaningless either way. God does not remove the terror of science.

Though technically I'm an agnostic due the the dodge about what constitutes a god being poorly defined and the low barriers to entry in ancient pantheons.

[Orange Wizard]

Terrible is a bad way to put it. More like, everybody is messed up.

Everybody is utterly depraved?

[origamiscienceguy]

Terrible is a bad way to put it. More like, everybody is messed up.

Everybody is utterly depraved?

You know what? Nevermind. This is going to end up derailing the thread.

[TD1]

Derailing the thread by talking about an aspect of religion? Doesn't seem possible to me

[Orange Wizard]

I was going to make a rant about we're terrible vs. we're not terrible; suffice to say that from a secular view morality is somewhere around "benefits the species", whereas morality from a Christian view is "what God commands". The vast majority of people are good, moral people from the secular point, no-one is moral from the Christian point. It's a shame we don't have different words for it because it's a really dumb point of contention.

[penguinofhonor]

Is this so hard to grasp? I've seen plenty of atheists write about why humans are greedy, short-sighted, xenophobic or tribal, violent, etc, usually giving an evolutionary explanation. Original sin is Christianity explaining the same thing. It's not saying humans are any more evil than they observably are.

[Graknorke]

Secualrists generally acknowledge that people can overcome those tendencies and be good people though. And oftentimes that they'll want to be good people.
Original sin makes everyone irredeemably evil forever, regardless of action.

[TD1]

Is this so hard to grasp? I've seen plenty of atheists write about why humans are greedy, short-sighted, xenophobic or tribal, violent, etc, usually giving an evolutionary explanation. Original sin is Christianity explaining the same thing. It's not saying humans are any more evil than they observably are.

No, but it's still saying you are bad. You are tainted forever by original sin. It is seminally present in all mankind. Secularists don't say that someone is evil, but they have redeemable qualities (in Christianity, belief in Jesus/God/whatever). Secularists tend to say people are both good and bad, and that their "redeemable" qualities are held against their bad ones, not that they're actually bad.

At least, that's what I've observed.

[Rolan7]

Classically, original sin justifies hell. A lot of people interpret it as "not perfect" and hell as "merely apart from god", but that's relatively new. It's not supported by the bible. Doesn't mean it's not true, but it kinda looks like wishful thinking developed to let Christianity survive in an increasingly progressive world.

Supporting that, regressives still tout the original interpretation: that we all deserve eternal, literal, fire. It's as common as it is disturbing, even if no one here believes in it.

[TD1]

Highmax28 said this in a PM to me:

Some people think the planets are the world's on Yggdrasil's roots. After all, 9 planets (including Pluto). If you take into account the characteristics of each planet, you could see a pattern, provided you notice some things:

Mars could be Asgaard. It is the closest planet to us outside of Venus and there was evidence there was things there before us, such as water, a face on Mars, etc.

Jupiter, the home of the Giants as it is the biggest planet in our solar system and jotunheim WAS one of the bigger worlds. It also is next to Mars, so if Asgaard was Mars, it would mean they could go there easily.

Now the gas giants. We can't get on them because they're so different. Now there are three of them and three worlds that catered to different races: Dark Elves, Elves and Dwarves. If this is true, then this could mean that there could possibly have been land there and that it was destroyed.

Venus is quite obvious. Venus, being the hottest planet fits the bill for muspell. A burning planet that roasts everything that sets foot on it? Welcome to hell.

Pluto. That ice block planet? Nifelheim; home of he frost Giants and Hel. Frozen wastelands and farthest away from the gods (assuming Mars). When Hermod rode to Hel, the way was dark and cold, and it makes sense so far away out there.

Mercury is kind of an anomaly to me, as I forgot the last world and that's the one that is MIA to me

What's everybody's take?
Edit: Don't worry, I asked before posting it.

[TempAcc]

There's so many alternate interpretation of nordic myths, many of them really cool, even if thats just what they are, cool alternate interpretations. I know a guy that has a chaos magic take on nordic mythology, in that the jötunn (generally applied term, meaning those from Niefelheim, Helheim, Jötunnheim, etc) represent the primordial chaotic forces of the universe and the Aesir and Vanir as tyranical beings that emerged from chaos and imposed their own rules to it through the world tree.

Anyway, I personaly found myself distancing from religions that have concepts of ~eternal hell~ and of a heaven consisting entirely of placid contemplation, for reasons properly and fully explained on the book I linked earlier.

[TD1]

Yea, Nordic myth, as with all religion, is open to interpretation. But it's interesting what modern takes are being made of it - even a dead religion (or mostly dead) seems to continue to change, even now.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

pluto isnt a planet. or if it is, there's a hell lot more than 9 planets on the solar system then.
jupiter is in no way *next* to mars. for adjacent planets they're actually quite far from each other and i'm not even counting when they're on opposite sides of the sun