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Well I belive in Evolution as God has not showed me that he exsists.

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Plenty of people will disagree and put up opposing points of view but if you expect me to see your view and change my line of thought why can you not change your view and change your way of thought and belive what I belive?

It will not be done as most people have been bought up to belive one way or the other.

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Except the one theory has a body of empirical evidence pointing to it, and makes predictions that can be validated, and gets revised when the evidence doesn't fit it, and the other one does no such thing.

I'll leave it to the reader to figure out which theory is which.

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"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind" - Albert Einstein

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ORIGINAL: anthrosub

dark~angel,
The central point I've been making is aimed at creationists who accept only the biblical version of how everything came to be and have been all along. You have stated you do not accept only the biblical account, so you are not a creationist as I just described. You keep taking my words as talking about people who are not creationists and reply that I'm generalizing people who, like yourself, are more open minded then that and accuse me of being a fundamentalist. Does that help clarify things?

As far as belief is concerned...see Ssilver's post.

anthrosub

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Well I belive in Evolution as God has not showed me that he exsists.

Plenty of people will disagree and put up opposing points of view but if you expect me to see your view and change my line of thought why can you not change your view and change your way of thought and belive what I belive?

It will not be done as most people have been bought up to belive one way or the other.

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being a devout atheist

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ORIGINAL: LadyAngelika

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being a devout atheist

Ok... how is one a devout atheist. That's an oxymoron. Atheism is the lack of theism so what are you devoted to, absence?

I'm an atheist, plain and simple. It's not that I will not believe, I cannot believe. Faith isn't something that I chose or not. It is something I do not have. My life experience has shown me no signs of God in the way that any religion has described him. My life experience has led me to believe that we humans try to put labels on everything and are limited to our very limited perceptions in trying to figure out the great mystery that is our existence. That said, I do respect the perspectives of those who say that they have seen signs of God’s existence. In their perspective, they did. And I’m not pompous enough to consider my perspective superior.

What I have in common with people who have faith is that I don’t think this is all random. I don’t think it’s simplistic. I believe that there are forces behind our existence. I just do not see those forces as the God that is described in Theistic type religions.

I think we limit ourselves by seeing existence with a beginning and an end. Why does there have to be? When my life will end, life will go on. It will not end because I end. I exist within a continuum. Such is the way that I view our existence. There was no beginning and there will be no end. It just will always be. I know this concept is hard for people to understand because we are so used to marking everything with time and space: It’s 4 o’clock. This is my front door. I have a 120G hard drive. It’s my birthday. It’s the end of the world as we know it! Everything is measurable, identifiable so we need to quantify, qualify, measure, identify the origin of our existence and theorise about how it will end. And of course, we are a very curious species. This is not a criticism.

I came to a point where I had to realise that I existed in a reality that was much more complex then I could understand. I think in general when people come to this conclusion, attributing the complexity to a divinity is a natural step. For me, however, that was not the case, and most likely because I disagree with the models that have been presented to me. The only model that remotely makes sense to me is the Tao. It permits me to simply understand the notion of existence in thinking that it’s all part of the Tao, an energy that is generated by everything that makes up our existence. It gives me a feeling of being united and tied into my reality. I borrow from that regularly.

- LA

*edited for a typo

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Ok... how is one a devout atheist. That's an oxymoron. Atheism is the lack of theism so what are you devoted to, absence

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I always wonder about all those people who went to hell after eating meat on Friday. Did they get a "reprieve" when that law was repealed?

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But seriously "they changed it"? I mean all of a sudden, the rules or our existence, of the balance between heaven & hell changed? Satan & God sat down and had a little chat and said "We shouldn't be so hard on these poor little babies. It's not their fault that their parents want to wait for the opportune time to have a big shindig for the whole family. Let's give them a free pass for a bit."

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ORIGINAL: Mercnbeth

In Homosapiens, the appendix has no know use. The evolutionary principle would seem to point to future Homosapiens being born without it. To my knowledge no one has been born without an appendix. Humans fly with the aid of machines, shouldn't we be evolving wings? Humans go underwater regularly, some die drowning, shouldn't we be evolving gills? The natural "technology" already exists. Why isn't evolutionary nature using it?

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ORIGINAL: Mercnbeth

In Homosapiens, the appendix has no know use. The evolutionary principle would seem to point to future Homosapiens being born without it. To my knowledge no one has been born without an appendix. Humans fly with the aid of machines, shouldn't we be evolving wings? Humans go underwater regularly, some die drowning, shouldn't we be evolving gills? The natural "technology" already exists. Why isn't evolutionary nature using it?



You're forgetting culture. We have medical technology that has greatly reduced selection pressure on something like the appendix. That's not to say that it isn't possible that in the future humans won't have one, but a mutation that removed the appendix wouldn't be nearly as valuable today as it would have been before modern medicine.

Same thing with wings. We don't need them, we have culture that does the lifting for us.