Which religion are you?

I'm with coreyb. Religion takes up too much time for it to be worth anything. Humans only get a limited time to live, and it is often shorter than it should be. To me, religion is just a waste of time, and it's basically there so that people don't have to fear death. I still don't see why people can't just accept that when you die, you're dead. Nothing special happens, you just die.

 

yeah very true itza and it just brainwashers ya and does stupid beliefs! like Your life is YOUR life not some weirdo religions that take over Your life and tell You what to do! , sorry dont get angry or flame me because this is my say and everyone has theirs!

 

In Poland they introduced ethics as an alternative, but in reality in most schools there's not enough kids who want it so school can create class for them. Although here teaching only one religion is somewhat justified because Poland is christian country with heavy bounds between religion and country, also it helps promote patriotism. Plus there usually are few classes to discuss other religions.

coreyb and Itza you're half right. You see IF there's nothing after death, then religion is just brainwashing, but most people prefer to believe that there IS some point to life and if following some rules can grant them happy eternity they'll gladly do that. It all depends on wether we just die or not, and since you scientists CAN'T prove believers wrong your calims are next to useless. Science relies on evidence while religion on beliefs so until you come up with something they may just be right. Or not. That's the fun part ^_^

Also some religions help to maintain some level of morality making the world somewhat easier to live in. Sure humans may have some morals encoded in their minds and there's law, but without encouragement from religion it wouldn't last long

 

Of course I know that it what happens after death is not definite, or proven, but if these religions are true, and there is an afterlife, then how do they know what it's like? Jesus may have come down from heaven, died, resurrected and told us, but what makes you think he's not lying? Maybe god is just a b!tch who's bored out of his brain, so he's taking out his boredom on on us, by leading us to believe that we'll go to heaven, but heaven turns out to be hell? There's no way to prove it's wrong, and the chances that it's true, and he is evil, are the same as him being nice.

Also, I just found this:
1 Kings 20:35-36
Meanwhile, the LORD instructed one of the group of prophets to say to another man, "Strike me!" But the man refused to strike the prophet. Then the prophet told him, "Because you have not obeyed the voice of the LORD, a lion will kill you as soon as you leave me." And sure enough, when he had gone, a lion attacked and killed him.
Killing pacifists? Yeah, that's nice.

 

omg the bible is funny like family guy, im gonna read it

 

I never said it's gotta be heaven. As mentioned previously, I've been raised as Christian, but I'm actually Agnostic. I was just saying that there may be SOMETHING after death, whatever it is. If it's hell for everyone someone will be laughing his ass of looking at most believers, heh.
I presonally prefer to believe in Terry Pratchet's vision presented in Discworld. When you go after death depends in what you believed would happen. So if you believed in Heaven you go there. The downside is that if you believed in nothingness you're probably screwed, but that's not my case, now is it?

1 Kings 20:35-36
Wow, that's cruel. Me being sort of pacifist I don't feel safe anymore. I just wonder if that man knew that it was prothet telling God's words. If he knew everything it's sort of justified (but still way too cruel, unless he went to heaven because he was so innocent ), but if he wasn't aware of what was going on...harsh, should've read Bible when I had the time for it.

 

cool, i believe you can do anything you want after you die, including creating your own reality

 

I know, I just used Christianity as an example.

It doesn't matter if the man knew that the prophet was speaking gods words or not! God killed him for not hitting a prophet!

@Iffdrie. Read the old testament, it's the funniest. The new one is just trying to cover up the old one's mistakes.

 

lol, sodom and gommora(short modern version): you aint gonna rape my my guests you perverts, here you can have my daughter and my wife, but not my guests./ it is a high crime if you turn around while god doesnt want you to, cause he'll turn you in a salt pillar

 

Yeah, had similar idea. Also it'd be cool if I could die, create my own reality with magic 'n whatnot, then come BACK here with all those ^_^

 

You know what I always find the problem is....people tend to think that just cuz there's an established traditions of religion such as Judaism, Islam, Shintoism, etc., that they HAVE to follow everything in it.

ItzaHexGor, you stated before that you believe that nothing happens after death and that you wonder why people just can't accept your belief. I ask you this question: If nothing happens after death and such, why does it matter if people decide to believe what they do? Now you say that religion was made out of fear...ever thought that maybe it was started just as any another philosophical question was started? If it really WAS just "invented" as you said, it was obviously not just some thing that sprouted out of one's mind, it was conducted just like any other philosophical question would have been. Obviously back then people didn't have science or books to help explain certain things, so when you think about it, it was probably one of the most brilliant and creative things that was ever thought up considering their resources.

Now I know you're thinking in your head "It's been disproven." Well....plenty of other philisophical ideas have been disproven as well, yet we still keep those philosophers in high esteem, why shouldn't we keep the prophets of old in the same esteem?

I tend to find that people focus more on the stuff that's less important than the actual message. The Old Testament was meant to be a law that was to help the people stay alive, considering that they lived and still live in one of the most fought after areas in the world, and it served its purpose. Sure we may not have need for it now, but they obviously did have need of it.

I'll expand on this later, right now I have to go. I personally am fascinated by theology, so I'm always open to new ideas.

 

great point, if anyone would just think like you we woiuld all be a lot happier

 

@ Itzahexgor & Coalescence ,

You guys are saying exactly the same thing that I am, but in a different context. However, what BirdofPrey saying about how "animals could have been created and still left fossils" is entirely incorrect. What is plausible and is the basis of the Creationist theory is that inorganic substances (demonstrated in the experiment that Coal mentioned) could have been engineered to create life and it then evolved.

So my point was this:

Evolution is a law of nature. It cannot rationally be denied.

WITHIN that law is the Theory of Evolution which is the theory of how these changes and the start of life came about. This is still a theory, not a law. At no point did I assert that this is proven fact. Even saying in classrooms that the Theory of Evolution (they're referring to the LAW of Evolution) is only one Theory. This is incorrect and is a lie. We are often making compromises with religious advocates on the truth. That should never happen.

However, when you say that I'm confusing what people are talking about, I am indeed not. Most people who rebut the Theory of Evolution, when they refer to the "Theory of Evolution" are in fact referring to the process by which animals evolved over time. They are not talking about how it happened. They are in effect denouncing the process of Evolution itself, not the way it happened.

Quite a number of people still believe that God created Adam and Eve and that was that. This is what I'm saying can no longer be supported as a belief within religion. The beliefs must be altered, or rationalized in a different way that would accept Evolution as a fact of life.

The only reason I'm making this argument is that I hear all the time how "Evolution might not have happened." I think it's a huge mistake to be teaching our children false truths.

 

This thread was great until Daseti and ItzaHexGor popped in.

If you two don't stop bashing, I'm a gonna have to drop the hammer and dispense some indiscriminate justice.

 

Eh, 11 pages though. Not bad considering our previous attempts

 

the hammer crashes upon their heads; thus they finally get to see what the afterlife looks like, a mineral map from SC.

 

Most priests I knew were stressing the fact that Bible is NOT a book or biology or history. They are leaning more towards the theory that there was evolution and at some point God gave people souls (this is when we become different from apes).

 

Yea...the Catholic Church has been leaning more to evolution. I think they stated it as scientific fact like how the earth wasn't the center of the universe and such. Yea, Meee pretty much summed it up: Evolution happened, but man was given a soul which sets them apart from other animals

 

If religion can't take a bashing religion shouldn't be bashing and trying to convert others.

 

I have only one belief about the afterlife/god/etc : and that is don't have any beliefs. There is no current way religion can be proved or disproved. Why people waste their time believing in something that may not even be real is beyond me. If there is a afterlife, yay. If not, oh well. I'm not going to waste my life going to church and following religious laws when there's no concrete proof that afterlife is real. But hey that is just me and yeh I suppose I am leaning more towards science the religion, because religion has LOTS of discrepenancies.

And how can you say religion makes people moral? The good portion of humanties wars have been fought solely for religious beliefs.