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Great news for the Atheists on here!

Actually there is a good chance he would be

Muslims probably aren't very tolerant of someone who would worship Obama and government instead of God.
 
You can never lose your salvation

So either you still are, or you never were. Time will tell.
 
Could not have said it better


I will be your cheering squad. Might want to snap your fingers a bit to get the beat. Great.
 
When you piss everybody off then youk know you're doing things right.

I think you're saying "You're a liberal and yet you piss the liberals off." I don't consider myself a liberal, although on social issues I'm much more in line with the Dems than the GOP but that's just 'cause the GOP is so out of touch on social issues. On economic and big government issues I think the GOP often makes a lot of sense.

I posted an interview a while back on here of American Atheists President David Silvernam at CPAC and he was saying that if the GOP would jettison the social conservative stuff they'd get more non-believer votes and he's right. Non-believers vote Dem more than GOP not because they're more into big government but because when there are only two parties and one openly despises you for your views on religion you have no choice but to vote for the other one. That said, although I vote Dem more than GOP, I vote 3rd party more than Dem or GOP.
 
If I may


When, where were you a member? What denomination? Why did you convert to present beliefs?

I am interested. If you have addressed previously and do not want to rehash, where may I look? What does/did the rest of your family do? Follow or remain in prior church? Will any of you be impacted by your moves?

Many questions, I think, if not too personal.
 
Guess I'm good either way then

My "path" to being atheist is similar to OP2's.

I was born and raise Southern Baptist. Both of my grandfathers were pastors, one Baptist and one Methodist. I joined the Methodist church later in life and was baptized accepting Jesus as my lord and savior. I was even president of the men's club at the church organizing fellowship breakfasts and other activities.

That church in particular represented everything that I thought was right about religion. It was a small church and the pastor would have any new faces introduce themselves. One day a really rough looking dude was in there and when he introduced himself he mentioned that he was just released from prison. At my mother's church, I can pretty much guarantee nobody would have approached him. At the church I was going to, nearly everybody approached him later and welcomed him into the church.

I moved back to WV, and the church I started attending here was the exact opposite. They were begging for money every service, and I had become friends with somebody on the board who was telling me how they wasted the money they did get on trivial things. The church was also very cliquy, and represented everything I despised about churches, so I stopped going to church at all and instead just read the bible at home on my own.

Like OP2, I was raised in it and honestly never really gave it a whole lot of thought.

Reading the bible on my own, I just found a lot of things that didn't work, and things that I had learned were wrong. So, I got to the point of thinking "if I can't believe this or this or this, how can I give credibility to the rest of it"?

Some of my responses on here have seemed like an attack on religion and it doesn't represent my true feelings.Yes, I'm atheist, but I do entertain the idea that there could be a God, I just don't happen to believe there is. I also know that there's no way for me to know until I'm dead. If there does happen to be a God, I don't think it's a God that listens to your thoughts and grants your wishes and has a path for your life and all of that.

I'm not going to say that anybody else's beliefs are wrong, unless it's something that we absolutely know is wrong, but that may still not invalidate their religion and their approach to life through that religion.
 
And I have no issue with that viewpoint

I can work with that. I joined a startup church over a year ago that is attempting to be less worldly and business-like, and more to serving the community. We don't even have a building to call church home yet, but spend 80% of what comes in on community service. We are attempting to build relationships with other churches in the area to work together. This is a huge challenge, and it shouldn't be. Church right after Jesus' ascension looked nothing like it does today. We're trying to get back to those roots, and change church culture.

As far as the contrasting what's in the Bible with what the world thinks it knows, neither is exact science. Making any kind of guess as to what happened in the past is not following scientific method, but an attempt to make things from the past make sense with evidence we see today. There are cracks in the foundation in many aspects of what science teaches, yet they don't get publicized much. I myself, I can't say scientifically exactly when the universe was created (and yes it was, this always existed baloney will disappear soon), nor when earth was. It doesn't seem like science has a grasp on it yet either.

Biblically, I can't say for certain when things occurred either. But I do teach the youth deeper than they would get with biology as far as genetics, anthropology, and archaeology. Last week I even had the opportunity to pull out the chalkboard and go into base 10, base 2, and base 4 numeric systems, and explain how they worked. I give them information from both sides. In this group we spend more time on science than we do in the Bible.
 
Re: If I may

I don't want to reveal too much because I want to maintain my anonymity but I grew up Catholic in PA. I'm an analytical person and over time I simply gradually came to the conclusion that it wasn't true. It makes more sense to me that people make up religions to fulfill needs than that it's actually true.

So you have the idea of an all-knowing all-powerful God watching you and that punishes you if you're bad and rewards you if you're good. If you stop and think about it that is a pretty useful thing to make a society run more smoothly. It takes away an incentive for people to misbehave. I think we're slowly changing to the point where a believe in God is becoming less necessary to make things run smoothly but a couple thousand years ago when the standards of morality were different I think it was useful to have a tool like religion to keep people in line.

I'm not sure what the rest of my family believes. They all act like they believe but while I think some do I suspect some others are just playing along. I don't really know though. Nor do they know about me. I'm living a closeted existence with respect to belief in God. It's unpleasant but I think the alternative of not being closeted would be more unpleasant.
 
Re: And I have no issue with that viewpoint

I don't know whether you're bit about knowing what happened in the past is not scientific is related to your disbelief in evolution or not but I think scientists in general are going to disagree with you on that count. There are ways of determining what happened in the past. In fact, strictly speaking everything you see is happening in the past since it takes time for the light to reach your eyes. The Sun is 8 light minutes away so when we look at the Sun we're seeing back in time 8 minutes. I saw a story today about something new they've discovered about Uranus by observing it but Uranus is some light hours away from Earth and when we look at it we're looking hours into the past. We can't observe it now.

Some stars are 10s of light years away or 100s of light years away. The Universe is billions of years old. Where is the line when it starts to be not valid because we're looking too far into the past?

Do you simply discount entire fields of science like archeology and anthropology and palentology because they look into the past? Or geology? If we can't tell what happened in the past then these and other fields of inquiry at simply big wastes of time.
 
Re: Here, I'll take you back to the fourth grade

None of those steps are necessarily left out as far as I can tell.

By the way, in addition to throwing out most or all of geology and palentology and archeology and other fields you're also going to have to throw out your computer because electrons can't be directly observed and without the knowledge we think we have of electrons even though we've never observed them your computer won't work.
 
Incorrect

You can still hypothesize and test results, as have been done over and over. Dating? Not so much.

Geologic and archaeological dates are theorized, then affirmed by another theory, which has never been tested and confirmed via scientific method.

Did you know there are 9 different fudge factor... errrr, calibration formats for carbon dating?
 
Re: Incorrect

No, I didn't know that, I am not familiar with the intimate details of carbon dating.

So the fields of geology and archeology are baloney then? If their dating is baloney I have a hard time concluding anything other than the entire field is baloney.
 
I wouldn't say baloney, you took it way too far

Their methods are based on assumptions that none of us were here for. Specifically for carbon dating, that the ratio of c14 to c12 throughout history remained the same. We have found it hasn't been, so the first assumption is out the window. They built in fudge factors to compensate, but how do they know what they were before our chronometers (items we know the date on that we've dated) existed? We don't. We just make the fudge factors fit what we want them to be.
 
Re: And I have no issue with that viewpoint

Originally posted by TarHeelEer:
I can work with that. I joined a startup church over a year ago that is attempting to be less worldly and business-like, and more to serving the community. We don't even have a building to call church home yet, but spend 80% of what comes in on community service. We are attempting to build relationships with other churches in the area to work together. This is a huge challenge, and it shouldn't be. Church right after Jesus' ascension looked nothing like it does today. We're trying to get back to those roots, and change church culture.
Click to expand...
This is what I think churches should be at their core. One of the things that got to me also was to look at the churches and the stonework and stained glass windows and everything else and just wonder how much other good could have been done with all of that money. Clearly many don't believe me, but there are also some that do as evidenced by your church's roots and efforts. I read a book by Bernice King once and she was talking about how meaningless the physical structure and the actual building is in a church, that it's all about the people.

At my mom's church they had a huge fund drive to buy a bunch more pews, when the ones they had were only half full. By the time they raised the money and bought the pews, there was essentially 1 family per pew with 15 feet of empty space. I just find that terribly wasteful. Use that money for bookbags for poor kids or something. In general I just don't like wasteful spending at all (although I realize that my values don't have to be held by everybody and therefore what I see as wasteful won't be seen as such by somebody else).

Sometimes people state things that seem like an attack on here, and I will sometimes say things very differently than I normally would.

I wouldn't normally tell anybody their beliefs are wrong. What works for one doesn't work for all. However, if my view is attacked as "stupid" or "delusional" I am likely to respond with something about the other side as I see as "stupid" or "delusional".
 
Re: I wouldn't say baloney, you took it way too far

And what do they say in response when you tell them that?

None of us were here for the Civil War either. For that matter none of us where here for anything that the Bible says either.

And even putting aside things for which some people were hear and recorded the events, there are entire branches of science that would be invalid if your criterion were uniformly applied.

And is it just a coincidence that the results of these sciences when applied to things in the current day work? We're doing it all wrong and everything is wrong but by some kind of incredible luck the answers are right.
 
Now you're getting into the historicity of different artifacts

I wish you'd stay on one topic that you don't understand.
 
Re: I wouldn't say baloney, you took it way too far

Originally posted by TarHeelEer:
Their methods are based on assumptions that none of us were here for. Specifically for carbon dating, that the ratio of c14 to c12 throughout history remained the same. We have found it hasn't been, so the first assumption is out the window. They built in fudge factors to compensate, but how do they know what they were before our chronometers (items we know the date on that we've dated) existed? We don't. We just make the fudge factors fit what we want them to be.
Click to expand...
Please stop posting about science. You are humiliating yourself and do not even realize it.
 
Re: Please do explain where I'm wrong

Carbon dating within the last 50,000 years is "extremely accurate".


This post was edited on 3/18 2:37 PM by countryroads89

Carbon dating
 
from eHow?


Ryan Voss
Ryan Voss is a freelance writer/blogger and artist/graphic designer from Fort Collins, Colorado. His areas of specialty are current events, politics and the martial and fine arts. He has been freelancing in a variety of creative fields since 2005.

I think I'll take a published science article over that. The processes haven't changed that much from the 80's. Robert E. Lee, "Radiocarbon: Ages in Error," Anthropological Journal of Canada, 1981, pp. 26-27: "The troubles of the radiocarbon dating method are undeniably deep and serious. Despite 35 years of technological refinement and better understanding, the underlying assumptions have been strongly challenged….It should be of no surprise, then, that fully half of the dates are rejected. The wonder is, that the remaining half came to be accepted."
Why do they ask how old you think your specimen is, and why when you request something be dated in labs?



This post was edited on 3/18 2:34 PM by TarHeelEer
 
Re: from eHow?

I found your previous source. It was a faith-based site disguised as an archeology site. You shouldn't consult religious people on science and you shouldn't consult scientists on questions of faith/religious philosophy. Your source here is a freelance writer? Geez! You just keep embarrassing yourself.

Here's another site since you seem to have a sincere desire to try to learn.



Real Science
 
You don't get to quote science journals.

First of all that article is 30+ years old but that point aside, you don't get to reject science and accept it at the same time. The science journals are what you're saying in wrong re. dating and all that. You're discrediting entire fields of science by saying this stuff is bogus and these journals are how these ideas are developed and exchanged. You can't do that and then use a support an article from a scientific journal.

Scientists that do this stuff for a living have access to all the articles, including all the ones you cited. Why do they conclude that dating is valid if they have access to that article? Are they all just wrong? Are they purposely ignoring that article? What?
 
Yet noone answers the simple question

Why do they ask how old you think something is, and why, when you get something carbon dated?
 
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