[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]YamatoDamashii92 wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]YamatoDamashii92 wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]YamatoDamashii92 wrote:
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]YamatoDamashii92 wrote:
I believe scientists might take some issue [/quote]
I believe so much of your world view is made up of conjecture and assumptions based on what other people had done or said, that what you claim to believe is a worthless measure, meaningless to any sort of relevant humanity.
Also, through my wife, I’m now related to an entire extended family that counts among them quite a few scientists. One of whom works for the government and is arguably one of the smartest people in the country if not the world. Each and every single one of these people are devout Christians to the point of where they didn’t (until kid six came along and the weight of more kids was heavier than sin) use birth control.
So what you believe others would take exception to means jack and shit. [/quote]
No scientist believes a man lived 600 years, that a woman was made from a rib. I also knoew very smart people who identify as christians but guess what, they don’t believe anything in their books, they are not christians, they merely hold up a cultural tradition.
Do you know who else identifies as christian? Richard Dawkins. I guess christianity is compatible with christendom after all 
Next you will be saying Einstein was religious. 100% of all scientists who claim any sort of spirituality do it under his contextual lens, some form of intelligence intelligence, a universal intelligence etc.
Also name the guy or it is suspect to say the least. Funny how this anecdote just appeared when you were arguing with an atheist and claim to know some super well known scientist who is pretty much the only christian scientist who actually believes in anything in the bible.
[/quote]
First off, I would take Beans at his word if I were you.
He has absolutely no reason to fabricate anything to score points on the Internet against a 22-year-old atheist.
Second, please cite the source in which Richard Dawkins identifies himself as Christian. This I gotta see.[/quote]
I know you are friends with some of these guys but lets be real here, no scientist believes anyone ever lived to be 600 years old. Maybe he identifies as christian but pretending there are prominent scientists who believe in a literal interpretation of the bible is quite questionable.
Richard Dawkins: 'I am a secular Christian'
He has quite a few videos where he identifies himself as christian.[/quote]
As Pat said earlier, not all Christians take everything in the Hebrew Bible as absolute literal history. Some do. My good friend Pushharder is one of them. But Pat doesn’t, and the Pope doesn’t, and Father Coyne, who used to be the head astronomer for the Vatican certainly doesn’t. You don’t have to be an atheist to be a scientist, just like you don’t have to be a Christian to be a credulous, superstitious nob end.
Dawkins called himself a “cultural Christan”. The equivalent would be Einstein, who was a “cultural Jew”. I am guessing Einstein did not personally believe that Methuselah lived nearly a thousand years, or that Noah literally gathered up a breeding pair of every land animal on the planet, nor even that God ever spoke to Moses or Abraham or Noah or anybody at all…but he was raised as a Jew, and would have been treated as one had he stayed in Germany.
You seem like a decent guy, Yamato, but you need to learn to choose your battles. This is not one of the battles I would have chosen, were I you. Now is the time to apologise graciously, and bow out.
[/quote]
If someone does not believe in a literalist interpretation of the bible they are cherry picking and are not true believers. And yes I understand the Dawkins and Einstein distinction I made them a few pages ago to illustrate my point. Most self proclaimed Christian scientists are not believers, they don’t follow the biblical age of the earth (How Old Is the Earth? | Answers in Genesis ) they don’t believe the earth was created in days ( they turn a day into a godly euphemism for billions of years etc ), they find ways to skirt the beliefs until they end up with “faith” as consistent as the church of England’s.
Most Christians have such a detached faith that had they been born 200 years ago they would be seen as heretics.
I will apologise when someone quotes a sentence where I insulted the OP. I don’t feel I did, I feel like a bunch of religious people hijacked the thread based off one post where I advocated getting him science books to go along with his religious studies.
If anyone is seriously upset from the posts I made in this thread I apologise for that, but every poster in PWI makes harsher ones about politics, race, other religions so it seems a bit like false outrage.[/quote]
If there’s one thing more absurd than a Christian calling an atheist “religious”, it’s an atheist deciding what constitutes true belief in Christianity.
Asa matter of fact, Young Earth Creationism of the type espoused by Ken Ham on Answers in Genesis constitutes a very minor percentage of the total number of Christians in the world. Even the majority of Jews don’t believe all of what their Bronze Age ancestors wrote down, but you wouldn’t judge them to not be “true Jews”.
I’m not saying you insulted the OP. Doogie’s got a pretty thick skin, and if he felt insulted, you would know, because he would be verbally tearing you a new arsehole. What I am saying is that I can understand why your foray into this thread has been roundly criticised, by religious and irreligious folks alike.
I’ll give you an illustration, then I will leave this thread, and let you do what you will. I don’t happen to be into video games. I think they’re quite imaginative, and I like the graphics, but I don’t play them myself, and I think that people who play them almost constantly are probably wasting their time.
If asked for my opinion on video games, I will admit that while I used to play when I was a child, I no longer do, because I lost interest. I may express incredulity that so many people seem to devote so much of their lives to what amounts to a digital fantasy, but I do not consider it my mission to aggressively preach the inanity and pointlessness of video games to the gamers.
On this site, on the GAL forum, there are, ever so often, discussions about different gaming consoles and game software. I don’t participate in these threads, because as I said, I am not interested. However, imagine if you will that a father who, like me, has no interest at all in video games, but has a fifteen year old son who has expressed interest in maybe playing some. So dad comes onto T-Nation to ask his gamer buddies about maybe recommending what to buy.
Into the midst of their discussion, I come barging in, saying, “why don’t you get him some good books instead? Or some DVDs or something? I don’t play video games, I think they’re a waste of time, and may be contributing to the degradation of our society!” Would you say that my comments have added anything to that discussion? Do you think that perhaps the other participants on the thread, regardless of their own stance vis-a-vis video games, might be just a bit put off by my brusque tone? Do you think, in fact, that they would be justified in thinking that maybe I was acting like a jerk?
Just something to think about.
Adieu.
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But I didn’t say get books instead. I said get science books too. Not instead of. Also the dangers of people becoming hooked on video games and the dangers of religion are hardly comparable.
However I agree I might of been abrasive to some of the posters, but when it is 10 theists all quoting you and arguing with one person it gets kinda hard to reply to each one without it becoming somewhat irritating and meeting their one liners and out of context quotes with harshness.
I will just steer clear of religion threads as it makes the believers angry.
