I see the problem...And I understand your comments.

But, when you are facing the unknown...And eternity is a long time... You just MIGHT say GOD I AM SORRY, PLEASE DONT LET ME GO TO HELL!! I WAS JUST A CONFUSED HUMAN!

GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE!

Or maybe not.

 

I see the problem...And I understand your comments.

But, when you are facing the unknown...And eternity is a long time... You just MIGHT say GOD I AM SORRY, PLEASE DONT LET ME GO TO HELL!! I WAS JUST A CONFUSED HUMAN!

GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE!

Or maybe not.

Possibly for some people, but probably not for me...

 

someday it will. maybe.

 

someday it will. maybe.

Death sucks, I agree. It's inevitable, but that's no reason to be afraid of it.

 

Its not death that is scary...it's dying that is scary.

I would hate to burn to death, or drown, or be run over feet first by a slow moving steamroller.

That would suck.

 

Its not death that is scary...it's dying that is scary.

I would hate to burn to death, or drown, or be run over feet first by a slow moving steamroller.

That would suck.

Agreed, I'd prefer to die quickly... if not at all.

 

Sorry, I'm breaking my word, but I'm weak and just can't resist...

"You cannot justify that it (a giant pink elephant in the sky) is not there just because science cannot prove it."

Evolution is not chance. Sure, mutations are chance but they are selected by the environment. Abiogenesis may well have been chance. However, it took about 9 billion years for life to arrive (in basic single cell form, not being very complex) in this universe. If you played the lottery on every week of those days with a 13 million to one chance (approximately the chance of winning the National Lottery in the UK and one of the reasons I don't play it) you'd win the jackpot 36,000 times.

Be cautious here. There have been billions of years since the first evidence of DNA and RNA in single cell life forms. Not much has changed since then. It can be effectively argued that humans are just a dependant colony of specialized single cell organisms, each not all that different than those original single celled forms.

First of all, fingerprints aren't unique to humans. Many animals have them, including primates, our ancestors. Fingerprints are made unique due to the different conditions we grow up in. For example, why don't all our hairs grow exactly the same as others? You would not try to claim that the apparently unique arrangement of everyone's hair is God's work, it is merely the different environments in which we grow up in.

I'd go a step further. If you can forgive the oxymoron I’d claim that uniqueness is ubiquitous in nature. The veining of leaves, the markings on a whale’s tail, the formation of water crystals, the noise produced by waterfalls. Everywhere you look, nature expresses uniqueness.

Thanks for the congratulations, it's nice to be free of religion. I used to be somewhat religious a few years ago, but then I took a step back and realised my position was fallacious, since science had the best answers, not religion.

Same here. 2 years of theology was enough to put religion and the existence of God into perspective. The collective writings of the monotheistic hanif ‘prophets’, from Ibrahim to Joe Smith, were overwhelming proof that this religion is a disorientated, inconsistent, generally not well thought out and purely human construct. At best, the early authors were trying to create a set of rules for the ignorant masses to use to live better lives. However, these rules were, and still are, so completely fraught with inconsistencies that they have attracted constant amendment. The problem is, in order to amend a ‘sacred’ text, you can’t change it significantly or you risk being declared a heretic and subject to execution. So the amendments have mostly been in the form of omissions and additions, which have only served to further confused the matter. God is a human invented entity brought into the equation as the enforcer. The original concept was a good one. It alleviated the need to explain anything. Follow the rules or suffer the wrath of God. Unfortunately, they took the role too far and attributed creation to this entity. While this initially seems like a good idea (don’t have to explain where everything came from, keep it simple, stupid!) the way it was presented was not well conceived. It has left as many questions un-answered as it resolved. However, the enforcer role was always used to deal with that.
Although we now live in a world where education is encouraged, this ancient dogmatism still appeals to those that do not want to take responsibility for their lives, or those who wish to cherry-pick from the buffet of conflicting policies in order to support their actions.

 

I think this thread has probably run its course. It certainly got far away from the initial topic.

There are any number of things (not confined to religion) we can believe in passionately as individuals, but not be able to support with any convincing evidence. In general, this makes discussions of these topics unsatisfactory.