Psalm 14: Who was Jesus' grandpa?

[Kodos]

[Aether]

I personally hate religion. I see it as the single most harmful affliction to the human race, seriously.

However, I am not one to condemn someone for their beliefs. I'm a reasonable guy and what anyone else does isn't any of my business, just so long as they keep it none of my business. What I do have a problem with is the state trying to indoctrinate children with the prominent religion, such as christianity. In my opinion, the state should be belief neutral.

Another thing that fucking makes me furious are missionaries. I have them around my area, everyone does, and I don't give them the time of day. But when they start trying to indoctrinate my siblings without parental or guardian consent, that's when I have a problem. I don't see how they think it's their right to come onto someone's private property and talk to the children of the house while adults aren't present. They're akin to paedophiles to me.

And then there are things like gay marriage and such. Now, I'm not against homosexuality at all. But then again, I'm not for it either. I am completely neutral as it has nothing to do with me. But then religious zealots come out and like a vocal minority they are just morally opposed to anything that doesn't follow the guidelines of their religion. What the fuck does it matter to them what others do behind closed doors. I honestly don't see the logic behind it. Couple that with religious groups being completely against adoption. I mean, what the hell is with that.

I don't necessarily have a point to this argument here, it's fairly baseless and I'm reactive, not proactive. But I think these are good points to bring up.

TL;DR: Fuck you religion.

[Bacon_Barbarian]

... Missionaries? I think you mean something else.

[Delphinus]

It's on a christian website, but you guys ought to like it.

(I found it while looking for stuff on hypergravity, i.e. gravity above 1G).

EDIT:

"Name one thing that reasonable people believe in - besides the divine - which they also claim to be utterly ineffable. I am aware of nothing."

I'd like to make a counter-argument to the idea that the ineffablility of the divine counts against its existence. Saying something is ineffable is not the same as saying it doesn't have qualities. It's saying that it's impossible to explain these qualities in normal language. I personally believe this is one of the most basic functions of art: to make it possible to explain the unexplainable. All art is a metaphor, and one of the things it may be a metaphor for is religious experience. Throughout history people have used numerous methods to achieve religious experience, for example extreme pain, sex, prayer, music and dance, psychedelic drugs, ritual, or meditation. Yet none of these methods are in themselves the religious experience, and the experiences they connect one to are all exactly the same thing. If they don't connect us to what I'll call the Divine, they're meaningless ritualism.

People would not starve themselves, inflict injuries on themselves, or spend hours meditating if they did not obtain some sort of connection to the Divine. The Divine itself is beyond explanation in ordinary language, and even in artistic language it's so personal that it's difficult to explain. I can tell you that for me the Divine feels like falling among the stars and the cosmos as stardust, or like lightning striking the peak of a rock rising out of a stormy ocean, but this is likely to be meaningless to you, and only partly explains what I mean. Whether the Divine itself is God, Brahman, or just the Self (in the Jungian sense) doesn't really matter and I'd argue is unknowable. The experience of the Divine is the crucial part of understanding religion beyond its existence as a sociological phenomena, and the Divine is ineffable. People have experienced the Divine, this is undeniable, and that's the only thing that matters.

[Sylux]

I totally agree, microgravity may have been observed, but there's no evidence for macrogravity holding galaxies together, it hasn't been observed in the lab.

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HOW THE FUCK DO YOU TEST GRAVITY OF GALAXIES IN A FUCKING LAB

[Delphinus]

Satire, Sylux, have you heard of it? That thread is hilarious and shows how normal Christians think the fringe is crazy.

Creationists like to use this lame argument to counter evolution.

[Kodos]

My favorite is when they say that evolution contradicts thermodynamics because it means they either have no idea how thermodynamics work or literally forgot that the sun exists.

[Delphinus]

By that logic cell division also contradicts thermodynamics.

[Kodos]

Well not quite. The argument as I have usually seen it is that evolution contradicts thermodynamics because it is increasing the complexity of systems. It's flawed because, first of all, it assumes that evolution is a movement towards increasing complexity. Historically that has often been the case, but survival of the fittest is not survival of the most complex.

The problems with this in regards to thermodynamics are of course obvious once you remember there is a sun.

EDIT: Point is that since their beef was with the 'problem' of increasing complexity, cell division doesn't necessarily count since I don't know that increasing quantity equals increasing complexity.

[Harvester_Of_Sorrow]

The Cambrain Explosion argument is probably my favourite, because when Creationists use it, you can see there little faces light up and that smug awe of self satisfaction gets slapped across their face. A look that says Hey, mister 'Science man', I just proved God with science.. At this point you have to educate them on the fact that the Cambrain Explosion did not take a year or two, regardless of what Hovind, Ham and that twat from New Zealand told them, it actually took about 880 million years. You then have to hammer the point home that every single organism that came about from the Camrain Explsion was water dwelling. At this point, that smug look will vanish and a long silence will ensue, broken only by the gears in their heads turning while they remember their next incorrect creation science claim.