Should people be religious?

[Mountaineer]

sure but not like obsessed religous people who only think of the religion and never stop thinking about it.all gose around the religion to those obsessed ppl and everything more than normal is bad.

[kev222]

I believe in the story of Adam and Eve (regardless if it's Scientifically impossible)

It isn't. The biblical creationist's scientific justifications for the account of Adam and Eve have been around,  unfelled,  for a long time. It's just not presented in schools as an alternative to the naturalistic belief that mankind evolved from ape-like creatures (For which, ironically, a case can be made for scientific impossibility)

-Kev

[Grakthis]

Ah ha! Here we are.  Good old fasion creationism vs evolution.

Kev, I would be VERY interested in hearing the scientific justification for Adam and Eve because everything I have studied says its a genetic impossibility.  BECAUSE we wouldn't have all of the near infinit variety in our genetic makeup if we all came from only two original humans.  Essentially we would just continually reinforce recessive genes and double up on dominant genes and most of us would all look the same, and there would be horrible genetic flaws in mankind because we wouldn't have had the genetic diversity that allowed mankind to survive dramatic changes in the world.

Besides, the bible says that Adam and Even only had two sons.  The random "women" just magically appear with no explanation.  So thats a major flaw in the idea.  Always pissed me off too.

Plus, If I remember correctly, the time line doesn't work out.  They couldn't have had as many kids as would have been neccesary in the amount of time humans have existed AND have created as many drastic changes as we see in mankind.  Especially if you believe the bibles timeline.  I dont remember the full argument here, but I know it was based on examining the differences between caucasians, african's, ahrabs and asians and saying they could not all be from the same two people.   I might have my facts wrong on this one, but thats the premise as I remember it.

Also, I have never heard strong evidence to indicate that evolution (or mans evolution from apes) is a scientific impossibility.  I have studied up on evolution EXTENSIVELY.

We are missing STEPS in evolution.  BIG steps.  But there are a LOT of  possible explanations for this.  And the theory of evolution, atleast on a smaller scale, is not only well studied but its been DEMONSTRATED.  So we KNOW animals evolve.  The only thing we aren't 100% sure of is if animals can evolve to entirely different species.

So go ahead and present the arguments.  Even if you dont know all the details, id be interested in hearing the premise because i've never heard a strong scientifically feasible creationist view.
---Andrew

I believe in the story of Adam and Eve (regardless if it's Scientifically impossible)

It isn't. The biblical creationist's scientific justifications for the account of Adam and Eve have been around,  unfelled,  for a long. It's just not presented in schools as an alternative to the naturalistic belief that mankind evolved from ape-like creatures (For which, ironically, a case can be made for scientific impossibility)

-Kev

[Grakthis]

but I feel as though you are just as close to god praying to him in your room then there.

Thats sound thinking for a 14 year old.  It's amazing that organized religion hasn't picked up on this notion yet.....  

...Oh wait.  That would put them out of business wouldn't it?  :wink:
---Amdrew

[Grakthis]

I'm not gonn follow everything exactly like it says, but just because I do one wrong thing doesn't mean you should come up to me and say "Hey, I though you were Catholic. Catholics aren't supposed to be bad."

You know, i find it ammusing when people say " i am such and such religion EXCEPT I dont believe blah".  Because if you disagree with just ONE part of a religion, then you CEASE to be a part of that religion.

Organized Religion is an all or nothing proposition.  If the pope says "you cannot use condoms" and you believe that its OK to use condoms, then you are NOT Catholic.  Regardless of what you call yourself.  Because a Catholic believes that condoms go against the will of God.

And the reason this works this way, is because the pope, scripture and tradition DEFINE exactly what a Catholic IS.  And if they redefine it, and you dont match it, then you CEASE to be Catholic.

Most organized religions work this way.  One of the exceptions being "Christianity" which accepts anyone who follows Christ REGARDLESS of the details.  The Marrionist sects are the same way.  As long as you are Christian and revere Marry then you can be a part.
---Andrew

[Laura]

[PIBby]

Andrew, I wasn't talking about protected sex, or anything like that. I'm talking about lying, or using God's Name in vain. Stuff like that, venial sins, methinks. Stuff I do without thinking

AND what I meant by that paragraph is if I kick someone, people are like "Oh, damn! Wht'd you just do?! You're Catholic."

[Alecs]

My father is a minister and he always says, "try not to be religious, believe in Jesus Christ and you will be saved. You can be religious and not be a Christian and will go striaght to hell." I know this is deep for bunch so I will go away. I always try to avoid topics of politics,religion,etc.... No matter what, we always offend someone.

I know it sounds odd but I believe it's the truth.

Works don't get ya to heaven, the Grace of God does. :wink:

[PIBby]

"try not to be religious, believe in Jesus Christ and you will be saved. You can be religious and not be a Christian and will go striaght to hell."

No offense to your Dad or anything, but how does he know that you'll go to hell? And why wouldn't he want you to be religious?

That's something I don't get. People are always saying obey the ten commandments, I'm a Christian, I don't believe I need to be religious and go to Mass every Sunday, but . . .

Catholic : Thou shalt keep thy Sabbath Day holy.

Protestant: Thou shalt keep thy Sabbath Day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

Hebrew : Thou shalt kep thy Sabbath Day holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath in honour of the Lord thy God; on it thou shalt not do any work, neither thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

All I'm saying is three of the most catholic religions in the world believe (or should believe) to worship weekly.

I love Alecs.

[Holly]

sometimes it's a good thing to beleive in things... so yeah, if thats what people want, sure.

[Alecs]

what I was saying is that people get all tied up with religious stuff made up by certain people than what the bible says. Yes DUH, I know what everyone is going to to say, "the bible was written by men". That's not the stuff I'm talking about. I'm talking about people freaking out if girls wear pants or cut their hair at all. No Jewelry or you're going to hell. Trust me on this, that was the 1st church my parents were brought up in and my dad realized really quick that whether girls wore pants or not had nothing to do with God. Heck, men wore robes back then anyway. That's what my dad meant by, being a christian or being saved or believing in God was more important than all these silly rules people make up for their "Religion". My dad welcomes anyone and wants people to be able to worship God freely without worrying about the rules of whatever... when People start basically punishing themselves they start being judgemental toward others and that's a sin in itself. Walking around being pridefull because they are following the rules is a sin too.

Colossians 2:21-23 says, "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!" these are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on HUMAN commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an APPEARANCE of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

[Blake]

When I was told wha to believe and MADE to believe it I did.

When I realised I can control wha I believe, I'm not at all religious anymore.

[KULPDOGG]

All i can say about this is believe what you want to believe, and dont question what other people believe.

[LimeTwister]

All i can say about this is believe what you want to believe, and dont question what other people believe.

true this.

[kev222]

I apologize in advance for the fact that I have a serious problem. I'm completely unable to be brief, despite my best efforts. I'm well aware this is way too long. But it's the minimal response I could construct in light of the density of your challenges. In a vain attempt to remedy this I have changed the font to size 9.
 

Ah ha! Here we are.  Good old fashion creationism vs evolution.

 
lol. I thought you might have something to say about it. In fact, I hoped that you would It is so very much fun to argue (with intelligent people, at least). So here goes
 

Kev, I would be VERY interested in hearing the scientific justification for Adam and Eve because everything I have studied says its a genetic impossibility.  BECAUSE we wouldn't have all of the near infinit variety in our genetic makeup if we all came from only two original humans. Essentially we would just continually reinforce recessive genes and double up on dominant genes and most of us would all look the same, and there would be horrible genetic flaws in mankind because we wouldn't have had the genetic diversity that allowed mankind to survive dramatic changes in the world.

 
The idea that humans would all end up looking the same, caught in a genetic dead-end, is an idea that stems from a misunderstanding of the creationist position. In short, that position is: Adam & Eve were created with the best possible combination of genes (best meaning the highest information content and so the highest potential for genetic variation in their offspring). Taking skin colour as an example, which is caused by the presence of melanin produced by our skin cells and so controlled by the genes that instruct how much melanin can be produced (of which there are several). Adam and Eve would likely have had mid-brown skin possessing the different genes for producing different amount of melanin. Thus their offspring could possess the entire range of skin colourings, red, yellow, brown, black and white which are all caused by melanin in differing amounts. As another example, if Adam had blood type A and Eve had blood type B the information would be present in their genes to produce offspring with all blood types. The same is true for eye shape, eye colour, hair colour and all other genetic differences we see today (and some that are extinct).
 
In fact, most evolutionists now believe that all of "modern man" are descended from one woman (A so-called mitochondrial Eve), and did not evolve seperately as previously thought. This is based on the genetic study of Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which is only passed down from the mother. They are thus forced to accept a scenario which closely matches the biblical account of Adam and Eve and the dispersion of a small population at Babel. A far cry from genetic impossibility.
 

Besides, the bible says that Adam and Even only had two sons.  The random "women" just magically appear with no explanation.  So thats a major flaw in the idea.  Always pissed me off too.

 
This is simply incorrect (Presumably the two sons you are referring to are Cain and Abel). Seth was another son of Adam & Eve (Genesis 4:25) and there were other sons and daughters of Adam & Eve (Gen 5:4).  
 

Plus, If I remember correctly, the time line doesn't work out.  They couldn't have had as many kids as would have been necessary in the amount of time humans have existed

 
Without the details it's hard to construct a counter argument but... in terms of pure population growth rate required from then to now, there is no problem. It does interesting lead to some problems for the evolutionary account history. All is explained within this article by creationist Dr. Don Batten of Answers in Genesis. There are better ones containing a lot more calculation, but this is the one I could lay my hands on.
 

AND have created as many drastic changes as we see in mankind.  Especially if you believe the bibles timeline.  I don't remember the full argument here, but I know it was based on examining the differences between Caucasians, African's, Arabs and Asians and saying they could not all be from the same two people.   I might have my facts wrong on this one, but thats the premise as I remember it.

 
This part of the argument is pretty much impossible to refute without the details. It sounds like another mis-representation of the creationist position. The information in the genome for all "racial" characteristics was present at creation and through population isolation/natural selection throughout history (Significantly the dispersion at Babel [Genesis 11]) information was lost to certain groups (E.g. Black skin in Caucasian populations). So the "drastic changes" were not created, but were rather already present in information contained in the original human genome.
   

Also, I have never heard strong evidence to indicate that evolution (or mans evolution from apes) is a scientific impossibility.  I have studied up on evolution EXTENSIVELY.

 
No debate is possible without defining the debated subject. So let me define Evolution as used by myself from here on in. Evolution is the process by which mankind and all other living things came in to existence from a single celled organism in the distant past through the sub-process of reproduction with mutation, shaped by another sub-process, natural selection. That is the very definition of Darwinian evolution. Evolution is used to mean a lot of other things, often just changes in something (usually an organism), but for the purpose of this post Evolution is defined as above.  
 
The biggest problem for evolution comes from the science of information. Evolution starts from a "simple" single celled organism, for which that genome does not contain the genetic information for hair, legs, lungs, brain, retina, nervous system, bones, etc, etc. and to end up via evolution at mankind who's genome does contain the information for all of those things. Therefore, evolution must account for that increase in information. Put bluntly, it can't. Neither DNA mutation, DNA inversion, DNA crossover, plasmid transfer, natural selection or any combination of those processes which are supposedly the driving force behind evolution produce information. There is not, and has never been a single observered case of an evolutionary process that causes an increase in genetic information. Not one, yet the theory demands many. So many, in fact, that given their supposed rate we expect to find some today. But we don't.  
 
Not only must evolution account for the existence of information. It must also account for the existence of the code system that encodes that information. It can't. It isn't surprising that it can't because the laws of nature regarding information state that "it is not possible for chance processes to produce information", "it is not possible for chance processes to produce a code system" and "The only source of both code systems and information is intelligence". Empirical scientific laws that a single counter-example would invalidate but for which no single counter example has been found.  
 
Obviously this is a very brief outline. Two books I'd highly recommend on the subject are "In the Beginning was Information" by Dr. Werner Gitt and "Not By Chance" by Dr. Lee Spetner. There is a wealth of debate material by those two authors, more authors and other stuff available in the ICR (Institute for Creation Research) archives.  
 

We are missing STEPS in evolution.  BIG steps.  But there are a LOT of  possible explanations for this.  And the theory of evolution, atleast on a smaller scale, is not only well studied but its been DEMONSTRATED.  So we KNOW animals evolve.  The only thing we aren't 100% sure of is if animals can evolve to entirely different species.

 
What do you mean by small scale evolution? Natural selection does occur and is part of many creationist theories, as does/is mutation. Evolution in this sense (i.e individuals change because of mutation and populations change because of natural selection acting upon mutations) is fact. However that kind of small scale evolution is of no use in explaining molecules to man evolution, which must account for an upward increase in genetic information. Demonstrations of non-information gaining evolution cannot be used as support for the idea that evolution explains the origin of any life especially mankind.
 
The creationist account fits nicely with science in that genetic information was created by an intelligence (God) and has since decreased as a result of mutation (and crossover, etc.) and natural selection over thousands of years.
 

So go ahead and present the arguments.  Even if you don't know all the details, id be interested in hearing the premise because I've never heard a strong scientifically feasible creationist view.

 
Well I did as good a job as I could. Even so, I haven't really presented anything above a very brief outline of some creationist positions. If you're really that interested, here are my two main recommendations for a complete understanding of the creationist worldview.
 
http://www.answersingenesis.org: Answers in Genesis  
http://www.icr.org: Institute for Creation Research  
http://www.creationresearch.org/: Creation Research Society  
 
Of course, a response is welcome.  
 
-Kev