From Christian to Atheist. Your thoughts?

KWCrazy said:

You're the one who seems unable to understand the very science you espouse to reign dominant. The fact is, on matters of origination the only truthful scientific answer is, "We don't know"

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Yep. Science doesn't claim to know what it doesn't. It doesn't cling to any age old book that claims to know the answer. It's willing to admit it doesn't know when it doesn't know, instead of desperately needing an answer and pretending they have one.

Thank you, for proving my point.

Heatios said:

No, the analogy is flawed. If you roll a dice you know it will produce a number, you may not know for sure, but you know, and have no reason to believe a single number over another. With the universe however, we don't know if it is result of god for sure, we don't have any inclination to believe it is based on the fact that we have no other universe's to use for comparison, and so we have no reason to believe god exists or any one claim god exists over another.

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My bad. My analogy was an attempt to understand how you can rationally not know something exists and yet accept and live by a belief the "something" doesn't exist. Do you want to try to give me your own analogy?[/QUOTE]

Heatios said:

You seem to be really trying hard to discredit my position.

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Duh!

Heatios said:

I did not encourage the OP to hold atheism, read it again, I encouraged him to hold the position he arrives at after questioning, and figuring it out for himself. I specifically said that if the conclusion he arrives at is god, that's fine, but the most important thing is to care enough about your beliefs to research them, and know what they are based on, instead of just taking it on blind faith, because that is never a pathway to truth.

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Blind faith that leads to believing God doesn't exist even while not knowing if he exists?

Hospes said:

My bad. My analogy was an attempt to understand how you can rationally not know something exists and yet accept and live by a belief the "something" doesn't exist. Do you want to try to give me your own analogy?

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Duh!

Blind faith that leads to believing God doesn't exist even while not knowing if he exists?[/QUOTE]
You do not know if unicorns exist either, THAT DOESN'T MEAN THEY EXIST.

I don't accept and live by the belief that something doesnt exist. Argument ad nauseam.

I simply DON'T KNOW whether or not one exists, same as you DON'T KNOW whether or not a magical flying teapot exists, yet you don't live your life as if one does.

Heatios said:

Blind faith that leads to believing God doesn't exist even while not knowing if he exists?

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You do not know if unicorns exist either, THAT DOESN'T MEAN THEY EXIST.

I don't accept and live by the belief that something doesnt exist. Argument ad nauseam.

I simply DON'T KNOW whether or not one exists, same as you DON'T KNOW whether or not a magical flying teapot exists, yet you don't live your life as if one does.[/QUOTE]
Setting your unicorns and flying teapots aside, I think you have slipped back into your well-worn rut of telling a Christian they have "blind faith". Trust me: it's ad nauseam for many of us, not just you. I'll accept blame for your rut-running in that I probably triggered it when I tried to point out your own jump in logic and called it "blind faith."

Anyway, we never were debating how you or I live; we were discussing the relationship between knowledge/ignorance and declared belief. To recap, you have claimed ignorance of God's existence while declaring your belief he does not exist. Given all your self-acclaimed value for basing belief on knowledge, I am curios how you reconcile believing God doesn't exist while not knowing if he exists. Seems to me, your belief is based on blindness: "I don't see something, therefore I believe it doesn't exist."

AussieBanana said:

So I want to start a discussion about religion and more in depth Christianity.
I want to first start by saying that I'm an Atheist but that wasn't always the case. I was born in to a Christian family and for most of my childhood and early teens I was. That was until I started studying science.
What I don't like about religion is the fact that it makes no room for questions, when I was a school it was "don't ask how Noah built the ark just accept that he did" and if I did question the church I would get in trouble.

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personally, I think this does a disservice to those who are being taught about God as well as to God Himself.

I guess my real question is how people can blindly(faith) follow a book that was written 4000 years ago but just ignore facts and common sense?

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My answer, I don't know....scripture teaches us to test the voices in this world, how can we claim to follow the teachings of scripture if we ignore that teaching? If you study the Bible and take it for what it says, not try to read into it what is not there, it is totally compatible with science, at least from as much testing as I have done....but the real trick is to not read into it what is not there. For example, one of the huge points of "disagreement" between the Christian religious and the science field is Gen. and the account of creation. However, the Gen. account of creation was never written to be a scientific treatise like many try to use it. Rather it was written to be a well crafted polemic of which it is. WE get into trouble when we try to make scripture something it is not, in this case a scientific treatise when it was intended to be a polemic.

That being said, a very good book that talks about Gen. from the standpoint of what is and is not scientific understanding is The Genesis Record.