Religion reduces science literacy in America

i have the rationalizing skills of kurt cobain?

well fuck...

 

All that knowledge ain't gonna do a lick of good for the folks who are burning in Hell for all eternity.

Also. The "literal word" and "inspired word" thing doesn't make sense. No Christian religion teaches that God himself wrote the Bible. Men wrote the Bible. Christianity doesn't dispute that.

 

So something has to be discovered in order to matter? Interesting.

 

That would require the assumption that there's an experiment at all. Rats scurry through the maze of NYC sewers their entire lives without ever being observed by a human being.
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Do we get bonus points for a lack of knowledge?

 

Or the Muslims are right and you, Eddie, are going to hell for not believing in the word of the Prophet Muhammad. Or the Hindu are right and you're headed for Naraka. Or the ancient Greeks are right and you're headed for Hades. Or the atheists are right and you're wasting your time. There's no way to hedge your bets on the afterlife. You believe what you think is right, and you try to be a good person. The threat of eternal torture doesn't matter in the end, because there are so many different eternal tortures that are mutually exclusive. It's the ultimate failure of Pascal's Wager.

Actually, Revelation 22:18-19 seems to make it pretty clear that everything in the Bible, according to the Bible, is meant to be there according to the Christian God. If you take any of it away or add to it, again, according to the Bible, you're damned to eternal torture in Hell. That seems pretty cut and dry, considering the other vague language in Revelation.

 

It's not necessarily irrelevant, it's just not directly related to the religion vs. knowledge thing.

 

Just because you believe there is no Hell doesn't mean there is no Hell. Pretending it isn't there doesn't mean you won't end up there when you die. That's problem with the whole "believe whatever you want cuz it doesn't matter" theory; it's totally irrelevant when it come to the actual Truth.

There is no "Christian God" there's just God.

 

The funny thing is that you are apparently unaware that your beliefs are arbitrary and no more "true" than anyone else's.

 

This is a great question and one that I don't want to be glossed over. It raises the important corollary of how we treat moral dilemmas created when believing in the bible causes you to reject science about the real world and it's consequences.

To choose the most theatrical example: If a person thinks the relevant portions of the end times prophecy were specifically about full blown nuclear war, and that the world would be better off the sooner it happens, can that person still be trusted with the proverbial big red button?

 

It's not that I don't 'believe' in Hell, it's that there's no evidence of it so I remain unconvinced of its existence. There's a difference. I'm not saying, "There is no Hell", which is a positive claim, I'm saying, "I'm not convinced there is a Hell", which is null hypothesis. How do you feel about Hades? That's probably how I feel about Hell. It's probably mythological, but I don't fully, 100% deny its existence because you can't disprove something for which there's zero evidence.

Well, there are Greek gods and Mesopotamian gods and ancient Native American gods and a Jewish God and a Muslim God. When I say Christian God, I'm referring to the character in the Bible, as opposed to other gods that exist in other faiths and other myths. It's a way of being specific. I'm not suggesting in any way I'm polytheistic.

 

Hell and Hades are in the Bible. The bible uses the word Hades. It's a Greek work. In the Old Testament it's the word Sheol, which is Hebrew. Also, I don't feel any way about Hades. I know it's there because God says it's there, and it's impossible for God to be wrong. I have no doubts that there is a Sheol/Hades/Hell.

 

By Hades, I mean the underworld-ruling Greek god, brother to Zeus, son of Cronus.

 

i'm just saying that it's not so unbelievable to think that there is a Creator up there somewhere and we just aren't aware of it. i realize the opposite is true but the fact that we're the only species to come up with cheetos and internet pornos makes me think that we're special.

 

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons." - Douglas Adams.

When you have something that nobody else has, you tend to put greater emphasis on it's importance.