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Originally Posted by shakran
sciency stuff
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I don't think that we need another science vs. religion thread. With that being said, science is not a silver bullet. Science is just what we can sense and it has nothing to say about spiritual matters beyond a shrug and a mumble. There is no reason one must pick science or religion. Science and religion can complement each other quite nicely seeing how neither one should have any sort of relevance in the evaluation of the validity of the other.
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Exactly my point. The bible is a bunch of claims made by men who 1) didn't have any secondary source to confirm what they were saying (who was up there with Moses on Mt. Sinai? Correct, nobody) and 2) stood to gain quite a bit if they could convince people that a wrathful god wanted the masses to listen to them (hey guys, God just gave me a bunch of rules and he sent ME down to tell you about them, and if you don't listen up he'll set you on fire forever).
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I don't know how many people took part in writing the various different things that got collected together and called the bible. I do know that it was more than two. Whether people stood to benefit from writing that shit down depends on the person. You should look up Job and see what an enticing image of god it makes.
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Of course there's nothing wrong with that. Where we have the problem is when we start using the bible to justify whatever we want to do, despite the fact that we have no evidence to back the bible up. You mentioned my journalism career - one tenet of journalism is that you never go to press with only one source. Watergate could have been written in the first couple of weeks, except that the Washington Post needed more than just one guy telling them the president was a crook. By the same token, using one source and only one source to justify things like making discriminatory laws (no gay marriage), etc, is irresponsible. Examine the bible all you want, but don't expect everyone to believe what you say about it just because the bible says it's real.
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I personally wouldn't use the bible to justify all the things i do, but i don't think it is any more unreasonable to use the bible to justify your actions that it is to use any other sort of code of ethics. I also don't think that you are very realistic in your demands for evidence. It would seem that your idea of what constitutes evidence would effectively eliminate a whole lot of recorded history from any sort of relevance.
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Or perhaps the pope speaks on behalf of himself and his organization and is able to change dogma because people BELIEVE he speaks on behalf of an all powerful being who can torture them forever if they piss him off.
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Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Nobody knows except the pope and he isn't saying anything.
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Well yes, to me too, but the trouble is that we don't exactly have fireside chats with God now do we, and so it's rather difficult to decide what exactly god is, if he is anything at all.
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I think that many people who are faithful feel like they talk to god all the time. Not that they could ever prove it.
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What this all boils down to is that, barring solid evidence that god exists and is our master and wants us to do certain things, we should not impose those beliefs on others. If Falwell wants to avoid gay relationships, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that. That's his personal choice.
If he wants to impose his anti-gay morality on gay couples who are not in any way harming Falwell, we have a problem. Obviously the gay couple do not believe that what they want to do is wrong, and since God has been so oddly silent these past two millenia, it is not possible for any person to say whether Falwell is right, or the gay couple is right, as far as whether homosexuality is wrong or not. Therefore, to attempt to use your personal religion to force someone else to behave the way your morals dictate that you behave is an indefensible action. In short, if it's not hurting anyone else, people should be able to do it without having to worry about some jackass using a 2,000 year old unproven book to stop them.
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Well, falwell thinks he's right. I think he's a douchebag, and i agree that it is against the spirit of our country to attempt to prohibit certain activities that aren't innately harmful to nonconsenting parties. None of this is to say that i think that nothing in the bible has any relevance to what is going on today.
Your position seems to be that nobody has any reasonable justification for finding any kind of specific motivational content in the bible because no one has the "right" interpretation of what the bible means. I disagree.