Religion is humans biggest failure...

a reply to: HAZE3

And all evidence points out that you are an ass hole

If all you have to offer is personal attacks you won't last on ATS for very long, friend.

originally posted by: Lucid Lunacy
a reply to: HAZE3

And all evidence points out that you are an ass hole

If all you have to offer is personal attacks you won't last on ATS for very long, friend.

Could care less how long I last here. As long as I get to poke fun at ass holes like you id say its worth it. Just stating my opinion on man's couple of worst failures

originally posted by: HAZE3
Could care less how long I last here. As long as I get to poke fun at ass holes like you id say its worth it. Just stating my opinion on man's couple of worst failures

Hmm.

originally posted by: HAZE3
I think the way you are talking is proof of societal decay.

Hmm indeed.

a reply to: HAZE3

So i'm an a-hole because it's my position that religion is entirely man-made, and evidence supports that.

That's absurd.

How about instead of being incredibly immature you engage in argument and discuss the merit of people's words and not resort to name-calling. This isn't grade school, it's ATS.

originally posted by: Lucid Lunacy
a reply to: HAZE3

So i'm an a-hole because it's my position that religion is entirely man-made, and evidence supports that.

That's absurd.

How about instead of being incredibly immature you engage in argument and discuss the merit of people's words and not resort to name-calling. This isn't grade school, it's ATS.

So many words and arguments but nothing ever gets done. It all just goes around in circles back and forth regardless of any 'proof' Just circles... I think you all are man's worst failures... just like me

a reply to: WakeUpBeer

Never said I was perfect buddy. But even an asshole like me has a code when it comes to children.

a reply to: HAZE3

Can we please be on topic.

Religion is human's biggest failure.

Present an argument why that's not the case, or attempt to refute members who's posts say it is. Do so by addressing the actual points, and not attacking them personally. That's what this site is about.

a reply to: HAZE3

What's not the case? That religion isn't humankind's biggest failure? Okay if that's what you meant then explain why...

and after you do so can you accept criticism without resorting to name-calling? It doesn't seem you can.

a reply to: Raggedyman

Ya OK I believe you ??????????? !!!

Just something I thought I would toss out there. According to the book of Hosea there is a curse upon today's world. Simply put back in the first century AD the Jews of the day managed to trigger a top level Leviticus 26 curse. And it's supposed to last 2000 years. My best guess is that the curse will end around the mid to late 2020s AD.

So the problem this thread has it that it's sample period is too short. The current state of the world is abnormal. A bit like saying the world is going to freeze and die off. But your sample period of time is only August, September, and October. March, April, and May are coming. You just don't know it yet.

This is a world cut off from "God" so to speak. What's it going to be like when the curse is over?

originally posted by: openyourmind1262
As Hitchens book say's......God is not great....Religion spoils everything it touches.

More like: "Gooooad iiissss noooout grayt. now pooor me another drink...poooor me."

a reply to: SuperFrog

So, in my opinion, religion is our biggest failure, and progress we see today was possible ONLY after religion lost its grasp... with people adopting laws that prohibit power from religion. Even today, in USA where I live today, people are using religion to stop progress for example in tissue engineering, science that might one day solve our issue with organ donations.

Agree some what with much of what you say but isn't religion a matter of conjecture? How would anyone get everyone on the same page without mind control? If one had the power of mind control how then would one implement that power? Would that then supersede choice? It is possible to control but isn't it impossible to incorporate the minds by free will?

Nevertheless, i agree that the minds of people are continuously evil but I can't see where religion is anything but mindset of people. In other words religion cannot be erased without erasing that portion of free will. How would you do this?

Sam Harris - Morality and the Christian God

Well, that was all very interesting. Ask yourselves, what is wrong with spending eternity in Hell? Well, I, I’m told it’s rather hot there, for one. Dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality. Ok, the whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well-being of human souls. Now, happily, there’s absolutely no evidence that the Christian Hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework, this theistic framework, in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.

Alright, 9 million children die every year before they reach the age of five. ok, picture, picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004, that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those, every ten days, killing children only under five. Ok, that’s 20, 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 or so a minute. That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Ok, think of, think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered. Ok, but according to Dr. Craig, this is all part of God’s plan.

Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn’t care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil. And worse than that, on Dr. Craig’s view, most of these people – many of these people, certainly – will be going to Hell because they’re praying to the wrong God. Just think about that. Ok, through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and they missed the revelation.

Ok, there are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. Ok, in Dr. Craig’s universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are, if you are praying to the Monkey God Hanuman, you are doomed, ok. You’ll be tortured in Hell for eternity. Now, is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9, and Matthew 13, and Revelation 14. Ok, perhaps you’ll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says when the elves die, they go to Valanor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison.

Ok, so God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus, ok. He engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire. Ok.

On the other hand, on Dr. Craig’s account, your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, ok, who – who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus, on Death Row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he’s going to spend an eternity in Heaven after death, ok.

One thing should be crystal clear to you: This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.

Ok, and please notice the double standard that people like Dr. Craig use to – to exonerate God from all this evil, ok. We’re told that God is loving, and kind, and just, and intrinsically good; but when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people, of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we’re told that God is mysterious, ok. “Who can understand God’s will?” Ok and yet, this is precisely-this, this, this “merely human” understanding of God’s will, is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. You know, something good happens to a Christian, some – he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive change in his life, and we’re told that God is good. Ok. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents’ arms and drowned, we’re told that God is mysterious, ok. This is how you play tennis without the net.

Ok. And I want to suggest to you, that it is not only tiresome when otherwise – intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. Ok, this kind of faith, is, is really – is really the perfection of narcissism. “God loves me, dontcha know. He, he cured me of my eczema. He makes me feel so good while singing in church, and, and just when we had given up hope, we found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother’s mortgage.”

Ok. Given all the good-all that this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others, given, given the, the misery that’s being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene. Ok, to think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings. And if God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery? Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes, like witchcraft.

Now, of course, there is a way of not taking these questions to heart, ok. According to Dr. Craig’s Divine Command theory, God is not bound by moral duties; God doesn’t have to be good. Whatever he commands is good, so when he commands that the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it.

Ok, well here we’re being offered – I’m glad he raised the issue of psychopathy – we are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. But it is, it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the, from the well-being of human beings. It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Ok, just think – just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God’s will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can – can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they’re praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.

Now, I’m obviously not saying that all that Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. Okay. If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is gonna turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, ok, you have lost your mind. Ok. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic. Ok.

Well done by Sam Harris...