Point of clarity ... the agnostics that I know, including myself, my wife, and my brother, don't ever wonder about the existence, or inexistence, of God, outside of what can be proven. I certainly have no issue with those who believe, or disbelieve, based on faith and assumption, though.
The bible does not say anything about an "age of accountability". So Christians don't really have a biblical basis to assume that aborted babies are not going to hell. Besides, is it any more 'just' to send an aborted baby to hell, than a 33 year old that has never heard? And if those who don't hear are automatically saved, WHY THE HELL SEND MISSIONARIES.
that's what I don't get. If you assume: 1. Hell really, really sucks forever 2. Innocents who have no exposure to religion won't go there if they die 3. Most people will grow up to not accept your religion, and so will rot in hell for eternity It seems like the logical thing to do is kill as many babies as possible. Odds are you will prevent a lot of people from eternal damnation. And while you yourself might be damned forever, it's a pretty selfless act to save so many others.
[video=youtube;-og87crqsCE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-og87crqsCE[/video] I was thinking the same thing. YES, I do believe in this heaven and hell.
Go also gave humans brains...and the ability to reason. What you are essentially proposing is ludicrous........and you know it. <nodding head>
speciation by common descent involving some form of environmental genetic selection, and that a hot big bang preceded our expanding universe are as close to scientific fact as anything can be. perhaps you are actually just referring to being agnostic about the implications people tend to draw from those things concerning atheism/theism? abiogenesis isn't quite settled, so you can intellectually get away with being agnostic about that (for now).
why is it ludicrous? the bible directly states the majority of people will reject god, so if babies are automatically saved killing everyone as babies is absolutely doing them a huge favor just as a matter of statistics. another example of christians not really taking the implications of their beliefs seriously.
Well, as close to fact other than neither have ever been replicated and/or repeated in a controlled scientific setting. Unless, of course, you've witnessed a secondary Big Bang that gave us all of our natural elements, and all elements found in the universe. I must have missed that one in the latest issue of Nature. People like you are as close-minded as the hardcore creationists. The pure randonmess of speciation, and the lack of literally millions of failed new species in the fossil record, is more of an endorsement of intelligent design than it is is some silly theory that some species adapt and change into new species, while others are unchanged for literally millions of years. There are even competing theories of speciation, two of them being a gradual process verus the gentetic leap, yet you're convinced that speciation is as close to fact as you get in science? I sure hope you don't teach science, because you seem to be terrible at understanding it, and how to prove a scientific law.
would heaven really be heaven with a bunch of kids running all the fuck around? i guess they probably just have gated communities for the adults, and neverending preschool teachers
i asked my pastor the 6 year old kid question back in the day, and HE said, that they will get their chance to accept god after they die. but it got me thinking.... they have never heard of this person before, why would they just blindly accept him? especially being 6, i would figure they would just be picking their nose and not really grasping the concept.
obviously the big bang can't be replicated, but any theory of the state of the cosmos without a hot big bang is going to have a really tough time explaining the CBR. genetic change due to environmental selection has been directly observed over and over. it's not a big deal to project this over longer periods of time to speciation, particularly in situations where different populations of a specied become reproductively isolated from each other. heavier elements originate in supernovae. this is understood quite well. no mystery there. i'm not closed minded at all. i would love to hear a reasonable argument for ID. i just never have. how is randomness evidence for ID? there ARE hundreds of thousands of extinct species known from the fossil record. the only reason there aren't millions is the environmental conditions that allow life to fossilize are quite uncommon. obviously adaptation ability isn't going to be the same for every species. species that have evolved to adapt in different environments are less likely to change phenotypically. me? the world's entire scientific community is convinced speciation through common descent is fact, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the mechanism. that the exact details of the mechanism aren't fully understood says nothing about the factuality of common descent.
This is silly. Of all people who post here, crowtbot is the furthest from being able to understand these sorts of things. He didn't assert the big bang and genetic selection are fact, just they're the closest thing to fact as anything can scientifically be. The evidence supports these theories, and when new ideas about testing them are tried, they further support these theories. In fact, when he wrote "some form of environmental genetic selection," he was not picking any specific theory of speciation but pointing out that some forms of speciation are clearly happening. I've never been a strict believer in Evolution - that life started as some single celled organism and evolved through a slow and steady process of mutation and selection, though. There are numerous catastrophic near life extinction events that occurred that basically hit the reset button on all but a few species each time. A species that has been unchanged for literally millions of years is one that wasn't affected by these extinction events out of pure luck - not anything really to do with the actual theory of Evolution. Sharks have been around for ~400M years. The sharks that existed 400M years ago are extinct, and there are very different sharks around today. They have clearly evolved over time.
Sounds like the luckiest people on earth are people who contract terminal diseases and murderers on death row. Both have the opportunity to choose Christ because why not, you're gonna die soon, but an innocent adult healthy person who never chooses Christ and then gets hit by a bus goes to Hell without getting the chance to change his mind. Also, how do you REALLY choose Christ? Close your eyes, bow your head and talk to yourself? If that's all a guy on Death Row has to do before he dies, why should anyone even go to church or do good deeds? Essentially, you can do whatever you want. Just bow your head and tell yourself you'd like to accept Christ from time to time and you're good. I was raised Methodist, confirmed in the church, and I'd like to believe, but so much doesn't make sense to me nowadays. How is hell even horrible anyway? Burning is something that would hurt if you took your living body with you but you don't and even if you DID, if you don't die again in hell from all the pain, wouldn't you eventually get used to it? And isn't heaven a form of hell anyway because it too is never ending and thus very boring and torturous in it's monotony of goodness. The way I look at it is I didn't exist before I was conceived in 1973 and that is where I will return when I die. To a point of not existing. It wasn't awful then. And it won't be awful after I die. I just won't exist. Why should I be scared of that? I'm not scared at all that I didn't exist in the 1960s. It was fine.
But the bible also justifies killing all over the place. God kills practically everyone with the flood because they all sucked so much. He basically said, "Fuck it. I'm starting over." If it made sense for God to slaughter perhaps millions of people (and who knows how many animals) just so he could set humans on the right path, wouldn't it be doing the same thing by slaughtering babies?
It's not about me. I'm just trying to get an honest answer here. Which is better: 1. Letting people grow up, die, then suffer for eternity in damnation 2. Killing them quickly as children, then letting them live for eternity in heaven Obviously, human nature says that killing children is wrong. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the logical conclusion that comes with believing the innocent children always go to heaven. If you believe that, the only truly moral thing to do is to sacrifice your own soul by killing a lot of kids.
Exactly. I had this thought when I was a kid. My beliefs on this subject are well documented on this site but one man summed it up nicely about the myth of hell: "We're already in hell."
God gave us the ability to reason for one sole purpose: so that we would throw it out the window and accept utterly unreasonable beliefs about God. Apparently God has a dark and twisted sense of humor. barfo
