Frogwoman
First off, no need to apologise, you can take as long as you like or not reply at all. That said, I'm glad that you did get back to me. I always enjoy discussing things with people I think I can learn something from.
Secondly, in the interests of saving space: If I don't quote something that you say it's because I'm broadly in agreement with it.
frogwoman said:
if you look back in history at all the organisations that behaved in this manner, you will find that it wasn't just about religion. They had a vested interest in doing the things they did, and they had power, and lots of it, and they used the spiritual hold they had on the people to justify appalling acts.
Look at the way marx's teachings have been abused over the years, does that mean that marx's ideas were fundamentally bad? No, it doesn't.
Well some of them were. Equally, I think the big problems with Marxists is that they elevate Marx's writings to a level that they doesn't really deserve. Marx wasn't perfect. Neither was Jesus, Mohammed or Moses.
Yeah but a lot of people just see it as an allegory written by humans to understand G-d's power, it doesn't mean that G-d doesn't exist, if the bible was to lay down the exact detail of how he created the world it would be infinitely longer than it is now.
But he didn't create them all at once.
He created them over the course of that "day", and that could easily have been a period of several million years.
You see what I mean about these logical leaps?
To hang on to any plausibility you have to go further and further from the story.
You could equally argue that the Greek creation myth is allegorical. That the splitting of the Nix's egg represented a the seperation of complex life into biological sexes or that the Prometheus tale represents the turning point in human evolution when man discovered how to use fire.
That's fine, but you can't also then talk about the God figure in that myth as a literal entity any more than you can claim to have a personal relationship with Prometheus.
I guess my big problem is with the tendency to use the term 'creator' when talking of God figures. It assumes a
But like i said, there are many different ways of interpreting that story. I dont know what really happened back then, nobody does, and the fact that it might not be real doesn't disprove the rest of the bible or mean that G-d doesn't exist, and there is proof that the other events that are described in it, did happen. I don't believe in christianity for instance, but Jesus was a real person, although there's no evidence he walked on water or any of that, so it might well be possible that some bits of genesis are true, even though not all of it is.
You can argue for ages and ages though about whether it is real or not and it's totally irrelevent, if it turned out tomorrow that that story was a load of bollocks, would that mean that people's faith was worthless? No it wouldn't, because just because one element of our understanding of G-d is wrong, it doesn't mean that G-d doesn't exist.
Well it does in a sense. It would mean that people who claim to know or understand God would be proven wrong in their assertions. It would also raise the pertinent question 'if this is wrong, what else in my religion is?'
What do you make of the fact that pretty much every creation myth, primitive or otherwise, describes a flood covering the earth in the same manner that Genesis does? I have a book of myths, and native american tribes, japanese, hindu and african myths all describes something like that.
I think it's very interesting, personally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(mythology)#Theories_of_origin
Something along these lines seems most likely to me.
Certainly, the idea that the Noah's ark story literally did happen is the least plausible explanation I've come across. It's the sort of answer you can only come to if you start with a conclusion and
then gather evidence to support it.
It's a folk tale about flooding. It may have been adapted from an older folk tale about flooding. Most primitave cultures would have experienced flooding in one way or another. Without having much knowledge of geology or weather systems, angry Gods would have seemed like the most likely explanation. Folk tales may have ensued.
That's a bad analogy, any fool knows that fairies don't run computers,
Why would it matter than nobody but me believes that faeries run my computer? At one point a great deal of people in Greece believed that the world came from a magical bird's vagina.
What I was really asking is if you think that personal beliefs can be held to reason. Specifically, I'm trying to establish whether or not you think that proving a level of uncertainty with a logical theory means that a fantastical theory can be held in equal regard as it.
I could think that my arm was sore because evil spirits were invading it, it follows some sort of coherent logic, but that doesn't mean it would actually be true.
My point exactly. I could spend all day pointing out that you have a tasmanian devil chewing on your elbow and you could spend all day telling me that didn't necessarily negate the evil spirit theory.
Now is the evil spirit argument a real argument, or a load of balls?
How does that differ from the existence of God argument?
