Mark 3:29:

"But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin."

X-51 wrote: The bible was written by people is all I'm saying. I'm a man of faith, religion however, in my opinion, is something compleatly different.

Agreed.  I don't like much of what the Church teaches, and don't agree with most of it.  I think if in your heart you regret the wrong things you did and have lived a fairly just and moral life, you're going to heaven, no matter what faith you are.

¤ Råp¡Ð F¡rè ¤ wrote: karll wrote: The bible isn't meant to be taken so literally.

Millions of fundies disagree.

And if you don't take it literally, how can you base any decision on anything written in the Bible?  Once you start believing some parts and not others, you might as well just make up your own religion instead.

Hysteria wrote:   Say, for instance, that have a very, very large ant colony.  I put them there, I have the power to rain fireballs down upon them, to take away their food or to end their existence as I please.  This pretty much makes me omnipotent, at least relative to them...

Not even close.

That's just "really powerful".  Omnipotence is something else entirely. 

It would literally be impossible to ever do (or even think) anything against the will of an omnipotent being.  The omnipotent being would have free will, but there could be no will (free or otherwise) than that being's will.

Arguably, if there is an omnipotent being, than there cannot even be any other separate entities - everything else is just a facet of that omnipotent being.

God=/=Bible and Church, IMO.

I agree with what someone else said, if you live a moral and good life you're not going to hell regardless of religion and such. I'm sure god likes some athiests a hell of alot more than those (of all religions) who "worship him" (Those who take advantage of those who worship god, remember the Middle Ages in history class?).

USAF - the Bible repeatedly refers to god as "almighty".  That's not just omniscient, but omnipotent.

Hysteria - omnipotent does mean "all powerful".  But your ant example did not describe "all powerful", only "pretty powerful". 

And the point I was making was that omnipotence/omniscience requires determinism.  How can god know the future if the future is not set?  If god knows the past, present, and future equally, then each of those are set equally.  "Will happen" and "has happened" are the same.

That's the problem with omniscience/omnipotence.  Those concepts drag all kinds of other stuff along with them.

evillepaintball wrote: Susan Storm wrote: If God is truly omniscient then there is no free will, and the whole system falls apart away. other than being, you know, retarded logic, good job.

Elaborate?

I was raised catholic, and I have slipped from the beliefs over the last few years. If the catholic church is gods presence on earth, how is it that they could be wrong on so many issues? How would god let it commit genocide while still claiming to be the voice of god? That goes for any religion. I don't understand how you can do something that is directly against what you believe in, and still claim to be a moral orginzation? How can you change history as you please to make yourself look right?

Personally I am somewhere between agnostic and atheist now. I don't know if I want to believe in a god or not.

Susan Storm wrote: Millions of fundies disagree. And if you don't take it literally, how can you base any decision on anything written in the Bible?  Once you start believing some parts and not others, you might as well just make up your own religion instead.

Since various people apparently disliked my post, I shall elaborate.

First, a factual assertion.  Millions of fundamentalists take their religious texts literally.  I am not taking an outlandish or unusual position.  For somebody to simply declare that the Torah/Bible/Koran/whatever is "not meant to be taken literally" is insufficient.  Clearly millions believe otherwise, and so a claim as to the non-literality of these texts must be backed up by something.

Second, a logical assertion.  These holy texts must be all or nothing. 

Compare to a college textbook.  When you read this book, you are accepting it as true - or not.  Barring obvious typos and errors, you do not "choose" which parts of the history book to believe and which to not.  You do not extrapolate a "general theme" from your botany book.  Once you have accepted the authority of the book, you also accept that you are not qualified to doubt or judge individual pieces, and that you have no logical basis for doing so.

Compare this to a novel.  This book you more or less arbitrarily believe in bits and pieces.  When Clancy describes the assassination attempt on the pope, you figure that some of his stuff is probably true while other parts are not.  You are pretty sure that Captain Ahab didn't exist, but still feel confident relying on his description of the whaling industry, at least to some extent.  You are still not (generally speaking) qualified to determine which parts are true and which are not, but it doesn't really matter.  You do not plan on making any life decisions based on Clancy or Moby Dick.  They may be informative, but they are not "authorities" that you can rely upon.

The difference here is that the textbook claims to be true.  The novel does not.  Once you accept the textbook's claim of truth, you are not qualified to dissect.  If you do not accept the book's claim of truth, then you are essentially treating that textbook as a novel, with a fair mix of truth and fiction.

The Bible is intended as a textbook.  THE texbook, perhaps.  Believers very much DO make life decisions based on this book.  It is frequently cited as the ultimate authority.  And thus my point.  If you are treating the Bible as a textbook, then you are not qualified to declare that some parts are or are not true.  You are not qualified to merely extract themes.  You must take every word at its word.

Once you start disregarding portions of holy books in your own discretion, then you have basically demoted the thing to a novel.  Interesting, fun to read, informative and thought-provoking, but not absolute truth.  Not an authority upon which you can rely.

People say that the Bible is "intended" not to be taken literally, or that you should look for "overall themes".  On what basis can you make this claim?  That's not what the Bible says, certainly, or the Koran.  What renders you qualified to decide which parts of the Bible are the Word and which parts are merely words?  What renders you qualified to extract the "overall theme" of the Book?  And if you are qualified to do this, why even bother with the Bible to begin with?  In order for you to determine which parts are "correct", you must already know the ultimate truth - you must know the mind of God, which renders the Bible redundant for you.

And since everybody who choose to "interpret" the Bible will, almost by definition, have a slightly different interpretation, each individual interpreter is essentially creating his or her own personal religion.  And, frankly, you might as well base that personal religion on Moby Dick or Clancy, since your source now has about the same amount of ultimate authority.

Yes, "take all of the Bible or take none" is an old phrase, but some phrases live to be old because they are accurate and true.  I have yet to find a satisfactory response to this challenge, and I have looked.

Reb Cpl wrote: "All or none" loses its credibility in my eyes when the information you're looking at isn't cut and dried, black and white all the way through.

I agree completely.

I believe that "some" loses credibility because of its arbitrariness and general unfoundedness.  "All" loses credibility because of it irrationality and inconsistency.

Which leaves me with ...

Reb Cpl wrote: Faith? Coming to grips with the fact that there are things you will never understand? Does "All" have to lose its credibility? Perception of what is irrational is derived from 'rational' thought.

Once again I agree.  What I call "rational irrationality" is the saving grace of faith.  I find it perfectly legitimate for a rational person to rationally decide to accept an irrational belief - just so long as there is that understanding that the belief is "irrational" as we normally use that word.

I think we make a serious conscious attempt to unravel the beliefs of organized religions because we don't care for the fact that there might be something out there that we cannot understand. We can put a man on the face of the moon, clone sheep, and share information in the blink of an eye, but we can't comprehend the idea of a supreme being and the ideals wrapped up with it, so it becomes something we dismiss.....unless we come to grips with the fact that there are things out there that cannot be understood by us, and adopt just a smidgen of faith.

Here I don't agree.  Lack of faith does not mean un-faith.  It just means lack of faith.

Reb Cpl wrote: In order to rebut that I'd have to know what you think 'un-faith' is.

"Un-faith" to me is the literal meaning of "atheism".  It is simply the absence of belief.  This as compared to the current application of "atheism", which implies some strong affirmative faith-like belief and focus on the absence of deity.

Un-faith is how most people think about Santa Claus.  Most people do not believe that SC is real, but they put little thought or effort into Santa's reality or unreality.  They just accept that he doesn't exist and go on with their lives.  They make no decisions based on Santa's existence or non-existence.  It is simply a non-issue.

Un-faith includes most people who describe themselves as "agnostic", but I would more accurately describe as literal atheists.  These are the people who live their lives on the presumption that god does not exist.  God does not define or influence their lives - but neither does their atheism.  The whole bit is just not an issue.

This as compared to the folk who feel the need to "prove" the absence of a god, the people to whom god is almost as important is he is to the actual believers.

The un-faithful basically treat god and religion as fundamentally irrelevant to their lives, much like Santa Claus. 

"Faith" can be a defining feature of a person.  So can atheism, in its current colloquial usage.  Un-faith is not a defining feature.  It is the absence of a defining feature.

EDIT - I just realized that I defined "un-faith" as the opposite of how I was using it in my previous post.  Doh.  But I think the point is clear anyway, whatever words we use.

evillepaintball wrote: ... one of the most obvious is their editing of the ten commandments.  they took out number 2 entirely (create no graven image...) and in order to keep it so there are ten commandments total, they broke the 10th into two seperate ones with 9 being ...covet...wife, and 10 being ...covet...stuff.

This doesn't really bother me so much - there is no "ten commandments" section of the bible with convenient numbering.  That chunk of Exodus lists a bunch of commandment-type things, and it frankly isn't that clear just how many there are, or even what they are (depending on the translation).

X-51 wrote: I'm a man of faith, religion however, in my opinion, is something compleatly different.

Edit - I just realized that when you posted this, it had nothing to do with what anyone was talking about.