Overstaged

So you contradict yourself... If mathematics can solve anything in the universe, then EVEN what makes a person chose good or bad, wrong or right, has a mathematic reason, an equation. It´s probably too complex for humans to calculate it, but it doesn´t change the fact it´s determined in nature. You are a product of a series of factors, even your ideas, it could all be arranged in an equation, there is no control over the future cause it´s determined by equations. As Schopenhauer said: "a man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills" It´s pure maths! No religion or superstition has anything to do with this. Free will, by the way, is a belief that have absolutely NO rational basis.

So, do you think when you throw a rock somewhere, the rock choses where it´s going to fall??? Or the place where it falls is determined by the strenght you used, the direction, the wind, the weight of the rock, etc???? The same goes with your brain. You have the apperence of "making choices", but if you chose yes or no, white or black, it´s all because of chemical reactions happening inside of your brain, that you have absolutely no control of it. So when there was the big explosion (IF there was, because science changes its views all the time) none of the atoms coming from there "chose" where they were going to be. They were just distributed acording to the rules of nature, acording to their weight, the attraction, the strenght of the explosion, etc. In physics nothing is aleatory. And our brain is nothing but an ultra-complex physical machine. We don´t understand exactly how it works, but it´s all beyond our control, wether you believe there is a God or no... You don´t chose to live under the rules of gravity, for example. You don´t chose to live under the time passing... Who wouldn´t want to stop time during a good moment? Or be young for 50 years? But no, we can´t do nothing about it. So I say, if you had a bad education (you didn´t chose the family you were born in!), and a brain that will make you pick the wrong decisions (you didn´t chose the physical structure of your brain!), you might be a criminal... There´s no such thing as free will. You´re working with the assumption the christianity teaches free will, but it doesn´t (or at least it shouldn´t). The Bible doesn´t teach men have ANY control over their destiny or wether they are going to be good or evil. Atheists agree with this, except the part where it says it´s all determined by God. Atheist believe it´s determined by... nothing.

By the way do atheist believe in predestination??? I mean, not by a superior being, but the universe comes from an explosion and so, everything that happened since then is an idirect consequence of all this stuff, including the earth to be positioned exactly in the place where it must be to permit life to develop here, and then the appearence of our human species... When we make choices, it´s nothing but our brain working out its chemicals but nobody choses the size of their brain or the family they are born. So, an atheist believing in free will, sounds completely "religious" to me. How can there be any "freedom" in the universe, if everything resumes to chemical and physical action-and-reaction golden rule. Of course predestination doesn´t mean you don´t need to do nothing... but in fact, it means even the things you do are predestinated. If predestination is nothing but "fantasy whitterings from supersticious fools", thens this means that Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietszche (all of them SECULAR, if not atheist philosophers, not to mention the fathers of Church who were also genius of our civilization) were all "superstitious fools".

Wow, what a nice argument... I see you have been studyng. It´s a privilege to be considered a fanatic by someone as "tolerant" as you (who have proven hate and intolerance in thousands of posts in this forum). What is your definition of a fanatic??? Anyone who disagrees one of your opinions??? Seems like we have a fanatic out there... We can see how incisive you are with each comment, that you consider an abuse that anyone dares to disagree with you on ANY subject. Sorry, but I´m not taking this... If you want to be ignorant, then be! Nobody is asking for belief, just respect. If you want to say bull$h!t about a doctrine you don´t even know (and therefore look like an ignorant clown), say, but I´m on my right to build a defense.

Now this is LAUGHABLE!!!!!!!! You know as much as christianity doctrine as my dog knows about maths. You could have read the 39 articles of faith of the C of E at least, to pretend you know something. It´s ok if you want to criticize, but dude... have some basis.

Well, it seems that you can´t go any further then scratching the surface of this religion cause you ignore even the superficial facts about it. If I am to make serious criticism of any ideology, for example, it means that I need to know about what I´m talking, and not basing on what I´ve heard. You don´t expect someone who never read Shakespeare to make criticism about his work. You point that there is no proof, but then anyone who knows christianity very superficially knows that it preaches salvation by faith, so it would have failed it there was any scientific proof. Then the point about the supposed "failure" of God is hilarious, since any kid in a C of E sunday school must have learned that the gospel is preached an believed by every single person it was planned to be. There are no possible failures. Every single person who was meant to be saved, will be eventually saved, and it´s not a matter of choice. Then again, a person becomes the most widespread name in human history without a scientific proof of his existence and you consider it "failure"??? People like Madonna and Mariah Carey have worked their entire life in order to be worldwide famous, and their name will never reach 1/30 of JC´s audience, and will be lucky to be still remembered a few decades after their death. Guess why, because they have no relevant message in it, an JC´s message doesn´t resume to "be nice, and do good to others".

Well, we don´t have physical proof, that´s why I said in the New Testment literature. Altough 99% we know from ancient history comes from literature. Most of famous ancient personalities lives cannot be considered "facts" by this strict sense of the word. People who have left physical evidence of their existence surviving for 20 centuries must be one in a million anyway. Whoever invented the Jesus figure in literature, must have been at the same time, genial and dumb. Genial for writing some of the cream of universal literature, and the most famous and impactant speeches of all time, dumb for leaving the fame for an imaginary character and loosing the chance to make a name for himself, in history.

I have never done that. If it was anyone else posting this, I would be ofended and ask for proof. But since it is you, I don´t really bother, cause people kind of know how honest you are with your arguments. They just need to read a few posts below.

So, an isolate fact that happened in a school in Florida is taken as "an attitude within faith schools". Well, if this fact was so common like you believe, then it wouldn´t have become news in first place. You wouldn´t have to mention news coming from a school overseas if this was the general faith schools attitude, because that would be happening day after day in all schools around you. It wouldn´t be "news" material. In 99,9% of faith schools the teacher wouldn´t be dropped because of this little entertainment, of course, assuming there wasn´t any bigger abuse since we don´t know all the facts about it. Your judgementalism is so irresponsible. You clearly take the exception as a rule, so the structure of your prejudice is exactly the same as anyone who uses one example here and there to build concepts about a whole group of people. If you said that "Jews are all liars" it wouldn´t be less ofensive then it, cause it would be the same cheap cheap cheap generalization. We know that in a world with millions with jews, there must be many jews who are liars, in the same proportion as there are non-jews who are liars aswell. In a world with millions of christians, surely there are millions of them who are full of prejudice and make cheap generalizations about other groups of people, but then again in the same proportion as there are non-christians who practice prejudice and make cheap generalizations - yourself being one of them. All these mentions about witches being burned, inquisition, and stuff is soooo childish. When was the last time you heard about people being sentenced to death by a christian church??? In the past, church and state were not separated at all, the church served for state purpouses. But churches and states have separated since then. The whole medieval mentality wasn´t that much influenced by christianity after all, the fusion between church and state being the biggest proof of it (because christianity actually teaches the separation between secular and spiritual powers, to the point state and institutionalized religion play the devil´s role all over the New Testament literature, remember Christ was killed by the state and the institutionalized religion of his time). In the middle age an average person wouldn´t even have acess to the Bible in the 1st place. Not even priests had acess to the full text, but only the excerpts that should be used during the masses, with the versions of the Bible being usually in latin, which was only understood by intelectuals who probably made up less then 0.5% of the population. And even if the Bible had been completely acessible and translated to the popular languages, still, most of the people dind´t even knew how to read. So the medieval Europe christian? It was as "christian" as 21st century England.

I think this will be a long runner like Unwritten, first it will peak on sales, then peak on downloads, it will be a huge hit in total, but is there a UK planned release?? After becoming a huge hit in US, it will be easy to score a hit in UK, since UK charts always follow America.

These are just extreme cases, that contribute nothing to the debate. I have known of several teachers who were fired in secular schools for political opinions, for example. Should we shut them down?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre Before learning to read books and basing opinions on serious stuff, wikipedia should do the job for angry adolescents.

My sister went to a catholic school for some time (while our family still had money to pay for it), I checked her biology books and I don´t remember seeing anything about creationism, and the school was undoubtedly the best over this city. The Catholic Church is not against evolutionism or the Big Bang Theory. In fact, the author of the big bang theory was a roman catholic priest. The hypothesis of a universe coming into existence from nothing was discarded by all atheists before that, but christians knew that since forever. BBC likes to portrait christians as a load of middle age idiots, while it pretend to be suporting "tolerance". Their influence is huge in this society were people base their opinions on superficial TV shows and journal articles, (people who have never read an entire book since left the school). I think not only christians, but everyone needs better education, and read some basic literature before falling into this bull$h!t of cliches without ever bothering read an entire book about the subject.

At least she doesn´t waste too much space... :D :D :D In Victoria´s own words (I remember from an old interview I read), in Britain sucessful businessmen are sucessful businessmen, but sucessful busineswoman are seen as bitches. I think she got the point.

Why don´t you turn the forums into a blog of yourself only then??? Then you can live without the fanatics (everyone who thinks a little bit different then you), and without people pointing that something wrong is wrong. And all the predictable stuff that would arise, like anti-american, anti-christian, anti-anything-stablished-in-western-civilization, and all that pseudo-intelectual bull$h!t

I love how their one week sales sometimes are bigger then yearly sales of many pop divas

Then this means you are removing some of your own posts...

From the young couples you know, how many of them plans to have 3 or more children? The growth is because immigration, but couples tend to have much less children then it would be necessary to repopulate the countries naturally. I know for a fact that my family was huge since my grandmother had 13 kids, but my parents and uncles/aunts had all gone for 2 or 3 kids. The current generation even considers if they want to have kids. So, as the older are dyng, younger people don´t want to reproduce and it causes population to decrease sooner or later...

Proof???? Did Martin Luther King Jr or Mahatma Gandhi caused more trouble then atheist Stalin??? Lol, it´s funny that you talk about the Bible, I wonder if you ever read it on full, or even read other books. By the superficiality of your arguments, it seems not.

Lol, I have many friends and lots of things to do... but it´s not really the subject. I see that you can´t prove your false affirmation that "religion is purely evil" and the next step is to move to personal insult or joke... that´s when it comes to putting my personal life on the table. Of course it is possible to live without religion... Millions of people do so. To say that it is completely unnecessary and evil, is one step ahead. For me it´s possible to live without going out on a saturday night... to say that it is evil to do so, is another thing. So free your mind... it is POSSIBLE to be different then you and HAPPY at the same time (that´s assuming you are really happy and not just tryng to fulfil your emptiness with saturday night parties like amy winehouse/britney spears, with I hope so :D ). For me, it´s a matter of being happy whatever mood I´m on, I don´t confuse happiness with fun or pleasure, which doesn´t mean these things aren´t good at all. But I can be happy even in those moments I´m not particularly having much fun or when having trouble... cause I don´t confuse my happyness with superficial shopping and raving.

But what´s the point to ban someone to drive, when the person does not even have a driving licence to start with...

Lol, you really think that the world without religions would be like the Island of fantasy... How CHILDISH and BLIND you are. You don´t know what the real causes of problems in the world are and prefer to find and easy target. Your argumentation sounds like coming from 13 years old rebel with not cause. A world without religion but with a mentality like yours would be a hundread times worse then Taliban regime.

Christians don´t forget the story of Abraham, you instead forgot (or pretend to) the rest of the story... how the appearence of a certain lamb has saved Isaac from sacrifice, and from centuries to come the sacrifices of little children (very common among "inofensive" paganism in mesopotamia, where Abraham was raised) was substituted in Israel by animal sacrifices. This of course made the whole difference between Israel and their pagan neighbours concerning human sacrifices. Obviously, when Abraham lived human sacrifices were considered normal and broadly accepted in society, just like in almost every ancient pagan civilization. If the sacrifice of Isaac was consumated, Abraham would be doing nothing new or shocking to the society of his time. The intervention of the lamb, however, was something in a way to change mentalities. Later in the old testament, even animal sacrifices were considered unnecessary. And what does a sect of Mormonism has to do with Christianity? Mormonism itself ain´t a part of christianity. They developed their own system of belief that have nothing to do with the Bible, but only their book of Mormon written in America by Joseph Smith. They aren´t even monotheist for Gods sake. Hinduism is more similar to christianity the mormonism is. Lol, you wouldn´t believe how Max Cavalera is influent in Brazilian society.... :lol: I´m so sorry that you rely on the argument of poverty and inferiority (I read between the lines) of 3rd world people to build your anti-religious cliches. As blaming catholicism ofr our country being incapable of developing is beyond any stupidity and ignorance... I myself am not catholic and not even like it, but this goes beyond ridiculous. If you knew minimal about Brazil or any other undeveloped country you would know corruption is much more likely to be blamed. I can´t bother myself if Bush or whoever uses his religion as justification for its acts. Christianity is against killing people and against violence. It preaches to be nice even with your enemies. How the hell could it have any influence on making people be violent...

The difference is that, anytime a so-called christian kills someone, or even causes minimal violence, it´s going against his own religion, and not following it. When someone kills or persecutes a person for having a faith, that equals to killing someone in the name of your "lack of faith"... That´s what happened in pretty much any communist country. Of course atheism didn´t cause so much mass murders in our western world because it´s not organized and it only became widespred in the last few centuries, so atheist themselves were never numerically big enough to cause commotion. But it´s a real fact that in ANY country that it has became the "official" system of belief, it´s has caused death and persecution. Which means is not christianity that caused deaths, but the states embracing any belief as "official". The belief that the world without religion would be much better is a very very childish myth. The countries without religion we have in the planet so far are in fact much much much worse places in fact, when it comes to freedom and human rights. Western society needs a "devil" to blame for its own faults. Once it was witches, then jews, and now faith is the new "devil" that distracts us from our own faults.

It´s evil that people think different then yourself, of course... Someone who classifies a pregnacy like a cancer or a disease and openly supports women who kill their own children have a word on what´s "evil".