This. I think the story of it was just to explain to people the story of create in very simple terms. The book is 2000+ years old, and when it was first written I'm sure many regular people would've found the theory of evolution (or something similar to it) difficult to understand.

I just think the usage of the word 'day' is a way of describing each stage of creation. It doesn't necessarily mean that it happened in a day's worth of time, but maybe on a much longer scale.

Idk.

When there are two sides to an argument, it doesn't necessarily follow that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It's plausible that one side can simply be wrong.

Which side do you believe has fostered this conflict? Religious people have been imprisoning and murdering scientists for centuries.

Scientists develop a hypothesis then do their best to prove themselves wrong. When they are unable to do so, they call for backup from the scientific community and their peers to try and prove them wrong, when they can't, then it becomes a theory.

Religious people read it in a book.

Can you see the difference?

If religious ideas/theories are so strong, what is the problem with mocking their ideas. This is how intellectual issues have been worked out for centuries. It is a completely new idea that we can all be offended because someone doesn't agree with us.

Why is it ok for people to mock/dispute/argue political beliefs, but not religious ones?

Either your ideas are strong, or they're not, but they don't require special protection from nasty atheists who've finally had enough of the church denying condoms to Africa, blaming flooding on homosexuality, and numerous other harmful things, purely on the basis that it's in the bible.

Slavery is mandated in the bible, rape is ordered in the bible, a man calls god to send bears to murder children who called him "baldy" in the bible, a man kills a whole army with just the jawbone of a donkey as a weapon.

Now you can think those things hold truth in them, or you can think it's absolutely bat**** crazy, and potentially dangerous.

Again, the logical fallacy you employ is one of false equivalence.

Based on what?

Evolution describes my experiences of life a lot better than some story about things coming out of the oceans. I don't really believe either of them tbh, although the idea that we were created seems more realistic to me than that we were just some random thing that happened.

Don't know if anybody watched the BBC programme recently with David Attenborough called "Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life" It was excellent and makes it very hard for anyone to deny that there is evidence if evolution all around us.

It's still on iplayer for the next few days if anybody fancies it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/episode/b00hd5mf

Yeah, I heard that too, I watched a very interesting program actually last year investigating where the Adam and Eve story came from

'still' implies that I once did believe in it, which is untrue. I never believed and I still don't

My point is about modern day people trying to get you to believe their point of view, essentially sticking their fingers in their ears and closing their minds to other points of view.

Religious people have been imprisoning scientists for centuries because they were frightened by an alternative to God, when in fact science just goes about explaining the 'mysteries of God.' If religious people weren't so controlled by scare mongering, I truly believe that we'd be living in a world where science is just an explanation of what this grand idea of 'God' is. Of course I see the difference - I'm not a religious person (this is such a bizarre conversation to have with someone whose username's Jesus.H.Christ :laugh:) - but do you understand my point that I think religious people are ruled by fear of the unknown, hence their actions?

Intellectual issues are not worked out by mocking them, that's a ridiculous statement to make. Intellectual issues are solved through debate, yes, but not through ridicule. And in an earlier post, I've said, take away the ideas that don't apply to the modern world, and you are left with a list of morals that make sense to live by.

I'll quickly reply to the bits in bold, and thank you for taking the time to reply to me.

Science has nothing to do with any mysteries surrounding god for one very simple reason. Science deals only in the natural world, whereas "god" is a supernatural premise, and by definition, outside of nature and the natural world.

The problem, is that religion makes statements that collide against scientific knowledge. For example, take the resurrection, we know it is impossible for anyone to be re-animated after death, and creature that do, are called Zombies. Now you can claim that the bible is just full of stories, but that's not true. People base their beliefs and how they live their lives, on a document written by people ignorant of modern knowledge, and it reads as such.

Sorry, but again, you are completely incorrect. Mockery has been used for thousands of years, as a tool (not the major tool, but as part of debate armory nonetheless) to help defeat an argument. A quick viewing of PM questions will highlight this fact instantly.

Sometimes, to show how absurd someones argument is, you have to use language that shows the absurdity of it.

I have no issue with a list of morals to live your life by, but that is not the purpose of religion. Buddha said everything positive, that has been attributed to Jesus, but he did it 2000 years before. Religion doesn't want to offer a moral compass, it says that unless you believe x,y, and zee (see what I did there? :joker:) you'll burn in hell for eternity.

My point, is that the moral compass offered by religion, are common sense virtues and don't need religion.

Did we really need a commandment from god to tell us not to go round murdering people? There is no way humanity would have got that far, if we believed it was a brilliant thing to do.

Yea :amazed: I watched that. I thought it was brilliant. I loved how she was taking on a whole religion and their cherished beliefs.

I think one of the main difference between science and religion, is that religion has these men who speak for their gods, and they have all the answers for people. Whereas science is people of both genders questioning and finding answers through their research.

Not when there is phsyical evidence of human evolution

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/image...9989-1_300.jpg

No problem :) religion isn't something I ever venture into debating so it's nice to have someone to talk about it sensibly to!

I'm not sure you're getting my meaning of the science explaining God thing - people used this all encompassing idea of God to explain things they didn't understand. For example, plagues were described as being an act of God - when nowadays we understand medicine and know that diseases come from poor hygiene, for example. That's what I mean about science explaining the 'mysteries of God' - people didn't understand why they were getting ill and dying during the Black Death and had no idea how to prevent the illness from spreading. Nowadays we can stop such things with an injection.

Perhaps with the story of Jesus there was a misunderstanding of what 'death' means. It's a documented fact that there are people who can slow their heartrate down so much that it's as if they died; there are people who suffer from narcolepsy; there are people who fall into comas for a variety of reasons - there are several different realistic ways to explain how somebody 'died and came back to life' that, thousands of years ago, people were unaware of.

Mockery is used to belittle an argument, but it doesn't solve issues which was the point. Yes, mockery is used in the UK parliament, but that's a totally different issue. And you acknowledge that it's not the major tool used to solve issues, so I think that answers itself - some people try to mock ideas to try and score points in an argument, but it doesn't solve anything.

The Bible, a method of crowd control and fear mongering, scares people into acting a certain way. But the concept of be a good person, don't eye up your neighbour's things, don't steal, don't kill people - pretty logical, sound advice if you ask me. And I ask you to look at stoning to death, cannibalism, war and the countless murderers there have been over the centuries in response to your point about needing a commandment from God to remind us not to go around murdering people. It still happens even though it's been written down in an ancient book - so yeah, if it wasn't written down, I imagine it would be just as, if not more commonplace to find people murdering the **** out of each other :laugh: it might sound ridiculous to you and I, but we're just two people, the world is a crazy place and I think religion tries to be a voice of reason, in spite of its own pitfalls, to remind people to care for one another.

I don't belied Adam and eve is correct but nor do I believe evolution is entirely correct.

Just to expand further, my academic background is history, and history of religion.

If I use your example of the plague, and the phrase "mystery of god," then at the time of the plague, was in the middle of the dark ages, and not believing in every religious word spoken, meant death. So your example doesn't make sense to me. Those people didn't use "god" as an all encompassing Einsteinian/Spinoza kind of buzz word for the transcendent. They truly believed that the plague was sent from god. They understood that fact, and believed it as much as humanly possible. You are looking through modern eyes, they were looking through the eyes of people strangled by religion.

To expand on your point about Jesus, I commend you on your rationality and trying to see an explanation. However, Jesus wasn't asleep or meditating his heart rate lower. He'd been brutally savaged by a Roman torture crew, and nailed to a piece of wood in such a way that death is inevitable. To test this fact, a Roman soldier even speared his side to test the consistency of the blood. He was dead.

And mockery is still a potent force, but it needs to use facts. Mockery was used in ancient Greece and is still used today, it isn't the basis for an argument, but it can be a powerful weapon in stripping someone else's down.

To finish, the first thing you mention is stoning, which is mandated and recommended in the bible. That's how deeply ingrained the religious belief system has integrated itself into our society. All these things that religion is supposed to stand against, actually are the origins of a lot of these issues.

Do you want to know who causes the most death in the bible? God. Do you know how many people Satan kills? 7 And he commits these murders as god allows him to, because they are having a private bet. Seriously.

All of those golden rules that you attribute to religion, were being spoken about thousands of years before religion co-opted them. Ancient philosophers figured these truths out for themselves, and not once did they ever require an imaginary friend to tell them, or write it on a piece of stone for them, either.

You won't find an anthropologist on the planet, who agrees that humanity didn't have these things figured out prior to religion decreeing it so.

Ive never believed in Adam and Eve.

Evolution.