Religion or Science - How do they compare?

And I quoted Alice in Wonderland. Do you see the connection?

If by that you mean I'm bringing knowledge into the discussion, I'll happily agree. Good. And we know how that works. I see you've substituted the word 'view' for your more usual 'belief'. It doesn't change anything; you still have absolutely no support for it. That is not a belief, it's a fact. It's a fact that you've already accepted. Empathy is an evolved brain function. Evolution you accept is an unguided process. A "mindless' process as you tell us all the time.Are you now changing your mind? Is empathy not an evolved trait? Or is evolution a guided process? Repeating what you belief without any evidence and against what we know and have supportfor is not saying anything useful. It is not.If evolution is a 'mindless', random process a God is not involved. Make up your mind, is it guided or is it unguided?

I have no idea what that means. I will happily believe you. People can and do believe almost anything. What is your point?

But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I broke a small promise to myself not to waste my life trying to work out what nonsense people choose to believe and looked up Calvansm an predestination. It'll be a while 'til I do that again. Leis Carrol couldn't make this shit up.

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Predestination
Main article: Predestination in Calvinism

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Reformed theologians teach that sin so affects human nature that they are unable even to exercise faith in Christ by their own will.

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While people are said to retain will, in that they willfully sin, they are unable not to sin because of the corruption of their nature due to original sin.

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Reformed Christians believe that God predestined some people to be saved. This choice by God to save some is held to be unconditional and not based on any characteristic or action on the part of the person chosen.

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This view is opposed to the Arminian view that God's choice of whom to save is conditional or based on his foreknowledge of who would respond positively to God.

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....and so on. Make up anything you like...

I have no idea what you're trying to say, none of it makes any sense to me - it's all just fantasy. What I can say is that you've just chosen to believe a particular set of fabrications.You could have just as easily chosen a different one such as this from the next paragraph.

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Protestants do not hold there to be any other requirement for salvation, but that faith alone is sufficient.

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All the words you use I recognise but when they form sentences I don't get any meaning from them. They have an underlying mysticism that blurrs the words.There are many things superior to my own intellect in many areas. For example any second year university mathematical student has a greater understanding of mathematics than me but I have a greater understanding of, say, fishing.I am not the beginning or end of anything.I have no idea what you are trying to say. Try using plain language.

The human mind is a wonderful thing, it can believe two totally contradictory concepts without going insane.Of course, it might be insanity anyway.

You can't understand it because it's incomprehensible. This is what you agreed is what you believe. So we are unable to do what pretty much every Christian has told me that Christians have to do which goes along the lines of 'accepting Jesus into your heart'. (Whatever that means.) God accepts or rejects our attempts to do what Chritians tell me is to 'know him' (whatever that means) on some basis that he doesn't disclose. So 'sin' (whatever that means) is normal. We can't help ourselves and we can't stop sinning. This at least almost true, or at least it is if we use 'sin' as a synonym for crime. Crime is normal in that we all do it; it's the frequency and harmfulness that varies. And then we have the crunch. It says that regardless of the above, some people are saved anyway and some are not. Nothing we can do - either good or bad, believe or not believe - it makes no difference to god.Sounds like a recipe for mayhem to me, no need to take personal responsibility for anything, you're saved or not anyway.

No, Darwinism is about how organisms adapt to the environment. It is not only physical, it includes ALL of the traits we inherit. That means our hormonal responses, reflexes, intelligence and emotions and so on. It's not just arms, wings and noses. We've answered this a thousand times. Intelligence, empathy and morality evolved in exactly the same way as all other traits. You have the evidence, you presented it yourself. You agreed with it.But If you can show us some other mechanism that did it and that is specific to one particular organism - ie us - and not present at all in other organisms please do so. Flat out wrong. How many bloody times?YOU tell me that evolution is a mindless process. We all agree. YOU agree that it produced the brains of animals. YOU produced the article showing the parts of the brain responsible for empathy and morality.Which part of this process is where an undefineable and unevidenced god getting involved with? Where is this agent? Why is he needed? It doesn't exclude invisible pink toads either or anything else you can imagine. The fact is that another 'intelligence' is not needed in the process. The process is both the why and how. If there was a missing step where some outside intervention was necessary you would be entitled to suggest your god, but there isn't. Sorry, I read no further.

Haven't a clue. Yes, there are things you don't understand so you think god did them. Meaningless waffle. New-age, magical drivel.

What you believe has nothing at all to with what we're discussing.Go back and address the points I made about evolution and how there is no necessity for any god to intervene at any point in the process of developing empathy and morality.You agree that empathy is a brain function and you agree that evolution created the brain. You also agree that evolution is a random process. A random - 'mindless' - process is one that can't be interfered with otherwise it becomes non-random.So how are you squaring this circle? Where is your agent acting? And how?Or are you now saying that evolution is a guided process?You can't have it both ways.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

What should I wear tonight darling?

What is it with you believers? There must be a gene that prevents learning. Something stops you taking in what's said. Somehow you reset the clock at the end of each post and start all over again as though nothing has been explained and you default back to your original understanding.Oh well, here we go again.Every atheist I know is a rationalist. We live for evidence. We change our minds when we get evidence. Evidence can be anything, it just needs to be observable or reliably observed. It can even be entirely hypothetical - just so long as it's founded on something tangible and testable.We don't blot anything out, we do the opposite, we look for everything everywhere. You provide the evidence we'll change our mind.Contrast that with Faith's (the person and the ideology) method of 'this is what I believe if there is any evidence to the contrary it must be wrong'. Exactly. Reality is what we have. The rest is makebelieve.