Religion or Science - How do they compare?

Yet the Bible is just the product of fallen humans and not anything directly from God. In addition all we have is our own understanding and the best we can ever have is our own understanding which is then tested against physical reality.The Bible is no greater source of wisdom and knowledge than the Qu'ran or Tao Te Ching or the Vedas.

It is not Science that demoted humans but rather truth, honesty and reality.Humans ain't any more special than pond scum and that's a fact Jack!You want to be special? Then throw away your dogma and begin to learn.

But there is no Fall in the Bible Faith. Nor is there any claim of some original perfect mankind. In fact the best that can be said is that God looked at all of creation and found it very good; humans no better than pond scum it seems.

Come on Phat, we have been down that path a Brazillion times.The early Bible stories show evidence of Polytheism; there are lots of Gods; lots of Gods as real as the Hebrew God. The difference is only territory and subjects. Each God holds sway over the peoples of a given area."us" are the other Gods.

Except of course Faith, that is NOT what the Bible says. Have you ever actually read the Bible?There is no Fall in the Bible.Satan is God's agent in the Bible, only doing what God directs Satan to do.What you market is not what the Bible says but only the dogma of your Cult.

And the Trinity is NOT Biblical and no, there are not hundreds of of references to God that clearly define one God in Three Persons. That is all stuff created long after the Bible was codified.And taking quotes out of context is exactly the utterly dishonest stuff apologists thrive on to dazzle the ignorant masses.Genesis 6 is not describing any Fall.Nor is the quotemine from Corinthians.Remember Faith, many of us have actually read the Bible itself.AbE: On the Sacrifice; the marketing of Jesus dying on the cross as a sacrifice is also one of the perversions common throughout much of Christianity; a perversion that totally diminishes Jesus, his message and even the Christian God.Edited by jar, : see AbE:

So says Faith who constantly misrepresents what is actually in the Bible.

How is honestly reporting what is actually written illiterate?The issue Faith is one of honesty.The Bible is a creation of man, the very Fallen Mankind you claim exists.There are factual errors, contradictions and even absurdities in the Bible Stories.There is no single version of "The Bible" that is universal to Christianity, not even some universal Canon.There is no single purpose or even thread that runs through all of the various stories that get included in Bibles.The Bible is a collection of disparate and unconnected writings selected, edited, redacted and even revised by unknown authors, writers, editors, redactor and committee of Canon.Christianity is a human creation, part theological but primarily political in nature.It only makes sense to try to understand the evolution of the various pieces parts that make up the various dogmas of the various chapters of Club Christian.

No Phat, you would conclude that the authors of the stories believed that the Gods were equally real and held sway over their subjects.This is basic Phat, that is the whole point of the Exodus story. There one God takes ownership of a peoples and says that no other god should have preference with that people.

quote:

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Exodus 20:2-6

2 I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

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3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

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4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

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5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

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6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

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Edited by jar, : fix sub-title

Do you really mean that?Or do you just mean that you will assert or maintain, or believe?Is there anyway that the position there is a God could actually be defended?

But what does the evidence show?England lost it's Empire and world dominating Navy and faced debt far greater as a percentage of production than the US debt. Did the people turn to the church to get what government no longer provided and did the church meet those needs?France and Germany and Belgium and Italy and Spain and Poland and Greece and Russia and ... lost everything, homes, factories, generations, governments. Did the people turn to the church to get what government no longer provided and did the church meet those needs? [center]US News Best Quality of Life by Country 2018Edited by jar, : add link to quality of life survey.Edited by Admin, : Live => Life

You are conflating confirmation bias and critical analysis and they are two opposite approaches. In the former you have first formed a desired outcome and then only accept the evidence that supports your desired outcome rejecting any evidence that does not support or refutes that desired outcome. In the latter there is no desired outcome rather the body of evidence itself determines the outcome. ringo is not displaying confirmation bias.

In the specific case of the existence of a deity or deities I think it's safe to say there is so far no evidence that a deity or deities exist and so believing that a deity or deities exists is not reasonable, rational or logical.And that is also true of unicorns, ogres, trolls, fairies, ghosts, demons, possession and things that go bump in the night.

And what is the belief based upon? As you say, there is little (but certainly not NO evidence) and in fact the evidence available is that so far every time there is enough specificity about a deity to seek verification then the god has been shown to not exist.That only leaves faith as a basis for a belief and faith is a belief in that which cannot be seen or evidenced.But wait, there's more.The evidence that IS available shows that there is no single uniform or universal god and that even those who with faith believe is quite different and often totally incompatibly deities. The deity that Faith markets seems to me to be a vile, cruel, dishonest tyrant that should it exist deserves no honor or worship and that should be opposed by all moral beings.That leaves us with a few possibilities; that all the deities being marketed don't really exist and are just the creation of man or that there are a whole bunch of deities and each believer only gets a glimpse of his/her local deity or that some got it right and all the others got it wrong but there is no way to tell who got it right or wrong or that the deity or deities that do exist are unlike anything we have imagined. No, I suggesting that all believers of any religion should at least admit that their beliefs are not logical, rational or in many cases even reasonable and that it's equally likely that everybody but them got it right.

The Gods that are described in the Bible reflect the morality of the peoples and writers that created the stories. For most of history that involved a concept of morality far different than what is common in the current Platonic Ideal.If a Ruler killed a subject that was not immoral and would not have been considered immoral until pretty recently in history. For all of the Old Testament stories and much of the New Testament stories the God character could be described as amoral at best and immoral by modern standards most of the time but excused by the remnants that still stand by the standard that the Ruler can do whatever She wants to subjects.That Biblical concept of morality unfortunately continues even today in much of Christianity; with Christians seeing nothing immoral in the God they market condemning everyone but the "Select" (meaning those that Cult selects) to eternal damnation and by creating Apologetic Justification for events documented in the Bible that could only be seen as immoral by any current moral standard person.You can see this strange justification throughout the early books of the Bible. The God character in Genesis 2&3 creates humans that do not have the ability to know right from wrong or to obey God over some other source, creates an attractive nuisance and even brings it to their attention, gives them a command that they do not have the ability to obey and also lies about what will happen if they do disobey and then punishes them when the inevitable happens.The God in Genesis 6 is even worse. Even though this is the supposed almighty creator speaking there is no attempt to fix what he created but just throw it all away by killing every living thing.The problem is not the Bible; it's the readers and the writers. Their sense of morality is all too often selective; they have one set of standards for "us" and a different set of standards for "them".