If we were evolved from monkeys - why we still got monkeys?
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Stumble ThisSteve Harvey from http://www.videosift.com/video/For-God-s-sake-don-t-date-atheists goes on Larry King live and calls atheists idiots. He also can't understand why any can believe we came from a "gastreous" [sic] ball.
I'm not so much insulted by his remarks as perplexed and amused by the ignorance, which is why it's in *comedy.
I'm not so much insulted by his remarks as perplexed and amused by the ignorance, which is why it's in *comedy.
"What is an atheist, I get into talkin' to people all the time. 'I'm an Atheist', I just walk away."
"If you don't believe in God, you gotta have an explanation for this."
Actually, sir, we don't have to explain anything to you. Nor, do you have to explain anything to us.
Anyway, doesn't the Christian doctrine involve helping people no matter what their faith? By avoiding any Atheist you're not a real Christian, you're a
"neo-Christian" with a heart full of hate.(to borrow the 'neo before everything rule works' as some right-wing sifters like to do ;-) ).
1) No one who actually understands the theory of evolution says "We came from monkeys"
- The theory actually states that both humans and other primates came from a common ancestor
2) On the issue of morality, God cannot validate some kind of morality. Either a moral principle is intrinsically valid or it is not. I like the example given by Colin McGinn which goes something like this:
If someone says 'It's wrong to murder,' OK why is it wrong to murder? 'Well God says it's wrong.' And that almost seems to work but try it the other way around, 'It's right to murder,' Wait a minute, murder is wrong, 'Well God says it's right to murder.' That second go-around doesn't all of a sudden convince you that it's right to murder. The reason for that is God (or anyone for that matter) cannot simply put a stamp on something and make it right or wrong, the moral rules we have are intrinsically valid or invalid.
I have heard his relationship book (from a twice divorced man) is crap too.
See, killing an atheist today means saving the souls of thousands -- maybe millions depending on how far off the Rapture is. Oh, how I look forward to the Armageddon, when righteous angels on horseback tear through the street, people suffer as their bodies lie, everliving in agony crushed on the streets and the anti-Christ reigns supreme over the barcoded masses; the newly faithful starving on the streets because they refuse the mark of the beast.
That's morality. That's morality at it's highest. That's the compass I've been looking for all my life.
http://www.rom.on.ca/media/podcasts/display.php?id=78
"Refute Steve Harvey's entire knowledge of evolution using basic information you learned in the first week of class (1 point)."
I wish people would get their facts straight on this issue.
1) No one who actually understands the theory of evolution says "We came from monkeys"
- The theory actually states that both humans and other primates came from a common ancestor
2) On the issue of morality, God cannot validate some kind of morality. Either a moral principle is intrinsically valid or it is not. I like the example given by Colin McGinn which goes something like this:
If someone says 'It's wrong to murder,' OK why is it wrong to murder? 'Well God says it's wrong.' And that almost seems to work but try it the other way around, 'It's right to murder,' Wait a minute, murder is wrong, 'Well God says it's right to murder.' That second go-around doesn't all of a sudden convince you that it's right to murder. The reason for that is God (or anyone for that matter) cannot simply put a stamp on something and make it right or wrong, the moral rules we have are intrinsically valid or invalid.
I disagree, our moral rules are not intrinsically anything, and they have constantly changed over time. Your example of murder can easily be modified by adding a situation such as "either you murder this person or I kill your entire family or entire city or entire country or entire world" at some point you'd be willing to murder that person. You could argue that its different because the reason for committing murder is so drastic but theres no objective line of whats a justifiable reason to kill someone and what is murder and thus you end up in a practice of subjectivity.
>> ^gwiz665:
You don't have an explanation for God, thus your "explanation" for anything God did is not valid. It is YOU sir, who is the idiot.
This also isnt true, because you're applying the rules of logic and science to a supernatural entity. See creationists have an easy out because they believe in a divine being of uncomprehensible power that is not of this universe (since he created it)and so they dont have to abide by our universes rules. They can just say "he created himself" and how can you argue with that unless you have a thorough understanding of the nature of God, which you can't and thus its not provable or disprovable. It might seem like circular logic if you give it hard thought but the luxury of the faithful is it doesnt matter, all they need is faith that he exists and everything follows neatly after that.
Athiests have it much more difficult because they're trying to explain the world within a very rigid rule set and through our fairly insuffecient (though constantly progressing) technological and academic observation/reasoning. Even more difficult is the fact that even if you could explain everything in the universe with science, the argument can still be made that it all makes sense because God made it in this way. This might seem unfair but again its not something you can prove or disprove and its not something they have to justify based on their faith in an all powerful divine being.
My biggest concern with science trying to explain existence is that at somepoint there had to be "nothing" and this is not the nothingness of vacuum in space, because even that is something. It is a nothingness in which there is no existence at all, time, space (the 3 dimensional space we exist in not the kind we orbit in), or matter. So the question is how did something come from nothing in a scientific and provable way. Now you could argue that because time did not exist then its not a factor prior to the beginning of the universe, however at that point i think we move outside of our ability to comprehend anythng since our very existence functions based on time existing.
To try and explain waht i mean, imagine a cup falling and breaking, this is time in its forward direction. Now imagine it going backwards in time and it flies back up and back together. Easy enough right? So what happens to the cup with no time? Does anything happen? Does something "happening" require time as a precursor to exist? If so then how can anything "happen" without time? I dont know that we can reason that out, however theres always the possibility of mathematics being able to "describe" it as it does dimensions beyond the 4 we're familiar with. As to whether we can ever go much further than a mathematic understanding of such things I sadly doubt.
There doesn't have to have been a beginning. It's entirely possible that everything has always existed, forever, and will continue to exist, forever.
It's only our abbreviated, framed existence (frame by our own births and deaths) that drives man to assume that everything begins and ends.
I've given this some thought as well, as i said we're limited by our need for time in understanding the universe. However if you think about it the big bang is our biggest fore runner for explaining the universe. We know that time as we know it started at the big bang, and thus our big concern is what existed prior to it right?
I don't know quite how to wrap my mind around it all but to say that maybe the universe as an infinitely dense ball of mass existed forever and the big bang just changed it into our universe is to say that existence in general has always been. That is to say by definition the presense of that ball of mass requires that existence is a given. My problem arises when i consider the alternative to existence which I can not fathom. I feel like it's easy to take existence for granted because it has always been as far as our universe is concerned and its all we know, the entirety of our knowledge is based on it. But scientifically speaking, if you wanted to explain the universe completely and definitively, you have to account for how existence came into being dont you? Otherwise you havent explained how the universe came to be completely. Any book ive read regarding cosmology and the early universe necessarily ignores anything prior to the big bang.
This is the problem that science will face and why you will likely never be able to convince creationists they are wrong. At some point you'll have to come up with an alternative to God creating existence or being existence, whatever. TO do that you have to explain existence. If you just assume that existence has always been, isnt that a sort of "faith" in itself? You have faith that existence has always existed, but until you can prove or explain it, its just that, a belief. IF you come to this conclusion without explaination, then you're just at the point of debating whose belief is more believable/valid, and that unfortunately has no objective outcome.
Logic is Universal, it is, not matter how you perceive time or space. "A = A != B" A thing is itself and not something else, no matter how you spin it.