Religion's affect outside of religion

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Ah, that. Shifting sands. Gotcha.

So what you're trying to suggest here is that a "faithful" person is one who believes so strongly that not even reality can shake his belief.

Nice. If reality constitutes a "storm" against your "faith", which you feel you must resist, then you're in a cult. Congratulations.

No. A believer has little need or room for faith. One believe, because he knows what the truth is. I don't need faith anymore, because I have been given opportunity to believe, and I took it. Belief differs from faith because belief is tangibly based acknoweledgement resulting in action of what one knows to be true. Faith is believeing without anything tangible to believe in, and acting on what they want to be true..

That is the difference between jumping out of an airplane with a bed sheet in hopes of making some sort of a parachute on the way down, and Jumping out with a parachute that you know works, and understanding why it works, thus putting you in a position of a working belief that your chute will open and do it's job.

If you believe you had belief, and it could not stand up to basic rational thought.. I hate to be the one to tell you it was only faith in your system of belief, and again according to Christ that belief is the 'house' that the winds and rain tested and came down on itself. If what you know to be true can whether any storm then that belief can be solidified as Truth.

Is that cultish behavior in of itself? (Belief in what you know to be true) Only if your looking to hit the panic stop button on this particular conversation. (It's easier to label someone crazy than it is to go line by line and prove that they are using their own content.)

Cultish behavior is easy to identify in that one believes in something but has no reason for belief. They believe because the cult believes.. (which btw sounds more like some of your peers who believe in science, yet they do not understand a fraction of what they believe in.) My beliefs are based on what God has done for me over the last 20+ years. Not because someone told me what to believe. But because I have personally witnessed and experienced what was laid out in the bible. Most of which happened before I knew what it was I was looking for. It wasn't till years later that I could verify what I had experienced. Again, non of which was 'church'/cult taught.

Yeah, except I was a scientist. I have a degree and part of a Master's in science. And most of us do understand science, from what I've seen posted here. Yes, part of my Southern Baptist upbringing was teaching me that my faith and beliefs were based on solid science, except I later found out they were just making shit up that was in no way scientific, and trying very hard to pass it off as reality. That's what I mean by "conflicts with testable reality". Even rudimentary testing shows that the beliefs that I felt so confident in (such as the Prophecy of the Destruction of Tyre and the story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood) are easy to prove false, if and only if you are willing to be honest when you look at the real facts.  That's the catch. My belief system said to reject what my brain told me when confronted with "man's knowledge" or "the world", and to cling more tightly to certainty in my beliefs. But I am not a naturally dishonest person, and could not in good conscience do so. 

When confronted with the problems of the amount of rainfall it would take to cause the Great Flood, you instead chose to talk about bird blood in your next post, and then quote the findings of one of the greatest frauds in pseudo-archaeological history (and that's really saying something... there have been some doozies!), instead of facing a glaring flaw in your basic ideology. That's what's known as intellectual dishonesty.

As far as your arbitrary division between faith and "knowledge"-based beliefs, when it comes to your religion, I think I'll let the other (honest) Christians here, few though they may be, tear you apart over that silly little bit of nonsense. Most of them find faith not only important, but critical to their beliefs, and would no doubt be more offended by your claim anything I could say to them.

[Heat]

On a side note Dripster, isn't it about time you got a new avatar. I was sat on a bus the other day, staring out the window and dreaming dirty naughty thoughts when a huge fucking sunflower appeared over the top of a fence and burned my eyes and made me think of you. I sicked in my mouth. Change it to a warthog or something, don't get many of them on my bus journey route.

That particular sunflower represented hope when I had none. It was light on my darkest day (they only bloom/look good for a day or two.) this one bloomed, and was taller than my house the size of a very large dinner plate, or a serving platter. On a day where I just wanted to say F-it all, it made me stop for a moment and admire it and the few dozen smaller ones growing around it. So I stopped and took a breath and a few pictures, and shared them with my wife (the one who planted them.)  It serves two purposes now (almost 10 years later) One, to remind me of the hope I need to bring here, to you all 'good people,' and two to give me hope again when things here get tough.

So, sorry if I messed up your bus ride, just wait a few more days and if the flower is allowed to goto seed it will get very heavy with sunflower seeds and begin to droop below that fence line.

Like I said, you will forever be stuck in a loop of rejecting logic and reason, and we can't give you a logical argument for why you should accept logic. Your thinking is that apparently God who made the entire universe apparently purposely left bad evidence, relies on anecdotal testimony, and languages that die out, and that this supreme being who wants everyone to follow him would not correct this mistake so that the people who actually want to follow him can do so without having to worry about whether or not he exists. And that somehow we have to trust this bad evidence even though we never believe anything based on bad evidence besides this, and if we don't accept this and refuse to question it we will be burned in eternal hell because your supreme lord didn't feel like using something other than a fucking book that has no physical or observable evidence and contains many contradictions.

I can understand why some are now classing religion as a mental disease. I wish I could be respectful, but you are crazy, and I can't think of any rational way to help you at this point. You are far too deluded.

[ApeNotKillApe]

No. A believer has little need or room for faith. One believe, because he knows what the truth is. I don't need faith anymore, because I have been given opportunity to believe, and I took it. Belief differs from faith because belief is tangibly based acknoweledgement resulting in action of what one knows to be true. Faith is believeing without anything tangible to believe in, and acting on what they want to be true..

Knowing the truth is the supreme display of ignorance

[Neo-Scholastic]

When confronted with the problems of the amount of rainfall it would take to cause the Great Flood...

Actually, the flood was not caused by rainwater; but rather, by the opening of the fountains of the deep.

Fountains of the Deep

[Neo-Scholastic]

Where I draw the line (on agreement) is where you continue to claim, despite our best attempts to explain to you, why it's entirely possible to make value judgments despite being an "ontological naturalist"....I'm not sure why you persist in claiming that we cannot make "value judgments" unless we have a magical friend in the sky.

And when have I ever argued for a magical friend in the sky? I'd like to see you find any post where I said that God was in the sky. To make a value judgement, someone must be able to identify the essential nature of something in order to determine the degree to which that something conforms to an ideal. Naturalism denies that anything has an essential nature.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Knowing the truth is the supreme display of ignorance.

Is that the truth?

[ApeNotKillApe]

Knowing the truth is the supreme display of ignorance.

Is that the truth?

I don't know.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

When confronted with the problems of the amount of rainfall it would take to cause the Great Flood...

Actually, the flood was not caused by rainwater; but rather, by the opening of the fountains of the deep.

Fountains of the Deep

Sigh. Learn to read the fine print, Chad.

Because that's not what ringwoodite is. It's water trapped in mineral deposits, and 

The journal Science described it thusly: 

"The transition zone can hold a lot of water, and could potentially have the same amount of H2O as all the world's oceans."

(Emphasis mine.)

Still not enough to cover the earth's mountains, I'm afraid, even if it all was somehow magically released and bubbled to the surface without destroying everything, before magically turning back into hydroxide ions bound to the mineral deep below the entire crust. It is related to tectonic plate shifting, and is only released where the plates come to the surface and/or are subsumed... part of why there's so much water in lava.

From the article below:

"Ringwoodite is a rare type of mineral that forms from olivine under very high pressures and temperatures, such as those present in the mantle's transition zone. Laboratory studies have shown that the mineral can contain water, which isn't present as liquid, ice or vapor; instead, it is trapped in the ringwoodite's molecular structure as hydroxide ions (bonded oxygen and hydrogen atoms)."

(Emphasis mine.)

http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/o...140612.htm