True happiness can be gained by STAYING ON TOPIC!

I'm trying to! its just these religious people keep sticking their oar in, as is there wont.

How about this -

The probability of not being watched is inversely proportional to the stupidity of your actions.

Always take time to smell the flowers.

"Staying on topic can be gained by not replying to off topic posts."
--Yet another religious person.

OK you do have a point there...

Iv taken my post out after reading about off topic posts.
Id be happy to continue elsewhere if someone wants to comment

[ I suggest merging this portion of the thread with "Dangerous Religion" ]

Well, many are happy to believe in God too. But, hyperboles and pseudo-logic are mostly redundant and unnecessary when you want to engage in wishful thinking. Discussion would be a waste of time if you're not open to the idea of criticizing the bible (and anything dogmatic) with an open mind, that is: independent of the results that may lie ahead. You want your own expectations to be true and you wouldn't care to set aside the rigorous consequences of logic when it's exercised.

I'd like to cast my doubt on this last statement. The human mind would not care to feed us a fantasy for our well-being on Earth. As long as a fantasy make us happy, I think our psyche provides it for us as a compensation... It happens mostly on times of distress and as a self-healing trick. Our human mind isn't blindly interested in the TRVTH after all. It's about life and its conservation, whether in this plane or another.

I cast my doubt on your last statement too. I don't think there's a "reason" in every single thing, but it's our reason that demands it. In any way, the reasons for many of the products of our psyche are unconscious. Freud, Jung, Adler et al were right, and Socrates wasn't. Our rational and conscious mind is only a tool and has its field where it can be applied.

Mmmm no. But you're proving your statement anyway. Are you aware of the circular trap of this kind of logic ? You're stating an a priori assumption that you'd like to be true, then you apply a backwards method that ultimately yields nothing.

The meta-truth of it is that we demand the truth. The "why" would be interesting to solve. We demanded truth to try to predict when (and why) a particular volcanoe would make eruption and possibly avert its danger. Then we came to understand why and how do they erupt, and our relationship to Nature changed drastically. Isn't it evolution? Religion still exists these days because of our ignorance of what may happen when we're dead. Religion hasn't died, yet. We still use it to clean ourselves in preparation of what we think may happen. It has such a good effect on some, so we can expect it to be like this for years to come.

We should be counting years with "before science" and "after science"

This proves to me that we believe such things as long as they're beneficial or while they're being tested. When they're first created, no doubt they'll be held in the most fanatical and strict steem. Only after they were rigorously followed then we can trascend them. It has been the path of our evolution. If you drop some people at a remote island they're likely to create a religion for themselves.

You're 1000% right.

The God factor is useful only for moral conclusions. If there's a God, then how shall be our relationship as humans with this supreme being, and with our kind ?

The moral realm isn't simply the field where science is to be applied. It's called philosophy! And, being moral values based on the subject's impressions and expectations, they're likely to be relative. What we try to grasp as eternal TRVTH's, are based on what we think is common to all human beings and, in some cases, all living beings: don't cause suffering, etc. Can they be valid in what we call "the inorganic world" ?

This happens with many hinduist writings, mayan poetry, and many many myths. (Read anything by Carl G. Jung). What these myths contain are beautiful realizations that are mostly intuitive and when our rational thinking wasn't what it is today. Also, there's a problem with western rationalism when it thinks that it discovered America first. The Vedas predate mosts greek achievements. It was thousands of years later that we would evolve to the many ways that deny the existence of God and reach their conclusions. Buddhism is a spiritual atheism while Communism started with Rationalism to develop these materialist conclusions (see Dialectic Materialism), like our happiness is based on the (un)availability of material goods. While many of the earlier Mankind's theories were set with an end in mind, the later ones started with a set of assumptions based on the experiences we've had earlier.

This kind of knowledge is the most precious we have because of the ways we achieved them: years of experience and intuition. But to say "God provided it for us" is no more valid to me as to say "God provided the capability to reach these conclusions to us".

No. We can't go that far... We may not really need to prove where they come from.

Don't lose your head, you need your head: your brain is in it.

Can't think twice if you don't think once.

"God is dead" Nietzsche

"Nietzsche is dead" God

What I want to know is: Which bible? All of this posturing about the King James Version smacks of shallow research. Anybody read the original texts? If not, how about a nice steaming cup of STFU, to put it nicely.
Next there will be arguments about which end of the egg to break when making an omelette...
Unavoidable aside: my invisible friend can beat yours! <grin>

"For words to lose their meaning you must repeat them 70 times"
- Amen

PS: 70 times 7