immortal

The language used in the scriptures is quite clear about what they are describing and the available literature has validated the scriptures again and again. This is not alien to bible or any other religious scriptures, its quite common to all religions, they are not describing unicorns, they are describing anthropomorphic gods. When John says "I turned back" he doesn't mean to turn his neck around and see as though the angel had appeared in the empirical world, No, it means to turn back and see one's own pysche, now this is not childish, this is weird psychology, revelation requires that a self exists and through it a new observation is said to be possible which is different from empirical observation. Now even after communicating with God and knowing he exists is it not evidence beyond any doubt to assert that he exists as a fact, they are not broken unless they are lieing to themselves, unless the countless scholars are lieing or are there any other reasonable explanations that you can give to dismiss such claims or you want to dismiss it because you want to dismiss it anyway irrespective of knowing what the truth is. Its very important for me and for many others to know on which worldviews we should base our future actions on, the worldview given by religion is a competely different worldview and it drastically changes one's frame of thoughts and one's way of living, so your comparison that we should dismiss belief in god and accuse people who believe in god in the same way as we dismiss beliefs in tooth fairy is fatuous in the face of literature available for god accross different cultures compared to a tooth fairy. I'm not saying religion deserves a special pass, no, we don't have to accept anything as true before we have seen it with our eyes or through any other means but that doesn't mean those who have a special talent to access a reality which we cannot access, are broken, I'm unsure of it, that's all.

http://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcbc245/MCBC245PDFs/Gellon.pdf okay sammy7, here it is, I have found it for you in google scholar, its not a big thing you know.

I'm sorry, we just don't make things up in science based on faith and the fact that there is so much to explore and to develop new models and new explanations is what makes science exciting and interesting to study with out any bias or faith. If you're not satisfied with the overview and don't believe in it, search the article in scientific journals like Nature or scientific american, I can't do much other than that. I don't know where your telomere paper is. Science is not a propaganda we are open to alternate explanations and theories which gives better explanations based on evidence than the current ones.

Macro-evolution is a theory, it is not a fact. Please care to read what the paper claims to explain, before it was argued that there was no genetic mechanism for macro-evolution but now the researchers have found out a genetic mechanism of how macro-evolution could've happened. The geological evidence provides the conditions that prevailed on earth at different times, molecular clocks and evolutionary trees provides timescales on when a population diverged and branched out to form a different species, this is the most reasonable explanation that we have got based on evidence.

http://www.websterworld.com/websterworld/scienceupdates/h/howanimalbodyshapeschaion725.html

Type-2 science

It may not be an exact science like physics and mathematics but it still falls in the domain of science because the theory is falsifiable. It is a type-2 science. Ofcourse you never said such a thing but the videos in your posts all point to creationism.

Sammy7, Macro-evolution is not something which can be observed in a person's life time, we can make inferences from the mutations of homeobox genes which indicates that small and single mutations can cause a wide range of abdomen changes with limbs developing in every segments to no limbs at all, so its not that unlikely considering the millions of years of evolution on earth. We don't just accept the macro-evolution theory as a fact, theories are there to give us better explanations for our collected observed data. Just because macro-evolution is not observed doesn't mean that God created the life on earth, so the arguments of creationists cannot be accepted as science they need to do more than just say there is no observable empirical testable reproducible evidence for macro-evolution. I am a theist and I don't have to make god fit with science or even call it as science.

Religious scholars are not spokespersons of some religious institutions, they are individuals who have made an honest effort to study both the scriptures as well as religious practices, they might have indeed communicated with god and concluded that god exists and if that is true they don't qualify as broken to me, I am not saying religion should be made incontrovertible, but this generalization of yours to call all people who believe in god as broken just because the evidence doesn't qualify your criteria to be called as evidence is what I'm against of and cannot accept it. For us it might be broken to conclude that god exists without any evidence but for those who have seen god its not broken to assert that he exists as a fact. This is what I'm arguing from the begining of this thread, you cannot really convince anyone with faith and revelations alone so there is nothing wrong if you keep your personal beliefs with you but if you want to enforce your beliefs on others then you either need to show empirical evidence or guide the person to have the revelations which you had, if religion evolves and grows in this way then there is no problem rather than accepting things based on faith alone with out questioning it.

We both agree that the dark age thinking of religions is purely based on faith and there is no evidence what so ever and no way the decisions being made based on such ideologies is justfiable. Religion can be divided into two kinds one is the Institutional religion which normally interacts with the society and has an impact on the political decisions which are being made and the other one is the personal religion which is the quest to know the truth and one's purpose in the comos. So let's not confuse the two. I really do think that such influences from religious institutions needs to be minimized but there is no need to suppress one's freedom of religious expression. When it comes to religion I'm nonsectarian. If there was enough evidence to support such dark age thinking I would have made an effort to force everyone around me to implement such thinking in every aspect of our society because I personally think that societal models based on religion was better than our current democratic system, can you imagine a world where you would give offerings to priests for your sins and the priests praying for the good of the society as a whole so that there is good rains all through out the season with sufficient food to feed everyone and to keep everyone happy and lead a righteous life. There is no need to make it facetious, it deserves respect. However as you can see in the modern world it is not such dark age thinking which feeds the seven billion people of the world, its biotechnology and science which is based on evidence based thinking and passing every known product to clinical trials and other tests is what has kept us happy and is feeding our seven billion people of the world, its not magic which has come to our rescue and hence I would never ever try or allow such dark age thinking to influence our life and our society. Just because of some blind dark age beliefs which we cannot comprehend let's not allow people going so crazy as to they start killing out each other and affect our well being.

Obviously the tree of life refers to the promise of eternal life, the ability to live forever. I don't think we should take it literally as though going and eating the fruit from the tree of life, instead its about having or accessing the knowledge of God and his numnious nature is what gives you immortality and I think that is what god means when he says, "To the one who conquers I will grant to eat the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God". I'm not sure what you mean here. Would you just make up and follow a false religion just because it solves our world problems irrespective of knowing what the truth is, if you assume that all religions were created by humans and that there is no such thing as god's words only then it makes some sense but we don't know that is what the case is. You're thinking as though scriptures were written by people getting together with each other and having a some sort of agenda to fulfill. No, take bible for example, a collection of books written by individuals accross different times, they wrote what was revealed to them. What I have read from scholars is that they say that God stimulated the thoughts in the minds of these men to write the scriptures and is thought that those words are directly from God which means we men are mere puppets in the hands of gods.

Yes, knowing and believing are not synonymous.

I am not clinging to it just because it makes me feel good, I honestly want to know whether such claims are true or not. Your critcism is taken positively. No, I am not dismissing any religious beliefs nor do I think that the mainstream religions are silly, what needs to be done is that we should separate religion from the real world as much as possible, this is what I'm arguing for not for dismissal of their beliefs, I don't care whether the beliefs are of Abrahamic religions, Jainism, Buddhism or any other religious beliefs for that matter. Religious studies deserves some respect, calling the works of scholars who give all their life and energy to develop such interesting works as wish-thinking is not what I'm in for. The world would have been a different place if religious works were taken more seriously and if our decisions were based on religion but that's not a common consensus which religion has won and hence it is important to separate it out so that the impact that it has on our modern culture is very very less.

I have heard that Moses really tried hard to understand the nature of God and failed to do so, that's one of the cornerstone of Abrahmic Religions that one shall not make an idol of God and it is against idolatry which clearly indicates that his true nature is elusive without a particular form and its wrong to represent him with worldly objects.

Many religious scholars suggest that pre-cognition is possible and it is real. Imagine how such a thing can add to our knowledge of space and time, Minority Report was an amazing Sci-fi movie about precogs. I know my argument is weak since I'm not demonstrating it and I also know you might have a different explanation for such cases but it is these things which attracts me to religion. There are good things and great wisdom which can come out of religion so we should be careful of on what to minimize or suppress and what to encourage and pass it on to our children. The root cause of such ignorance might indeed be from religion and it has to be minimized but its wrong to think that the ancient people were in a dark age as though they didn't made any contributions to the knowledge base of humanity, knowledge is cumulative. There is so much to learn from them, I would suggest that there is as much a need for scholars who study these things as much as we need scientists and engineers. Its wrong to think that there is no use from such studies. That's the point, there is no need to eradicate the apples as a whole just because there are a few bad apples which ruin the acts of good apples. The very encouragement to study such literature from scholars would make them question their beliefs and their pre-concieved notions and if we can seperate religion from the real world then we can let them be open to whatever positions that they want to take about religion. There is a difference between criticizing a certain way of thinking and minizing a certain way of thinking. I am not in for minimizing religious thinking as a whole. You can criticize all you want and some think that if they some how make an argument look ridiculous and show disrespect to it that they have won the argument, the very fact that we doubt religious ideas keeps us adherent to these positions rather than dismissing them as a whole.

This is the main problem I have with this thread there are different theists out there and you should be careful on what you're trying to minimize or suppress. In the modern world there are people who are not highly religious and at the same time they are not anti-religious either and they give respect to non-intellectual ways of looking at the world which is quite irrational. There might be other ways of knowing other than rationalism and empiricism. http://www.ndtv.com/...troversy-211213 Certain religious thinking indeed often does impact the world around us. Recently some Oregan company in the U.S gave a beer bottle in the hands of goddess Kali which is the label to their bottle and today morning the leader of an extremist religious group openly stated in the media that if this trend continues he is going to chop off the hands of those who insult their gods and attacked the Church for converting people. This is the world we live in, let's accept it. People killing out each other in the name of politics and religion. Its really afraid to live having such people around you and such thinking need to be minimized. My main point is not all religious thinking and people who believe in god harm others in any way, infact the priests of oldest religions used to pray for the good of the society as a whole and praying that his acts does not cause harm to others in anyway, what I am basically interested is in studying such religious thinking which challenge our accepted notions of reality and there is so much literature out there written by religious scholars which adds so much knowledge and contribute to humanity as a whole, so the question that I would ask to the original poster is that do you don't want to teach these things to our children, is it right to minimize religious thinking just because it isn't rational to you? Now I'm afraid of such intolerance towards religion and such intolerance shouldn't be tolerated. You can criticize such religious thinking all you want but its wrong to minimize it, its wrong to attack them personally so that society looks down upon them.

Yes, thank you. I am being mentally retarded for viewing the world that way. Have you ever worshiped the fire coming out of the gas stove in your kitchen? The ancients used to do that, have you ever worshiped the water coming out of your tap? They did that. Some might suggest that the ancients didn't knew how things worked and hence they worshiped the things in nature as gods, I think there is more to it to this idea of viewing the things around us as anthropomorphic gods, some scholars are convinced that we are not alone and that they exist and support such a view of the world. This way of thinking is so much different from the current science, I still cannot grasp how the air we feel can be an anthropomorphic god with human qualities and emotions. I don't know where to begin with, I think studying such ancient cultures would be the right place to start with. The idea can be fairly described by pansychism which suggest that even rocks, water etc have a mind and has feelings and expierence the world, this clearly redefines our notion of life and what constitutes to be called as alive. Only when we view the world in this way, the mainstream religions makes some sense.

I don't think an agnostic position can be the safe and correct position, there is gnostic theism which says that the existence of god is provable and that the absolute truth can be known which challenges agnosticism and hence no position can be the honest position. Some don't have problem having both the worldviews or modules in their heads giving equal chance to both theism as well as atheism.

Yes, I have been following some new discoveries in the field, see - http://arxiv.org/a/patel_a_1 and it is still an unsolved problem. The question is what is the point of all of this, why should gravity has to hold mass together, why should we be aware of our bodies, the body is a machine it can take care of itself, what's the point of all this, as you can see the whole point of life is that there is no point in continuing to live. Everything in this universe goes into the jaws of death, everything dissolves into an uniform entropy, so if a purpose as such exists there must be something eternal, unchanging which we can rely on and live by such a principle. If you rewind the tape of evolution and run it again it is very unlikely that same creatures would have appeared again, so we as a species are here because we just had those lucky mutations which nature favoured it. If nature had not favoured us then homo sapiens wouldn't have existed on earth at this point of time. So, I don't know what you mean when you ask what is the purpose of life evolving, no there is no purpose, life didn't evolved just for the sake to create homo sapiens. Unless you're coming from a religious perspective and as I said earlier that would require something eternal and unchanging, that could be a god or a thing or a set of absolute universal principles. I apologize for that, if you didn't get anything what I said then please kindly ask for clarification.

According to anthropologist Richard Leakey we're in the middle of a sixth great mass extinction, I think rather than falling into fear we should educate people and make people more aware of this. http://wn.com/the_si...planets_history

The idea of Gaia should be attributed to this man, James Lovelock. There can be different interpretations of the Gaia hypothesis while James Lovelock and others argue that it is just an emergent property of the system which is inevitable and say that there is no need to invoke any teleology or design into it, the other interpretation would be that to say that non-living elements are somehow aware and regulate the atmospheric temperatures and gases on earth invokes panpsychism and panexperientialism which in turn lead to the existence of anthropomorphic gods. So any evidence for Gaia could be evidence for Intelligent design as well. It would drastically change the way we think about this world.

Many have looked into this problem from ancient times, why there is so much suffering in this world, surely if we knew god and had knowledge about him then we could've eradicated all the suffering in the world no matter how good or how evil the world would get. It is the problem of suffering and honestly speaking I don't know the answer to your question.

Religious and Bible scholars agree that Jesus existed, that's what I've heard after seeing this video. I have to agree with the bible scholar there Bible has more to say about the supernatural realm than about the history of earth. The worldview given by religion is very much different from the worldview given by science, that doesn't mean they have to contradict with each other, I'm quite open to both the worldviews or any other worldview which gives answer to our big question, where do we come from with adequate evidence and the worldview of religion is in contention for that. Perhaps it could be also an indication of our ignorance of such gods not that they never existed.

Yes, I did watched the video and yes there is no sign of any design, things have evolved naturally. I think Intelligent Design as a theory can possibly be extended to the design of our reality as a whole and not just for biological systems.

The evidence is in the literature of religious scholars but such evidences are anecdotal, such evidences may not be sufficient enough to conclude that god exists for sure but its enough to show that religion deserves much respect as a tool for finding out the truth and our origins. Unfortuantely such religions are dead and are not being practiced by anyone of them, perhaps only by minority of people around the world. I for one is not arguing for the mainstream religions of the world, you know more than me about the childish nature of such beliefs and why our study of religion forced us to reject it.