Thorham

Maybe they can. Depends on the nature of our existence.

Should be imagining

I meant things that may exist for which science has no evidence. The fact that science doesn't know whether certain things exist or not doesn't mean anything. While imaging such things is clearly ridiculous, there can still be people who have genuine knowledge about the existence of things for which science has no evidence. How likely or unlikely that is, I don't know. One of the problems with such genuine experiences is who's going to believe it? If someone truthfully told you they've had a telepathic experience (where that really happened), would you believe them? And how would science go about proving it really happened? Where do you even start to try and measure such a thing if it were real? While there are undoubtedly a large number of crackpots who'll come up with all sorts of nonsense, you can't rule out the possibility that some people really did have certain real experiences. And no, I'm not one of them, and I also don't believe in these things, I just think it's possible that supernatural things may exist. All I know is that there may be more going on than what science would lead us to believe. Maybe the physical world is all that's there, maybe not, and I couldn't tell you what the true nature of reality is if my life depended on it.

The real problem is knowing what reality is, and most people's understanding of reality doesn't go farther than what they see and what science tells them. Not knowing that something exists doesn't make it not exist. Otherwise radio waves wouldn't exist, because at some point in time we didn't know they existed. There may be whole realms of which we are blissfully unaware, and the fact that many people don't believe in these things doesn't remove the possibility of them existing. The fact that science offers no evidence of these possible things means absolutely nothing at all.

To Iota: You don't have to convince me of the ridiculousness of the bible

Depends on the newspaper If this was written in a newspaper today, then at least it would be possible to work out whether it actually happened or not. Yes, two women raping and old man is quite sick, and I'm not denying that. I was just asking what any of this has to do with pedophilia.

Where does it say his daughters were children when they did this? And also, is someone a pedophile if children do something like that without that person's consent? And just to make it clear, I'm not defending this biblical nonsense. This sort of thing is clearly absurd.

You're forgetting that Christians will tell you that those parts of the bible need to be interpreted

No, because what you see isn't always what you get. A good example is color. Color only exists in the mind, it's not a physical property. It's the brain's way to represent the frequencies of visible light, and while this representation is fairly accurate (although not under all circumstances), it's still just a representation of those frequencies of photons. Another one is atomic matter. Ordinary matter may appear completely solid. That's what we see and that's what it seems like when interacting with that matter, but the truth is that solid matter is mostly empty space. Objects don't fall through your table not because there isn't any room for that, but because the objects and the table exert forces on each other that prevent the objects from moving down any farther than the table's surface. Yet another one is the sun rising and setting. It may seem that the sun moves around the earth, but it's the other way around. For the moon, however, it's true, it moves around the earth. Both the sun and the moon seem to be doing the same thing, while in reality they're not. Basically, we don't always see how things really are.

It's pretty obvious they have reasons to convert. An atheist doesn't wake up one day and think 'Today, I'm going to became a Christian." out of nowhere. Those reasons don't have to be good reasons, of course. People do things for bad reasons sometimes.

You misread my post. I wrote that something has always existed and that we don't know what or who that something is. Could be anything. From omnipotent beings all the way to universes and many things in between.

There are plenty of atheists who have converted and who were most certainly not indoctrinated. There are for the people who converted, or they wouldn't have converted.

Who knows? Maybe there's a need, maybe there isn't. There's simply something that has always existed and we don't know what or who it is. What was the initial state of everything? Seems a little hard to answer, especially so seeing how we don't know everything (we can't even see the whole universe). That which has always been has never been set into motion. Not everything has a beginning. If that were the case, you'd get this problem: Something must've caused it, and then that has to be caused, and so on.

No, I'm not saying that at all, even though for some military organizations that's undoubtedly true. I'm just stating another reason to not be religious.

You're probably right, but hey, it's the bible we're talking about here, so can you blame me for writing that? It can also be the fact that religions such as Christianity and Islam seem to have only one purpose and that is to control people (which both seem to excel at). They tell you what to think, believe, do, eat, wear and so on, and if you don't then you're going to hell. How obvious is that?

Unicorns? Really? What's next? Pink, flying elephants?

I think it happens when the invisible dancing goblins on our heads get angry, and pour an invisible flammable liquid over the body which they then set on fire.

... which works perfectly fine, or nothing that requires math to work would actually work at all. A very good example is JPEG compression. Without math this doesn't work, and that's just one thing. Numbers exist simply because we invented them.

I don't know, but does it have to have an advantage? As long as something doesn't hinder an organism's ability to survive and procreate, it doesn't matter. Humans have empathy, but it doesn't hinder us and we are in fact one of the most successful organisms on earth. A new species only has to be adapted well enough to be able to survive and procreate adequately in the environment in which it exists, and doesn't have to be optimal. Edit: Just a theory or philosophy? I'd say it would be one of the most important philosophies in existence!

Instead of just saying my post is gibberish, you could also explain why

It's worse than that. It assumes that everything exists in a system of space-time similar to that of this universe. A system where space seems to be made of 'stuff'. The OP forgets that space-time has to exist in something, or rather, that it may just fill up nothingness. Not to mention that space-time doesn't exist in it self.

So do we. So do some of us. We used to do this all the time, take a look at human history So do some of us. The concept of morality seems to be absent from certain species of animals, such as lions, bears and other such predators, but does that really mean that you can't find a single species apart from humans that shows some form of morality or empathy? It's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the ones well adapted enough to the particular environment in which they exist. We probably didn't. Such a notion is probably based on empathy. Not all non-human species do this rampantly, and there are plenty of peaceful creatures from which we could learn a thing or two. Also, can I say WW2 and other nasty wars? Humans can be one of the most brutal species in existence.

That just means that at a certain point scientists don't know what really happened, yet. You can't expect scientists to come up with a theory that explains everything just like that. The expansion of the universe is the evidence. Believe, or think it's plausible? It's not about avoiding anything, it's about the finding the truth.

I just have a problem with religions that tell you how to act, what to think, what to believe, what to wear, what to eat, and that if you don't do these things the way they want you to that you're going to hell.

There is no evidence that points to a creator existing or not existing at all. We've only just begone to look at the tip of the iceberg, and have absolutely no clue whatsoever how deep the rabbit hole really goes (and that's assuming the thing actually comes to an end). We can't even see the whole universe that we're a part of, let alone know everything that exists. As long as we can't answer the question 'What was the initial state of everything?', we really can't say anything about the existence or non-existence of possible creators, and we can in fact not say a whole lot about the true nature of reality as we know it, either.