Originally Posted by Yin

paul, this ^.

it's not very bigoted, but i smell a bit of "separate but equal" aroma behind it (i used *smell* to get you to give us teh funnAy now ), cuz apparently, heaven is some elite country club where you need a sponsor to get in. that's why i gave to billy graham . hopefully i made the cut . totally kidding god people!

Originally Posted by medicSTi

That empirical data does not back secular humanism as fact, only philosophy. If you can find answers to the 4 questions I posted without including God which can withstand logic and reason, post it please

Originally Posted by Overbear

Just so you understand where I am comming from...

I was for a long time a "christian", the whole deal, believed Jesus Christ was my lord and savior, the works. As I grew older however, I started to see the lies, the hypocrisy, and hate the church taught others. I drifted from it, learned to hate the words in the book and spoken in the buildings. I saw the evil it caused and the evil done. So I launched into study of religion, I have read almost every religious book you can think of, and talked with the "scollars" any chance I could.

It all comes down to one thing, religion, is a control system, designed to keep the "sheep" in check.

Originally Posted by saqwarrior

Oh, ok. So I have to watch my tone, but any one of you "believers" can say whatever you want? **** that. You watch your tone, "BRO."

Seriously, is this your first time on the internet? Telling people to watch their tone on a forum? What planet are you from, and what gives you the right to tell me what to do or how to speak?

Originally Posted by Overbear

That really was only a tiny part of it. It more came from the lack of proof, the words that were hollow and empty. I could ask "why would god do X" and just be told "thats the way god wants it"...

Originally Posted by Overbear

That I guess is where I have my problem. See it was not a choice, not somthing I sat down and went "hey I want to be attracted to my own gender" it just was...from as early as I can remember, even back 3..4yo the feeling was there. Now at that age you don't have words or understanding for that feeling, but it was there.

Originally Posted by Overbear

Oh trust me, I did all I could to "change" myself. I was married, had MANY girl friends, always I thought "this will fix me, I will be normal, I will stop feeling like this" but all the time it felt...wrong. It felt so...dirty, tell I finally came out to myself.

Man, 27yo, married, and I came out, it felt like the world was lifted off my shoulders...the ex-wife wasn't so thrilled but...hey what can I do.

Originally Posted by medicSTi

The only way to combat sin is with the help of God and the Holy Spirit through Christ.

None of the ways you went about it were that, which is why it didn't work. Not that it will ever be perfect by God's standards. None of us will, but that's okay if we have Christ.

Originally Posted by Yin

the only thing i'm still confused about: how is a ******* intelligent design? (read post #44)

Originally Posted by evsoul

right, because "evolution" would choose someone to de-evolve which is exactly what homosexuality is if we believe you are born with it, and that evolution is real.

lacking the ability to procreate is not progression through evolution.



unless you can, without using someone else or a textbook walk up to a chalk board and put down all the scientific data proving evolution then you too believe "blindly".
and there have been MANY discoveries that scientifically backup the Bible.

And it's funny that during the Columbus days they believed the earth to be flat..
while in the Bible Isaiah 40:22 (written in BC) they mention it being round. How would they know that?

If we look at the Bible simply as a historic document, it should be among the most reliable on record compared with others.

Historians routinely cite Herodotus as a key source of information. He wrote from 488 B.C. to 428 B.C. and the earliest copy of his work comes from 900 A.D. (1,300 years later). There are only eight known copies of his work.

By contrast, the New Testament of the Bible (with all its information about Jesus) was written between 40 A.D. and 100 A.D. The earliest known copy is from 130 A.D. and there are 5,000 known copies in Greek, 10,000 in Latin and 9,300 in other languages.

Still, to put to rest the notion that there is no historic and scientific proof of Jesus outside the Bible, we may look to Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and to Roman historian Carius Cornelius Tacitus - both well known and accepted.

Josephus, in the book Jewish Antiquities" wrote:

"At that time lived Jesus, a wise man, if he may be called a man; for he performed many wonderful works. He was a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure. . . .And when Pilate, at the instigation of the chief men among us, had condemned him to the cross, they who before had conceived an affection for him did not cease to adhere to him. For on the third day he appeared to them alive again, the divine prophets having foretold these and many other wonderful things concerning him. And the sect of the Christians, so called from him, subsists at this time" (Antiquities, Book 18, Chapter 3, Section 1).

Tacitus, in writing about accusations that Nero burned the city of Rome and blamed it on Christians, said the following:

". . .Nero procured others to be accused, and inflicted exquisite punishment upon those people, who were in abhorrence for their crimes, and were commonly known by the name of Christians. They had their denomination from Christus (Christ, dm.), who in the reign of Tibertius was put to death as a criminal by the procurator Pontius Pilate. . . .At first they were only apprehended who confessed themselves of that sect; afterwards a vast multitude discovered by them, all of which were condemned, not so much for the crime of burning the city, as for their enmity to mankind. . . ." (Tacitus, Annals, 15, 44).

Originally Posted by Yin

just like in statistics there are outliers. all traits in evolution have some sort of distribution to it, whether it be a normal bell curve distribution or weighted to one side of the bell curve. ie. traits did not just disappear all at once, as instantaneous natural selection is somewhat of a misnomer/oxymoron. now, i'm not implying that the outlier in this case is inferior, but only pointing out that it's a numbers game. intelligence could be a 'survival of the fittest' trait, but it's obvious the smartest people in the world have not been selected for just yet, nor will it happen overnight.

Originally Posted by Overbear

Lets see...Gandhi, Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamen Franklin, Plato...the examples go on, all did not believe in the "christian" god, heck Jefferson outright hated Christians. So by your skewed reasoning, they will all be in hell... Sounds like all the good, smart people will be in hell, im down for that. (but as we, the educated know, none of that stuff exists)

Originally Posted by medicSTi

hit the nail on the head: "Traits did not just disappear all at once"

Over time we LOSE information in the gene pool through adaptation, which is contrary to molecules-to-man evolution which requires a gain in information over time.