I know a religious person, who when confronted with the 7 day world creation thing, explains it away as all being metaphorical, 7 days really means a long time, not a day as we know it, so it could be 7 millon or 7 billion years. It doesn't matter what the real number is, just accept that in an amount of time God created the heavens and earth. Now this particular person was a minister, able to explain away all the daft stuff in the bible but still believe it all to be true. As I say there's no convincing them.

As for the two genesis strories, there both as bad as each other.

The only story in the bible I think there might be some merit in is the book of revelations, my favorite too. I suggest people re read it and just imagine you are living say 2000 years ago, knowing only what someone from that era knows, and I read it as though he was taken on board a space ship and shown wonders and images on some kind of visual display unit. What John describes in revelations could easily be a trip on a ship.

Worth re reading with that in mind and tell me what you think.

Hey Arkon - my religion teacher told me the exact same thing about the "7 days" to cover the undeniable existence of dinosaurs for a few million years before man came about!
He also said Adam and Eve having sons etc. was just one example of many such occurrences around the world!
The ones he threw back at me was if we were descended from apes - why are there still apes? Also, male and female apes are physically similar so why as humans do females have less facial hair than males when male or female apes have the same amount of hair.

Andrew

Oh crikey, He sure had a point with the facial hair, you almost had me convinced, but I think I have a solution to his ideas. Apes are so darned ugly they can get a mate regardless and so some facial hair makes little difference. Whereas us humans are far more picky so we evolved by selectively picking a suitable mate. So if we men were attracted to hairy faces we would have been content to get jiggy with the monkeys, luckily we find the hairless female humans more appealing and so I think that explains the reason for the difference.

Another question for you all, if god did indeed create us in his image, how does that explain all the different races and colours? Surely he wasn't multicoloured?

Welcome, Wonko.

I see you're a newbie. Nothing like throwing yourself in feet first is there?!

Hope to hear more from you in this discussion...

Yes, welcome Wonko, I must say I'm amazed we have lasted this long having a religious debate with no nastyness flying about. Maybe there is something to the idea that people migrating are more open minded about things like religion, less constrained to dogma. I suppose if you had a close knit religious comunity that you were part of in the UK you might be less likely to up sticks and move to the other side of the world.

Because we come from a split, about 400 generations back. The genetic Adam and Eve produced the first 100% humans.

Seeing as humans are changing all the time, and exist in such glorious variety, can there be such a thing as a definitive 100% human? I would argue not.
I think it's very interesting how anthropology/archeology has shown the evolution of skulls around the world, and how theories are still changing and being overthrown about whether evolution was a linear process or whether different groups of hominids (is that the right word?) existed alongside each other and then ultimately one was more successful that the rest. There was a very interesting programme on it a few weeks ago, on SBS or some other free channel. (Probably not seven or ten!)

Re discussing this with believers, actually I think it's really interesting, provided both people can stay calm and not try to convert each other. (It's pointless, as generally agreed by everyone on here). I once got in to a really good debate with someone who was studying philosophy and training to be a chaplain (although I did not know that until afterwards and had to try and recall all the slightly tipsy things I'd said and pray that none of them were offensive). It was really interesting.

PS Did I mention I think this is interesting? Please substitute some of the above repetitions for fascinating, intriguing, erm... and other words that mean interesting.

Thank you Although I'm a little worried that my most recent post has been moderated out of the discussion. All I said was that this piece of halibut is good enough for Jehovah.

<sucks teeth>

Dangerous ground ...

Perhaps you should try reposting it. It can't have been any more contentious than some of the stuff that gets posted on here. It probably just got lost in the ether....

Yes, agreed. Remember that in 1917 a funny preacher called Lenin showed up in Russia. Everyone believed in him, and what he had to say, and so the country went off following his religion for the next 70 odd years, i the greatest social experiment of all time. Imagine if this religion had spread all across Europe, the middle and far east as the great prophet Marx had prophesied. Only because it was a huge pile of guff did people eventually realise and reject it.

Maybe that's what will happen with the current clutch or organised religions. People will realise that they are no longer relevant, or that something better has come along, and go off and follow that instead. Like happened with the Romans and the Greeks. At one time, they absolutely believed that these were the true gods that held sway over their lives. Now who believes in or worships Poseidon? (well except me obviously <Quickly hides trident>)

S

Saint Anselm produced an ontological argument for God's existence which goes along the lines of (quoting from Wikipedia here):

God, by definition, is that than which a greater cannot be thought. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist.

Leibniz created a more detailed version, which Gödel then turned into a mathematical proof, which can be found here. I like the fact he never published it because "he feared that it would be mistaken as establishing God's existence beyond doubt." Sort of like in Hitchhiker's Guide when God disappears in a puff of logic because "truth denies faith."

Well, not everyone, but those who disagreed tended to have a rather short life expectancy!

Not dissimilar to the Spanish Inquisition then... More religious fuelled hatred and death...

S

Well, not sure communism counts as religion, although I can see the parallels.
Plenty of other examples of death in name of religion though. And for other reasons.
Course there examples of good being done in the name of God too, even if I do take issue with the too-often-compulsory side-serving of religion.

O.K I take your point about the earth being flat (wow that Pythagoras was one clever old boy!) I guess my point was that over the years science has got it wrong sometimes and theories have been disproved and re-invented.

On the tooth fairy bit, again take your point although the difference I guess is that millions of people have not believed and worshipped the tooth fairy since the dawn of time.

Anyone who tries to argue the existance of Christ and God based on science, evidence and fact will lose hands down, but why has the idea of Christ and a god/God been believed by so many and for so long??

Did someone one day just make the story up and people believed/followed because the human spirit needs the existance of something or someone greater than itself, or is there the slightest chance that there might be an element of truth in it?