mrfe : While it is true that many scientists are Christians, Christ, even Darwin was at the very least a social Christian, the defining difference between them and somebody who argues as a Christian are what they use. When Darwin was talking about evolution he didn't say that it didn't happen because this is what the bible says, Darwin said that evolution happened because this is the evidence he has. I'm not saying that Christians can't be scientists, I'm saying that science isn't Christian. Science, at least when used well should be apart from the concept of faith, when that is what religion bases itself of it.  The Bible doesn't seek to prove anything that it says, and it baffles me greatly that people still believe a book written thousands of years ago has any standing today. You can be a Christian and provide points against it, but arguing the points of Christianity doesn't get us anywhere, because the Bible hasn't changed in years, and science is always changing as we discover new things.

Don't take me for a stubborn man, I'm willing to accept things that have evidence, that's why I'm an agnostic-atheist. My opinions follow the evidence, and the evidence is bringing us to the conclusion that homosexuality is not a choice. That is the simple fact of the matter. Don't for a second believe that I think we have proven it, because we haven't. We haven't completely proven there isn't a god, that's why I consider myself an agnostic-atheist. It certainly isn't the Christian God, but there could have possibly been something of a higher power that created us. Not that it's likely, just that it could have happened.

You're right, science hasn't explained everything, but religion seeks to explain nothing. It is an entirely faith based belief system. There is a world, and we have a lot of theories as to what happened to create it. Not a single one of which involves a guy taking a week long holiday and making a universe.

Also, I see this far too often. "Evolution is just a theory", yeah it is a theory, but it is a scientific theory. Police officers talk about theories they have on cases, a theory in that context is just something you think could be an answer. A scientific theory is much more complex, it is tested and tested and tested and tested and tested and tested and tested. Just about every scientist in the world will agree that evolution happened, it is happening, and it will continue to happen over the years. Those that don't agree with evolution, I'm of course willing to hear out but I'm also willing to bet that they're wrong.

As for Ron Gold, I think he is actually going for a Bronze on this one. There is a genetic difference in homosexuals, all of the articles I have provided thus far has stated that. Secondly, it's true that people change who they are for a society, but they never change who they are inside. Conversion therapies have been shown time and again to work about as well as Jurassic parks, and tend to inflict the people that go to them with very intense psychological problems. This actually makes me laugh, they change "culturally (as in virulently homophobic societies)". Yeah, I'm sure in an incredibly homophobic society, perhaps like the ones that exist today that are very vocal and violent towards them, a lot of gay people will say "Yeah, I'm gay, and I'm not changing!". Maybe there is a small bit of fear that comes into play on that one.

ender44 :    I first want to apologize because I'm going off topic with this, but this thread has kind of migrated in that direction anyway.

Secondly, I kindly ask that you don't use God's (Christ's) name in vain as you have done in your opening sentence in your last post.  I know this will mean absolutely nothing to you since you claimed that you are an "atheist-agnostic", which is kind of confusing.  So, using God's name as a four letter cuss word does and will not phase you at all.  However, His name means everything to the Christian.  It is the God that gave us life, whether you believe in Him or not.  Why don't you use Mohammed's name or Buddah's name as a swear word?  I bet if you did your house would probably be burnt down by this time tomorrow.  Interesting, isn't it?

Thirdly, you assume a lot of things about the Christian faith and especially the Bible.  The more I read so-called atheists' comments, the more I'm convinced that they just go along with hearsay or what they have read on atheist websites.  They don't make the effort to investigate the matter themselves, so I have to wonder, who is indoctrinating who here?  Back to the "atheist-agnostic" claim.  Like I said, this is confusing.  Atheist = Does not believe that there's a God (any god for that matter);  Agnostic = Does not know / Is unsure if there's a God.  So which one is it?  I personally do not believe that there's such a thing as an atheist.  Deep down everyone knows there is a Creator God.  They are just willfully suppressing that knowledge, because the freedom to believe and live the way that they want, is so important to them that the thought of someone being in charge of this whole thing and having a standard that He is going to hold them accountable to, is just way too much for them to want to submit themselves to, because that means it might put a wet blanket on some of the things that they want to do.      Also, it takes much more faith to believe that there's no God than to actually believe that God exists who created everything.

"The Bible doesn't seek to prove anything that it says, and it baffles me greatly that people still believe a book written thousands of years ago has any standing today."

Once again, have you actually taken the time to read / study the Bible or is this from an atheist website?  Science in fact confirms the Bible.  Yes, the Bible has not been written to be a science manual.  The writers of the Bible were not writing a technical textbook on astronomy. They were describing things as they appeared to the eye (as was the case in Joshua 10) or employing normal figures of speech.  When it comes to known, testable, verifiable facts, the Bible has been found to be in perfect harmony with the way things really are.  Here's only a few examples since there are many,

The Bible (2000 - 3000 years ago):  The earth is a sphere (Isaiah 40:22)
Science then:  The earth was a flat disk.
Science now:  The earth is a sphere.

The Bible (2000 - 3000 years ago):  Creation is made of invisible elements (Hebrews 11:3)
Science then:  Science was ignorant on the subject
Science now:  Creation is made of invisible elements (atoms)

The Bible (2000 - 3000 years ago):  Light moves (Job 38:19-20)
Science then:  Light was fixed in place
Science now:  Light moves

The Bible (2000 - 3000 years ago):  Ocean floor contains deep valleys and mountains (2 Samuel 22:16 & Jonah 2:6)
Science then:  The ocean floor was flat
Science now:  Ocean floor contains deep valleys and mountains

Like I said, this is only a handful, but science is actually always playing catch-up with the Bible.

Swinging back to homosexuality.  Just a quick note.  It's not a genetic defect or deviation.  It remains a choice.  Yes, there are those who have this strong feeling / tendency towards it, but it remains a choice to act upon those feelings.  Such is the same for pedophiles, cheating on your wife, sleeping with your girlfriend outside of marriage, theft, rape, murder.  Just because it "feels" right does not make it right.  The reason people are coming up with "scientific proof" for these choices are simply to justify just that - their choice.  If you do not believe in God, who is going to hold all accountable one day for everything you've said and done on this earth, you have nothing to fear right?  Why then stop at homosexuality?  Why not "sleep" with a donkey or a horse?  There is in fact a woman the other day that married her dog :/  If there's no God, there's no responsibility, no accountability.  Everything goes.  The reality is, there is a God and this is going to be a very, very hard reality for some one day. 

You see ender, I'm not picking on you or trying to be funny.  When people just carelessly throw around comments and "play" with their eternity, I'm concerned, because there is an eternity beyond this life - either in heaven or in hell.  Like I've said in many posts before, I've done some pretty stupid things in my life.  I'm not better than anyone else.  I've stolen stuff, lied, used God's name in vain, cheated on my wife etc.  According to God's perfect standard, I'm going to hell, but you know what, God does not want anyone to suffer for eternity in a lake of fire.  He left the glory of heaven and came down to this earth as God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, who took the punishment you and I deserve upon Himself and He suffered and died on the cross.  On the third day He rose from the dead and whoever repents (turn away) from their sinful lifestyle and as tornadocam said, believes and trust in Jesus Christ to be their Lord and Savior, will be granted everlasting life by God.  That's a promise and also the answer to the original question of this thread.  You cannot obtain this salvation by doing good deeds for others or any other work[/].  "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God..." (Ephesians 2:8)


PS:  I apologise for the weird format (bold & normal fonts) of my post.  Something weird is up with the editing...

We are starting to get a little off topic on this thread, and I would like to ask everyone to stick with the topic at hand: "What are the requirements for getting into Heaven"

As many of those have mentioned, heaven (or more specifically eternal life) is given to those who are saved. People talk about how as long as they are a good person, they can get to heaven, but scripture makes it clear that no one is good, which is why everyone needs a savior.

mrfe : I don't want to be a broken record, and a lot of what you said about how science is not a perfect way of explaining everything is true, you do have to understand that "theory" in the realm of science is considered a big deal and not "just" a theory. I have written about this topic extensively, which I also mentioned how a correct way to do science is to remember that "fact", "theory", "law" can change over time: https://www.vizzed.com/boards/thread.php?id=70888

ender44 : Something that should be cleared up is that the Bible does prove itself and it has stand the test of time which is why it is still relevant today. It goes to define the nature of Man and our relationship with God. When it comes to evidence, the Bible doesn't go without them. It's a misconception to think that faith is a belief without evidence. Even in studying theology, faith is not blind faith, but with confidence. Part of having that confidence is that there is support and backing that convinces the person. Even in theology, which many agnostics think that it's just simply believing in a belief and have faith in, the Bible actually warns that every belief must be tested and consistent with scripture, that there is evidence that what the belief is logical and true. 

It goes the same way with science, Yes, science is dependent on evidence. But for something to become a theory (whether in the community or personally), there is a certain amount of evidence before one can accept a theory to be standing as true, just like you said after many tests. At what point are there enough tests to make you convince that the theory make sense? That is the point where you make the extra step of faith to trust in that theory, or trust in the results. Without having trust in the evidence, you will forever be unconvinced and will just continue not trust in any theory. Having faith in something is the last step after obtaining evidence to be convinced of something.

play4fun :
ender44 (already summoned by play) -

It appears I poorly worded the sentence: "Evolution, at this point, is just a scientific theory". My point was that the jump from Hypothesis to Scientific Theory is much smaller than the jump from Scientific Theory to Scientific Law. That's why I threw 'just' in there, because there's still a looooooong way to go before it's considered Scientific Law, and therefore many ways it hasn't been tested and potentially disproven.

My apologies for being unclear.

I feel like responding to your post, ender, would be rather pointless, as SoL@R basically captured the main points I would have captured. My thoughts line up very closely with his.

mrfe : uh...that's still wrong. Again, please read my article on this. Law and Theory have separate roles in science and they don't necessarily go from one to the other. Hypothesis, yes, but law and theory, not really. In fact, there are laws that are parts of theory, making theory the "higher" place of hierarchy for those specific examples.

SoL@R : I use "Christ" because I was raised in a Catholic household, so that word used to have quite a bit of weight for me, now it doesn't but the word still sticks in my mind, secondly I used it because I was talking about Darwin being a social Christian, and the word seemed to fit. I didn't seek to offend anybody. Also, it's kind of rude that you ask me to demean somebody Else's religion instead of your own, but just to prove a point, even though many Buddhists don't see Buddha as a deity, here we go.

Mohammad, it's like 90 degrees in Florida right now.

And for the love of Buddha, David (my brother) would you turn the Buddha-damn music down?

There is a lot of confusion on the term agnostic-atheist. In fact I'm not entirely sure if I made it up or not, I heard it used and kind of crafted it to my own definition. What it means to me is that I don't believe there is a god, that said, I don't deny that there could be because we don't know yet, I don't think it's likely but it could happen.

And I just want to get this part out of the way before I continue real quick

play4fun : I completely agree. Very few things are without faith. Sometimes, faith leads to great discovery, but I think faith has its place and discovery has its. Faith may lead to a discovery or an idea but after that you need to leave it at the door and start providing evidence. Also, and I can't find where someone in this thread said this, but I feel like I remember someone in this thread saying it, I hate it when atheists say "I believe there is no God", that goes against this whole thing. Atheism is about saying "I don't believe there is a God". Saying the former statement does require some faith, I agree on that. My problem is not with faith, my problem is with religion. I don't think it's relevant in today's society.

I think a problem with creationism and those that follow it is the way they go throughout their logic. What they think is "I want to believe in a God, so here are things I will find to support it", not "Here are the facts, let's see what they support". I highly HIGHLY doubt in this day and age we would come to the conclusion that a God created the Earth. The people who wrote the Bible were looking for meaning in an age where they knew very little about the universe. Much like the Greeks and the Romans they had no explanation so they created their own that in a way united them as a people.

Back to SoL@R, sorry, I am very bad at organizing my thoughts and I need to put them out once they come to mind.

The problem I have with you saying that deep down everybody knows there is a creator God is that there really isn't a way for me to disprove it. When I still believed in God, which I believe stopped when I was about nine, I treated God as basically an imaginary friend. My other imaginary friend was a dragon, and they held about the same weight. I feel like this assumption is you not wanting to believe that there are people out there who may have substantiated claims against your deity. 

Now allow me to go claim by claim here

As for the first claim, I wouldn't really call that science. Similar to the people who wrote the bible, very few societies then had taken the time to explore the world. I honestly can't blame them for thinking that. But the cool part about science is that we learned, when we found the evidence we accepted it. And let's not forget a very big problem with religion that Galileo had to deal with

Church: The Earth is the center of the Solar System
Galileo: The Sun is the center of the Solar System
Church: Rescind everything you just said, you're under house arrest.

Looks like the church isn't always right.

As for the bible verse from what I see here it says the Earth is a circle, which is flat, not a sphere. There is nothing here to say that they knew it was a sphere.

As for the second claim, the cool part about science is that we learn things! One of my favorite parts about science is that we went from knowing nothing to knowing so much about the world around us! I don't know how this quote puts points in the favor of religion, all you are saying is that at first we didn't know something and now we do. And it isn't even like the Bible was proven right on that one, as we don't know if that was God or not that made them.

As for the third, the bible verse I got was this, not sure if it was the one you got
“What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?"

I don't know how this implies that light moves...

And as for the last claim, again I don't see how this implies that the Bible was right. This quote only seems to imply that channels appeared, which doesn't translate to mountains and valleys. A channel is just a strait. I also don't really know that the scientific community as a whole or at least as a majority believed that the ocean floor was flat, but for the sake of argument I'll say they did, even so, the cool part about science is that we are learning. When we get something wrong we learn more. Judging from that last quote

Yes, you can choose whether or not to act on those feelings, but who's to say they shouldn't? Child Molesters cause extraordinary emotional and physical damage to those they affect, that's why we punish them. Two gay guys going at it under the watch gaze of God doesn't affect anybody but you guys because you insist on shaking your fists at them. Why stop at homosexuality? Maybe because we don't want to bang horses. I'm an atheist and I'm quite content with underwhelming women, and I have no desire to add men or goats to that list. What is the notion that Christians have that we will immediately all go out and shag a sheep like a Welshman on a lively Saturday evening the second we have the Okay? You guys think atheists have no morals because we have no god? How about the people who have a god, like the crusaders?

Let's look at a few bible quotes here

Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death.  Such evil must be purged from Israel.  (Deuteronomy 17:12 NLT)

 "If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives."  (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)

Whoever strikes his father or mother shall be put to death.  (Exodus 21:15 NAB)

They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.  (2 Chronicles 15:12-13 NAB)

If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death.  (Leviticus 20:10 NLT)

Judging from that last quote you should now be trying to find my address so you can put an end to me. Plus, you cheated on your wife, your own god wants you dead. You believe so readily in the morals of the Bible do you? Looks like you were willing to skip out on that part. You call this stuff morals? Let's not forget only what God's followers do, but what God himself apparently has done. Like when he sicked she-bears on children for calling a man bald. Really? That's all it takes? You guys are worried about two men hooking up, but you are okay with your God murdering children with a bear?! This was of course (2 Kings 2:23-24 NAB). Let's also remember the flood, which of course didn't happen, but those of this religion at least believe it did. God decided to murder 99% of the world's populous because people were being evil. Really? Bit of an overreaction don't we think? God loves all of his creatures, yes, but apparently he didn't care about all of the creatures he killed. I imagine a wolf that overslept and missed a spot on the ark and drowned, all because God decided he wanted a swimming pool. Then we have the benevolent and omnipotent being that for unexplained reasons decided that he couldn't forgive our sins unless someone died, a "good" person no less. This reminds me of whipping boys, he punished a good person for no reason and expected us to learn a lesson.

I'm not trying to be funny either, all of this stuff is in the Bible. I would find it funny if so many people didn't accept it. Even if there was a God, look at all this stuff listed here. If you believe he actually did this stuff, then why would you want to spend eternity with him? Here is a link to a wikipedia page on Lymphatic Filariasis, a disease caused by parasitic worms that leads to tons of horrible pain and deformities. Why did God have to make that? What did the young children of those tropical continents do to deserve something like that? Before God sends me down to the lake of fire I'm going to ask him why this stuff had to exist, and he better have a good answer for me.

Now that I am at about 1700 words I think we can stop. This was quite the long post. This is longer than any review I've ever done I think. I know I'm not going to change any of you guys' beliefs, but I hope someone out there who is starting to think like I do can see it and have something to say when people call them out for what they think.

SoL@R :  
ender44 : Ok, so we are definitely starting to go into multiple topics that are not relating to the original thread, and we should, just for organizational purposes, move the conversation to one or more different threads. And if you all want, I can group up all the related topics that were mentioned here into a couple of threads so that they can be addressed separately and orderly without continually going into tangent after tangent. And we can talk about those topics there.

Also, ender, obviously whether people change their minds or not would be up to their choice, and anyone can chime in without  you needing to be the primary responder to some of these things that you disagree. However, it is worth responding to some of the things that you brought up because I have noticed, just like how SoL@R mentioned a little, that there are some claims that are made here that misconceptions or sound like hearsay arguments, and just like how I corrected mrfe with his misconception, it is important to at least respond back to some of the misconceptions that you brought up. Whether correcting those make you more convinced is up to you, but it's better for you to argue and discuss with appropriate context and without using false information, which in looking at your post in first glance (in particular the world is round part and the quotation of Leviticus and Deuteronomy parts), there are portions of your post that are what SoL@R refers as "going along with hearsay" and I don't think you've actually seen a logical explanation or defense against these claims, which I don't blame you if you haven't. It might be why you think that the Bible "proves nothing" when there is actually a lot of logical proving going on with the Bible and valid reasons for many of the things you say are unreasonable. What I'm saying is that it's worth hearing some of the responses for these claims, because there are logical defenses to these.

play4fun : Sure, let's move to another thread. Also, whatever resemblance between my arguments and another is not intentional. I think we atheists make a lot of the same arguments, because there are a lot of parts of the bible and the Christian mentality that we all believe need to be argued. I'm not sure what you mean about me being the primary responder, perhaps just that I'm posting a lot in this thread. It just started with me talking with ahkarate and then mrfe jumped in and now I'm talking with a bunch of people. I believe I've said in the past that I truly believe you are a very intelligent person, and this is something I would love to talk out with you. If you want to do apologetics for the old testament, or want to talk about the Bible vs Science, that sort of thing, summon me and I'll try to give my take on the matter.

ahkarate :

You're young. Here's some wisdom. Listen to me. I'm not that old, but just enough so to be useful to you.

To steal is wrong. To murder is wrong. But these are actions. Certain actions are ethical or unethical. "Being gay" is more like "being born with one arm". "Being homosexual" is a birth defect, not a sin. Sins are actions. Homosexual activity is wrong. We agree. But if a lesbian were to go her whole life without lusting after other girls, what sin has she committed?