Some times cheap chicks are right. I don't know why it feels so good when she sucks me off just so....but sometimes I don't care about the science...lol

Also 'cheap' does not mean nonsensical. Just because it makes sense to Christians doesn't mean it can't also be an easy way out to explaining pretty much anything.

This also does not make it wrong. But that was NOT what i was trying to say.

'So, to you....logic needs to be more than "internally consistent" to be valid, does it not?' - no, logic needs merely to be internally consistent, the fact that i don't believe in angels and fantasy, doesn't mean that they don't exist. IT just means i don't accept that they exist.

This is based on what i take as a given truth to begin with, and my logical Universe flows from that. But what i believe in to begin with is NOT perfect, i am a fallible human being, i could be completely wrong about EVERYTHING!

I'll try to respond to the major questions: Question 1. Why did God require lambs/cattle/doves etc. to be killed--Why does God require a blood sacrifice for our sins? Two reasons. 1) To show the cost of sin. 2) To point the way forward to when God would himself provide the sacrifice for our sins.

You love the Big Bang, and yet never, ever ,ever ,ever has anyone explained to me where the singularity came from. Science is all fine and dandy until it hits the wall...and PRE_Big-Bang is the wall no scientist has ever gotten past. God is just as likely and explanation as anything else. You don't LIKE that explanation...but it is just as valid, as there is NO workable theory for the existence of the singularity.

Can everyone just accept that everyone is wrong about creation and nobody knows?

Question 2: Why did God allow sin in the first place if he's all-powerful? Because he values free will even more than life itself. He values love, and our awareness of his love, and our response to his love so much that he was willing to sacrifice Jesus, all God and all man, to teach us about it.

@orthaic.....I have enjoyed this. see...I'm not a complete ass! lol Hope we can rationally discuss things again...but I got's to forget God, the universe and everything in order to read a cheap sci-fi Star-Trek novel until I fall asleep. lol! Damned I love my Nook...and I MORE love that I can find...eh hem....free books on line....!!! lol

'we can't explain the "singularity" because science can not explain God...'

no, we can't explain singularity because quantum mechanics and general relativity don't mix well. The maths is VERY hard.

That is all.

also, 'singularity' is very large mass in one place. Which means very large gravitational force, which we know we can best describe with general relativity, one very small place we know to describe with quantum mechanics. So to explain a singularity we need a theory which includes both, but we have consistently failed to produce a mathematical model (ie a logically consistent explanation) which would incorporate the properties of both the theory of general relativity AND the theory of quantum mechanics.

We have lots of string theories, but we can't test them because are particle accelerators aren't long enough, and we don't have any singularities to actually observe directly.

@Shock....that maes no sense. You lose. Orthaic agrees.

Here's a Youtube version of a Fernando Ortega song. If you really want to know what Christians are all about, if you have an open mind, you might check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24spuXYeFKY

Message me if you want more cool videos that show why Christians love Jesus and why we have hope.

"....that maes no sense. You lose. Orthaic agrees."
I don't see him agreeing... yet. But really, you'd have to admit that nobody, including myself has any right to say what happened, because nobody can ever really know what happened. The chances are the atheists and every religion is wrong about what happened because none of them have any real evidence. Atheists can say all they want about the Big Bang, but they can never really explain why it happened. To say "God did it" is simply shrugging off the problem.

'As for the argument of order/disorder....fuck scientific "THEORY" that tries to pretend it was very ordered and then blah blah blah. Put a fucking M-80 in a watermelon and blow it up and tell me how fucking ordered that watermelon is when it explodes. And then sit there and watch a watermelon....or 10,000 watermelons...or 100,000,000,000 watermelons and tell me how many of them reorder themselves not only into a watermelon, but into something BETTER than a watermelon.'

try for one minute to assume i'm right.

The water melon you just shot up will fall to pieces, the pieces will break down and be absorbed into the soil and the bodies of other life forms, bacteria and insects. These eventually their waste will be used to fertilise another water melon planet, and the actual atoms will rearrange themselves into a bigger better watermelon. IF and only IF there is a sun in the sky giving them all the energy (and hence the order required) to follow this out.

i'm not just making this shit up. Without the sun 'life' wouldn't exist (except perhaps in the geothermal vents where they get energy from the gravitational collapse of the earth instead of the gravitational collapse of the sun...same thing different scale)

But yes, the theory says, everything started out very ordered, but we don't know why... the fact that entropy is a very hard concept to get your head around doesn't make it wrong. We've got a pretty good handle on how it works.

'You love the Big Bang, and yet never, ever ,ever ,ever has anyone explained to me where the singularity came from.'

why oh why should we know everything? Do you know why God created the universe? do you? can you explain THAT to me? cause until you can your belief system has as many holes as the one which doesn't hold a God as the source of all cheap tricks.

'Science is all fine and dandy until it hits the wall...'

how long do you actually think we've had the big bang theory? seriously? how long have we been up against this particular wall? cause i can tell you for sure, it is less than 100 years... that's without me needing to look it up... this is a recent development... before the 'big bang' we had other theories, Einstein made what he called his 'biggest error' in 1916 by adding the cosmological constant to his theory to make it fit with the currently understood ideas about the universe be the same always... (no big bang those 95 years ago)

then he was able to take his constant out when the evidence favoured an expanding universe, and regretted ever inventing it... (and now we've had to put it back in, cause it's not zero as he predicted... but only in the last 10 years)

" PRE_Big-Bang is the wall no scientist has ever gotten past." yes, because there was no 'pre big bang' and your ideas of time are meaningless simplifications useful only for living life at close to 0% of the speed of light... but that's how we evolved...

God doesn't just do things because they are functional. He likes to do things with style. He is an artist like Damien Hirst or Lady Gaga. The crucifixion of Christ was performance art and it got rave reviews from the Roman and Jewish art community at the time. But it was very underground / very avand-garde so it didn't immediately resonate with the public. The disciples were the orignal beatnicks.

'Can everyone just accept that everyone is wrong about creation and nobody knows?'

i'm afraid everyone is wrong about creation, and nobody knows how to explain singularities, YET. (though explaining singularities may not explain creation, it may just help get beyond the current limits of our understanding)

However this is not something which everyone will agree upon. I'm sorry. I may agree, but there are many many people out there who just fail. at. life.

"Atheists can say all they want about the Big Bang, but they can never really explain why it happened. To say "God did it" is simply shrugging off the problem."

firstly, the big bang theory is a scientific theory, not a atheist's theory.

The Roman Catholic Church and Pope, claim that the big bang theory is the most likely way that god used to create the universe, based on our current understanding.

Seriously, this is a theory which is officially endorsed by the Catholic Church.
Which means virtually nothing to me... as i'm not a Catholic... but it just happens to be the case.

That said, it is an incomplete theory. We specifically know that we don't know how to explain singularities. That is all.

Also. Spyman +1

I stand corrected, I should have said people in general, rather than atheists. Okay, substitute the word "atheists" for "people" and now try and dispute it. Also I should add that science can never, and will never explain what happened. It should now read:

"People can say all they want about the Big Bang, but they can never really explain why it happened. To say "God did it" is simply shrugging off the problem, and science, while it may be breaking wall after wall, that road never ends and there will always be a wall."

The purpose of that is to say; stop trying to convince people that you are right and everyone else is wrong when you don't even know what really happened.

And going out on a limb here... the whole bit about the communion wafers being the physical body and blood of Jesus is not supported by the Bible. Sure, Jesus said "this is my body" and "this is my blood," but he also said he was the door for the sheep, the true vine, etc., but he didn't mean physically. No, that night the disciples were celebrating the Passover, commemorating when the Israelites' lives were spared because they had put some of the blood of the lamb they ate for dinner on the doorposts of their houses and the angel of death passed over. Jesus took the cup of wine that symbolized that blood of the lamb and said, "This is my blood..." and "do this in remembrance of me."

He was telling them that his blood would spare their lives just as the Passover lamb had done centuries earlier, pointing forward to Jesus' coming sacrifice for all.

I like how everyone ignores the only reasonable Christian on this site (Mujus).

@description, not having read anything else in this thread:

"Hell + Pain On a Cross =/= LOVE"

That statement is technically correct. A more accurate way to put it would be "Hell+Pain On a Cross = JUSTICE + LOVE"
You see, God is just, as well as loving. He can't let, say, murder slide. The murderer must be punished. But He would much rather let the murderer come back to Him and cease being a murderer. But he can't let the murder slide. Could you imagine if a human court acquitted an obviously guilty murderer? The man who deprived a family of a son, husband, and father? The community of a citizen and a friend? That would be OUTRAGEOUS.

So the basic problem is, how to satisfy both love AND justice?

The Judge would volunteer Himself to be punished instead of the murderer. The crime would be accounted for, it would still be punished, but the guy who committed the crime would be free.

That's it in a nutshell. Hope that helped. I probably won't be coming back to this thread, so you don't have to leave an answer.

"The Judge would volunteer Himself to be punished instead of the murderer. The crime would be accounted for, it would still be punished, but the guy who committed the crime would be free."

yes that makes a lot of sense. I am surprised we don't see more of this in our modern legal system. It doesn't matter who gets punished just so long as someone gets punished.

"Sure, Jesus said "this is my body" and "this is my blood," but he also said he was the door for the sheep, the true vine, etc.,"

Except the disciples left in disgust because they certainly interpreted him to be literal.

Agreed, your statement isn't quite right baumhaer. God doesn't demand justice to be upheld. In God's eyes every crime is considered equal, and everyone has committed a crime. Those that plead guilty, admit they were wrong and truly mean it go free. Those that don't have "eternal hell". Of course, if this were our judicial system we'd have chaos, because only God can tell if anyone truly means they were sorry.

"We can never and will never explain what happened."

How, exactly, do you know this?

@obiwanobiwan Part of the idea as far as I understand it is that God is bound by laws. If the intelligences found within all matter lost their 'respect' as it were for God, then he would no longer be god. Therefore, in order to meet the requirements of Justice, someone must be punished for sins. However, some crazy logic aside, it's not us who suffer for our own mistakes, but Jesus who chose to suffer for us. That way we would be able to return to live in heaven. If there hadn't been said reckoning for wrongdoing, then the various intelligences would not permit humans to return to heaven.

However, I don't really understand much of it. Find a book on philotic theory, or hell, even read Orson Scott Card's later Ender's Game books for a tiny bit of the idea.

If you start with the premise "Jesus wanted to die for our sins and save us and all that" you're going to get responses along the lines of "heck yes he did and you don't understand and that's a-ok."

I'm not a Christian, but if I was pretending, I would say: Yes, Jesus died because he wanted to provoke an emotional (or spiritual, depending on your perspective) reaction.

To think of it another way: If Richard Dawkins were stoned for his atheism, it would be a powerful symbol, people understand that if someone is willing to die for their beliefs, those beliefs must be exceptionally present, powerful, and true to that person. The son of God has a heads up about God's beliefs, but it's still a strong message.

"I'm willing to die in a horrible manner because I think this is true so dang hard." We've started with the premise that God understands human nature and has given us free will, so (S)He has to convince us somehow, and that's a great way of converting all of us.

Turns out, given our premises, God is clever about human nature.