We use the term 'falsifiable,' what we really mean is 'testable.' Science has never (nor will it ever) conclusively proven or disproven anything. For all we know, every experiment ever performed could have come up with strange results by coincidence, or there might be some external variables which we don't know about. All we can hope to say is that something is incredibly unlikely, never that it is impossible or completely disproven.

Take gravity for example...would you say it has been proven that gravity is an attractive force between two objects?

Nope. I believe what you're getting at here is that I didn't personally inspect everything to ensure that the canon was perfect, knowing that the obvious answer is no. This, however, is where faith comes in. I studied all I reasonably could, and took the last step on faith.

Of course, the same could be said for about any belief. For example, have you personally read every experiment involving hydrogen, just to ensure they were really conducted reliably? I would guess not. Instead, you do what studies you can, and take the next step on faith. Of course, everyone believes that Hydrogen is the lightest element we know of - but then, as you pointed out, the fact that people believe it doesn't make it truth.



Actually, it is the clearest reflection of evangelical Christian thinking. Faith alone is sufficient, Sola Fide. The problem is that many people (Christian and otherwise) substitute the word belief and use it interchangeably with faith, believing them to be synonymous, when in reality they are not. The Bible itself says that even God's enemies believe in Him. Faith is one step further.


I believe you could go 5 minutes without committing any sin. If you can go 5 minutes, why not 10? Or an hour? Or even a whole day? Why not even a lifetime? It's not as if God forces us to do things wrong, we make the choice on our own.

The problem is that God cannot suffer anything less than infallibility - it's not as simple as him just saying 'meh, I'll just pretend they didn't do that.' Luckily for us, He realized that we were fallible and would probably make stupid choices, so he gave us a second way out. If we fail at both of them, we are even more to blame.




What makes you think they had no information at all?

In an overall, philosophical sense I agree with this statement - we do say "It's our fault," which I don't believe is an unreasonable statement. In specific instances (things like natural and even unnatural disasters), most of us are usually happy to say we don't know for sure why God does that. However, lack of understanding does not in any way imply that He does not exist, nor that he was wrong in so doing. It simply means we don't understand.

You lumped a couple together there, but you can see what I said to Xavius about the Scientific Method.



The point is not to look at each book completely independently, it is to look at the Bible as a collection. The Song of Solomon has a very deep religious significance actually, you just have to read further than the simple literal meaning (which doesn't make much sense on its own). It's a depiction of God's love for His people, which is compared to the love between a husband and wife on multiple occasions in the Bible (see Hosea, for example). Of course, as I touched on before, Leviticus is boring for you - mostly because you have no real interest in the laws that God gave to His people. For that matter, American law is boring to me too, but some people still love it. Nothing is universally interesting.

God's word is clear universally. It's just not universally INTERESTING. There are some sections which Christians do not believe are directly and literally applicable to us today (Leviticus is an example) but there are still things which could be learned from them.

Again, you point out the weakness and insignificance of the Jews. Yet the top three major religious worldwide today are based upon this 'small, petty, unimportant' group. Again, one has to wonder how they became so important.



Unfortunately, it's far from that simple. In one sentence, you say that the Jews were largely unimportant, then you attribute the survival of the most read book in history to them. How did Judaism (practiced by a very small group of people) become a dominant religion? What about Christianity, followers of which were abused and slaughtered? Who would suffer all of that for belief in such a horrible book?

Other than your acidic wording and attempt to frame this as a bad thing, it is true enough. I'm not sure how it negates the point, though...a book which is boring to read is even more boring to listen to.



You touch a bit on what helps religions survive, which is an interesting topic. Needless to say the reasons you list are not truly related in any way to the survival of any society or religion. Interestingly enough, Christianity does not fulfill the normal requirements for a society to survive - nor did Judaism, for that matter. As for the Essenes, my understanding (though I'm far from an expert) is that they were a subsect of Judaism, which has actually survived rather well. The majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls did make it to the modern day - they reflected pretty closely what was already in the Bible. There were other books included in the Dead Sea Scrolls, though, which as you say, did not survive well.

Try to walk onto the street and throw $50 at someone at random; you can't. Most people can't - We're just not wired that way.

This reminds me a of a few jokes.

1. The number of people in the margin of error of the Chinese census is greater than the number of Jews world wide.

2. The Chinese calendar is 4,000 years old. The Jewish calendar is 5,000 years old. Proof that Jews can go for more than a week without Chinese food.

3. A Chinese man meets an Israeli in the airport. He asks the Israeli, why is that the newspapers call your land Israel, but the maps call it Canada? "Huh?," replies the Israeli. Says the Chinese, "Well, I was reading the papers and theres all this talk of Israel on the front page all the time, I looked at my map and I saw Europe, I saw the U.S. and I saw Russia, all very large and important for world affairs, but I couldn't find any Israel. I heard no mention of Canada in the newspaper, so I assumed that such a large country must be Israel where all those Jews live. (A cold war era joke ofcourse.)

Someone should probably do a study about China in Jewish jokes, so bizzare. Probably cause they are the only major civilization that didn't persecute us.


Point is, Jews should be about as well known as Druze.

I think the problem with Christianity (besides it having acquired this position in the world via scheming, deceits and crime in the past) is that so many people choose not to look at the Bible as a book - filled with metaphors and such - but rather take it literally.

For example, if it was all literal, Genesis for one would be a bit illogical. How come in the english Bible it says that "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.", whilst in my Croatian Bible it says that he called the light 'Dan' and the darkness 'Noć'? Would that mean God was multilingual from the very beginning? Even though the Tower of Babel, which happened a lot later, is actually the story that explains the lingual diversity in the world?

I mean come on.

P.S. Agnostics rule.

Wierd... you would have thought it would say "he called the light "Yom" and the darkness he called "Leilah".... But yes, you would think that starting on page 1, people would know not to take it so literally. (Though really, I think thats the wrong word, but I can't think of the right one.) One has to wonder what "light" is being spoken about on the first day when the Sun and Moon are created on the fourth, and all those other illogical statements which jump out at you saying "Find out what I really mean... PLEASE!!!"

Funny thing I said yesterday when my friend and I were discussing this sort of thing...

"Ever wonder why they baptise you while you're a baby? Get 'em while they're young."

Except the proofs about hydrogen involve real, live evidence. I could, if I wanted, go ahead and perform the experiments myself - Repeatedly, on and on and on and on. You can't do that with Christianity. Ignoring the statements in the Bible that have been independently verified to be wrong or right, the core beliefs of Christianity are impossible to test and have no real evidence going for them.Christianity has one source, which is supposed to be taken as truth; science has multiple sources, all of which are falsifiable. Comparing the weight of hydrogen to Christianity is like comparing the evidence for the colour of Alexander's battle horse with the evidence for Alexander's conquests - One has massive mounds of evidence behind it, the other is a collection of anecdotes. After all, all those people who wrote the Bible could be just hallucinating, on drugs, playing an elaborate prank, or deliberately trying to deceive people - Which is far more likely than every experiment on the nature of hydrogen being a statistical fluke, specially if you consider that for every experiment explicitly concerning hydrogen, there are millions of formal and informal observations which are only coherent if the mass of hydrogen is as we believe it is. Science can prove things to very high degrees of certainty, and the minute uncertainty inserted by the possibility of statistical flukes isn't enough to argue that "Science can't prove anything". If you go there, you go into epistemology and of course, into the notion that reason can prove anything at all; maybe the collected works of all historical philosophers are just a collective hallucination and make no sense whatsoever logically, but everyone who's read them has overlooked the logical mistakes, purely by chance.

I believe you could go 5 minutes without making a mistake. If you can go 5 minutes, why not 10? Or an hour? Or even a whole day? Why not a lifetime? It's not as if anyone is forcing you to make mistakes. Therefore, if you ever make a mistake, you can be summarily executed; that is fair. After all, you can very well go your whole life without doing anything stupid.
Yes, but if you have to completely avoid sinning, the second way out is identical to the first way out! Otherwise, there's no difference between "faith" and "belief", and we're back where we started. Additionally, why did God have to pull that entire stunt? Why can't he just make the rules that way from the start, and save everyone a lot of grief? Why didn't he send Jesus first, instead of flooding the world to start over? How does that fit in with omnipotence? And what's the point of him dying if he's just gonna rise again three days later?

They had no Bible, therefore no access to Yahweh's teachings.
By postulating God and claiming all acts are acts of God, you have to justify why God does sick, vicious things like tsunamis and tornadoes. By not postulating a God, one is free to explain those events in terms of meteorology and probability. How is it fair or benevolent of God to kill people without even explaining why?

That's the point. God's word is cosmically special; it should be cosmically meaningful and relevant. But it isn't; in many ways it only applies to the particular way of life of the Semitic peoples who adopted the Bible.
Why would God bother to write stuff that only applies to some people? Why doesn't he go ahead and say, "Hey, those laws only apply to you if you're a Jew living in this particular time period." Why do God's laws change?

They were utterly unimportant until the inception of Christianity, which got popular in the Roman Empire. Other religions have had more followers over time; it only means that those religions are better at converting people. Some stuff in certain religions seems custom-tailored as proof of the theory of memetics, primarily because any religion that doesn't want to spread (Or get a piggyback ride from an ethnic group, which is what Judaism has been doing until a particular Jewish warlord united the shepherds and hunter-gatherers of the area under his particular brand of beard-worship).

Popularity doesn't make a belief system right. Christianity's ability to spread is pretty lame compared to Nazism. Nazism didn't exist in 1930; in 1940, everyone in Germany was either a Nazi (At least nominally) or Jewish. Some belief systems are just good at spreading. The core of Judaism particularly is good at preserving their holy books - As Daganev himself said, Jewish tradition consists greatly of making copies of those books and reading them. The reason we still have those books is that the small group of people survived to this day; there's nothing remarkable about that. The writings of the Hellenistic culture were used and read by the Arabs, and because the Arabs survived well into the 16th Century, Neo-Classical culture had access to those original writings. Christians (And Jews) love to play their persecution complex, but the truth is that Christianity was persecuted for less than 200 years; it has numerous components which made it attractive to people back then (Otherwise, it wouldn't have survived). Doesn't make the Bible any less frightening or horrible. Mein Kempf was capable of influencing the population of an entire country; doesn't make it divinely inspired.

Then again nobody listens to the Bible. The standard format for a sermon is to take one verse (Generally one of the four or five "good ones") and elaborate on it.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found - They weren't copied over and over into the modern day. A lot of information about them was lost, however, and nowadays there are people who call themselves "Essenes", which is quite clearly not possible. Christianity provides lots of things that help it spread; it provides a structure of social control, a "code of morals" which makes general sense (Despite being viciously askew in some parts, it's good enough not to be hateful, and was even better back then) a framework of punishment and reward, and so on. The reason there are no religions whose core message is "Kill anyone who hears about me, then kill yourself" is that those kinds of religions are correctly diagnosed as mental illness and die. Every religion contains provisions to ensure that it'll be copied and taught to other people, because religions that don't disappear or incorporate them.

Speaking as someone who has indeed given money to people expecting nothing in return, I can say you're partially wrong. Yes, we don't hand out money randomly, but we are compelled to hand out money to people who ask and provide a reason to - Given that said money is expendable. There's no need for any supernatural entities to be involved.

1. How does a Christian explain the fact that Yahweh, Jehovah and Allah all sound the same, and all originate in the same region and time?

2. If Jews are God's chosen people (Old Testament), why do so many Christians persecute God's chosen people?

3. How do you know Satan did not secretly intercept the thoughts of the Apostles and the Bible is not actually God's will?

I haven't been keeping up on the thread I'm afraid. Verithrax seems to have the counter arguments handled!

But have we gone over why it's okay to follow some parts of the bible and not others? If it's all the word of god then he's probably serious about you following the whole thing, right?

1. Umm, those first two words are different spellings of the same word.... and Allah sounds nothing like it. The first two words are the combination of the 3 hebrew words for Was, Is, Will be. Hayah, Hoveh, Yehieh. The word Allah comes from the same source of the word El, which means power. In the Bible, there are somewhere close to 10 names for G-d, I am not sure what you are asking exactly.

Y-K-V-K, Elokim, El, Shakai, Tzur, Adanai, Tzvaot, Makom, Tzadok, Elokecha, just off the top of my head.

In fact, there is only one place in the Bible where G-d actually gives His name. And that name is none of the above, the name given there is "Eyieh, Asher Eyeih" translated to "I am what I am"

I wouldn't rely on Verithrax's counter arguments as they are full of mistakes wrong statements, and some just blatant twists of fact.

I'll answer the first and second questions.

The Christian view is that all three religions follow the same God. However, only Christianity follows Him in the 'right' way. The Jews do not accept the 'changing of the rules' that came with Jesus, and Islam follows a book that (in Christian opinion) is not of Divine origin.



Why does any persecution of minorities happen ? Greed, intolerance, 'us and them' mentality, personal advantages to be gained, corruption, and so on.

If you want the specific reason the 'chosen people' status didn't protect them though, it's because Jesus said the Old Testament was over and done with. It used to be God's law but it doesn't apply any more.

Ok, and many people are compelled to punch other people in the face when provided with a reason to.

People are not wired to do anything randomly unless they have torrettes. It has nothing to do with morals.

Social conditioning, which includes instilling certain moralities, has a huge and powerful impact on people's lives. That's plain to see just by taking a few courses relating to sociology. So no, it's not random, it harkens back to learning and development, observation and experience.

What are you responding to exactly? I think you missunderstood me, if you are replying to me.

All I said is that people don't do anything randomly, just for the heck of it.

If an act is moral we don't randomly do it, and if an act is immoral we don't randomly do it. When people do things randomly, we start calling them funny names.

Daganev, the Chinese just have not got around to persecuting the Jews, too busy with the Christians right now... damn underground bible rings! -innocent-


Anyways, just a few quick comments about Buddha.

There. Are. No. Buddha. Faiths. Buddhism is frequently practiced (In the East) along side another religion, sometimes taking such a high place in the religion, it is merged into it. Shinto, and Hindu being the biggest examples of where Buddhism has become part of the religion. But note, it is no longer called Buddhism.

Buddha actually teaches, just like Confucius, that wisdom is not to be worshiped, wisdom is to be respected. A Buddhist seeks to gain wisdom. Wisdom is NOT answering 'Why are we here." Wisdom is the clarity of thought that allows you to fully understand the implications of the question, "Why are we here?"


By the way, I know why we are here. We are here to question, to ask exactly why are we here, because only through understanding the nature of the question, can we understand the nature of our endeavor to understand the answer, and the fruitlessness such efforts would bring. In the end, we are here to wonder why we are here, and accept that knowing why we are here is anathema to asking of the question in the first place.

That is the first thing most Buddhist, and Confucius followers learn.

No, as for Taoism, which Veritthrax brought up as a Buddhist faith, Taoism PREDATES the Chinese Empire. Taoism is the OLDEST continually practice religion in the world. (In which there are records of, Jewish people contest this claim, but in this case records are in Taoist favor.) And here is why, it is the most simple religion in the world. The spirits of nature protect the natural order of thing, and the dragons protect the basic 12 godly spirits. Dragons are also tasked with the protection of family lines, and will guide the ancestors to the spirit world where they can watch and guide their families. That is about it. Yes, to stories do get a bit more complex, but they are actually far more entertainment and 'fables' then religious teachings. Confucius was later, during Imperial Times, added onto Taoism as people began to desire an understanding of how the world worked. Then, relatively recently, Buddhism entered China, and as far as Taoist went, joined Confucius' teachings and helped us better understand who we are.

So in conclusion, mainly directed at Verithrax, just because the western world believes that something is a religion, simply because it is too lazy, and not wise enough to understand it in more detail does not mean you, as an individual capable of wisdom and free thought, should do the same.

Just because the philosophy of buddhism can be tacked on to a religion doesn't make it entirely non-religious. If that's the point you're trying to make. I didn't even mention Taoism.