here's a question that never gets answered.

because my religion is winning the war.

 

Oh man, and I don't think it'll get answered here either...

 

The one I always wonder is if there is a supreme deity, what the hell is the rest of the universe made for?

I mean, we live on a tiny, crummy little planet, orbiting a small, indistinct start, on an arbitrary edge of an regular old galaxy.

Whats the big deal?

 

hahaah EXACTLY! It took god multiple days to create the earth, but only 1 day to create the rest of the universe! WTF!

 

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly nintey-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea....." Yeah we don't matter, if ya don't believe me, listen to the galaxy song from monty pythons "The Meaning of Life"

hitchhikers guide FTW!

 

Well I believe my religion is correct because it is part of my faith in reality as a whole. I don't disbelieve any other religion, as that isn't a tenant of Judaism.

 

well because us little humans are so much more important to god than the rest of the universe

 

no one knows for sure which religion is correct. basically your beliefs are altered by the people you are around. for example.. parents make their kids attend church and believe in what they believe in. you dont really get a chance to think for yourself until your later teen years.. as for me... i think there is one big picture, and each religion has a little piece to the puzzle

 

When I was religious I believed my religion was right because when I prayed I felt a "supernatural" sort of satisfaction. The general concepts of the religion also fit into my preconceived notions about the way that humanity should be. Faith is a huge component. It is hard to explain what faith is to a person. Im sure someone could say that faith is the belief that something is real with no evidence and blah blah and people with faith are idiots. When you have faith it doesn't feel like blind belief though, I dont know what Im getting at. I also didn't believe that other religions were necessarily wrong. Almost all religions preach the same basic concepts of compassion, love, modesty, and morals so I felt that they were probably divinely inspired. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were all pretty much the same to me, they share a god and a lot of the prophets. The eastern religions always seemed like they were moving in the same direction as the Abrahamic religions.

Then I grew up, went to college, and was introduced to the real world. I dont know what I believe anymore. I know just enough to know that I dont know. Learning that I dont know will probably be the peak of my mental achievements. Despite this, if I knew I was dying I would repent. I think I answered the OP's question.

 

There is no ONE reason why people believe in anything...

It all has to do with their individual psychology and their interaction with others, etc. But, it's on a number of different levels. Subconscious, social acceptance into a group etc...

I can't pinpoint why I believed in God in retrospect (as much as I would tell you differently then)...just that I believed it.

Of course I would have given you a number of reasons why...my favorite was citing John 3:16 -

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that that we may not perish, but have everlasting life."

Beautiful verse Part of me still longs to believe...

 

Hey hey hey, easy now, don't call my planet crummy. Tiny yes, crummy no. It is lush and wonderful. Blue oceans with green pastures and white clouds.

Tiny, sweet planet thankyouverymuch. Tsk, ungrateful spoiled little humans.

 

I think I'm just jaded.

 

Well what exactly do you mean by "that your religion is correct"? elaborate on how you're defining the word 'correct'? what is correct? That after I die my inner conscious will remain and exceed into an afterlife?

I don't believe that all people that aren't Catholic are bitch slapped by God and banished to the depths of hell. I do not consider other Religions to be 'wrong' just different than my own. Religions are institutionalized systems based on conscientious interpretation in order to reach a cognition of cause, purpose and principal. Many times Religions start as explanations to the unknown, and then these explanations are molded down and what remains perceives and formulates conclusions that avoid completly deducing combined with what is depicted by science and then the result is based on that, along with intuition and perceptive insight.
All religions are related in ways because they arrive from a similar basis and origin. The Old testament, Koran and bible alike all have scriptures that suggest respecting other Religions.

And what you're attempting to do in this thread is somehow debunk the concept of belief and Religion alltogether...
Well you shouldn't be surprised that questions that do not have a completely integral answer exist because that can be said for just about any theory in science.

So what are you fearthebug an atheist who beliefs that evolution is all truth? most likely right?


here are some questions that evolutionist never answer:

Why do so many ancient cultures have flood legends?

Which came first, DNA or the proteins needed by DNA, which can only be produced by DNA?

How could organs as ridiculously complex as the eye, ear, or brain of even a tiny bird ever come about by chance or natural processes? How could a bacterial motor evolve? How could such motors work until all components evolved completely and were precisely in place? how bout stars, how do they evolve?

If macroevolution happened, where are the billions of transitional fossils that should be there? And not a handful of questionable transitions. Why don’t we see a reasonably smooth continuum among all living creatures, or in the fossil record?

How could the first living cell begin? That’s a greater miracle than for bacteria to evolve into man..,How in the hell could the first cell reproduce?? Just before life appeared?
An before life did the atmosphere have oxygen or did it not have oxygen?
Hell how did oxygen form in the first place?

I could go on...the point is every truth has certain flaws because nothing is 100% true.

 

Thats not true.

 

+Rep. Whilst I don't agree with your feelings I enjoyed your post and found it balanced at least. Why are there no transitional fossils? There are, and more are being found all the time. Sorry for the length of this, all statements have more references and links if required:

Response:

1. There are many transitional fossils. The only way that the claim of their absence may be remotely justified, aside from ignoring the evidence completely, is to redefine "transitional" as referring to a fossil that is a direct ancestor of one organism and a direct descendant of another. However, direct lineages are not required; they could not be verified even if found. What a transitional fossil is, in keeping with what the theory of evolution predicts, is a fossil that shows a mosaic of features from an older and more recent organism.
2. Transitional fossils may coexist with gaps. We do not expect to find finely detailed sequences of fossils lasting for millions of years. Nevertheless, we do find several fine gradations of fossils between species and genera, and we find many other sequences between higher taxa that are still very well filled out.
   
   The following are fossil transitions between species and genera:
   1. Human ancestry. There are many fossils of human ancestors, and the differences between species are so gradual that it is not always clear where to draw the lines between them.
   2. The horns of titanotheres (extinct Cenozoic mammals) appear in progressively larger sizes, from nothing to prominence. Other head and neck features also evolved. These features are adaptations for head-on ramming analogous to sheep behavior (Stanley 1974).
   3. A gradual transitional fossil sequence connects the foraminifera Globigerinoides trilobus and Orbulina universa (Pearson et al. 1997). O. universa, the later fossil, features a spherical test surrounding a "Globigerinoides-like" shell, showing that a feature was added, not lost. The evidence is seen in all major tropical ocean basins. Several intermediate morphospecies connect the two species, as may be seen in the figure included in Lindsay (1997).
   4. The fossil record shows transitions between species of Phacops (a trilobite; Phacops rana is the Pennsylvania state fossil; Eldredge 1972; 1974; Strapple 1978).
   5. Planktonic forminifera (Malmgren et al. 1984). This is an example of punctuated gradualism. A ten-million-year foraminifera fossil record shows long periods of stasis and other periods of relatively rapid but still gradual morphologic change.
   6. Fossils of the diatom Rhizosolenia are very common (they are mined as diatomaceous earth), and they show a continuous record of almost two million years which includes a record of a speciation event (Miller 1999, 44-45).
   7. Lake Turkana mollusc species (Lewin 1981).
   8. Cenozoic marine ostracodes (Cronin 1985).
   9. The Eocene primate genus Cantius (Gingerich 1976, 1980, 1983).
   10. Scallops of the genus Chesapecten show gradual change in one "ear" of their hinge over about 13 million years. The ribs also change (Pojeta and Springer 2001; Ward and Blackwelder 1975).
   11. Gryphaea (coiled oysters) become larger and broader but thinner and flatter during the Early Jurassic (Hallam 1968).
   
   The following are fossil transitionals between families, orders, and classes:
   
   1. Human ancestry. Australopithecus, though its leg and pelvis bones show it walked upright, had a bony ridge on the forearm, probably vestigial, indicative of knuckle walking (Richmond and Strait 2000).
   2. Dinosaur-bird transitions.
   3. Haasiophis terrasanctus is a primitive marine snake with well-developed hind limbs. Although other limbless snakes might be more ancestral, this fossil shows a relationship of snakes with limbed ancestors (Tchernov et al. 2000). Pachyrhachis is another snake with legs that is related to Haasiophis (Caldwell and Lee 1997).
   4. The jaws of mososaurs are also intermediate between snakes and lizards. Like the snake's stretchable jaws, they have highly flexible lower jaws, but unlike snakes, they do not have highly flexible upper jaws. Some other skull features of mososaurs are intermediate between snakes and primitive lizards (Caldwell and Lee 1997; Lee et al. 1999; Tchernov et al. 2000).
   5. Transitions between mesonychids and whales.
   6. Transitions between fish and tetrapods.
   7. Transitions from condylarths (a kind of land mammal) to fully aquatic modern manatees. In particular, Pezosiren portelli is clearly a sirenian, but its hind limbs and pelvis are unreduced (Domning 2001a, 2001b).
   8. Runcaria, a Middle Devonian plant, was a precursor to seed plants. It had all the qualities of seeds except a solid seed coat and a system to guide pollen to the seed (Gerrienne et al. 2004).
   9. A bee, Melittosphex burmensis, from Early Cretaceous amber, has primitive characteristics expected from a transition between crabronid wasps and extant bees (Poinar and Danforth 2006).
   
   The following are fossil transitionals between kingdoms and phyla:
   
   
   1. The Cambrian fossils Halkiera and Wiwaxia have features that connect them with each other and with the modern phyla of Mollusca, Brachiopoda, and Annelida. In particular, one species of halkieriid has brachiopod-like shells on the dorsal side at each end. This is seen also in an immature stage of the living brachiopod species Neocrania. It has setae identical in structure to polychaetes, a group of annelids. Wiwaxia and Halkiera have the same basic arrangement of hollow sclerites, an arrangement that is similar to the chaetae arrangement of polychaetes. The undersurface of Wiwaxia has a soft sole like a mollusk's foot, and its jaw looks like a mollusk's mouth. Aplacophorans, which are a group of primitive mollusks, have a soft body covered with spicules similar to the sclerites of Wiwaxia (Conway Morris 1998, 185-195).
   2. Cambrian and Precambrain fossils Anomalocaris and Opabinia are transitional between arthropods and lobopods.
   3. An ancestral echinoderm has been found that is intermediate between modern echinoderms and other deuterostomes (Shu et al. 2004).

Hunt, Kathleen. 1994-1997. Transitional vertebrate fossils FAQ. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html

Miller, Keith B. n.d. Taxonomy, transitional forms, and the fossil record. http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Miller.html

Patterson, Bob. 2002. Transitional fossil species and modes of speciation. http://www.origins.tv/darwin/transitionals.htm

Thompson, Tim. 1999. On creation science and transitional fossils. http://www.tim-thompson.com/trans-fossils.html

These are just a few.

Q: DNA needs proteins to be created that are only present in DNA:

Response:
DNA could have evolved gradually from a simpler replicator; RNA is a likely candidate, since it can catalyze its own duplication (Jeffares et al. 1998; Leipe et al. 1999; Poole et al. 1998). The RNA itself could have had simpler precursors, such as peptide nucleic acids (Böhler et al. 1995). A deoxyribozyme can both catalyze its own replication and function to cleave RNA -- all without any protein enzymes (Levy and Ellington 2003).

References:
Böhler, C., P. E. Nielsen, and L. E. Orgel. 1995. Template switching between PNA and RNA oligonucleotides. Nature 376: 578-581. See also: Piccirilli, J. A., 1995. RNA seeks its maker. Nature 376: 548-549.
Jeffares, D. C., A. M. Poole and D. Penny. 1998. Relics from the RNA world. Journal of Molecular Evolution 46: 18-36.
Leipe, D. D., L. Aravind, and E. V. Koonin. 1999. Did DNA replication evolve twice independently? Nucleic Acids Research 27: 3389-3401.
Levy, Matthew and Andrew D. Ellington. 2003. Exponential growth by cross-catalytic cleavage of deoxyribozymogens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 100(11): 6416-6421.
Poole, A. M., D. C. Jeffares, and D. Penny. 1998. The path from the RNA world. Journal of Molecular Evolution 46: 1-17.


MelT

 

What's really interesting is when you start asking religious people what heaven will be like. Most people I've asked believe that they won't even remember their past life and will just exist as a part of god. That's the same thing as slipping into nothingness, it's just dressed up in a fancy hat.

 

Having questions without answers just proves we have questions without answers. It doesn't prove, or even suggest, that a miracle or biblical creation is the missing answer. Does make you think though, eh?

LOL