We are trying to get these topics back up and running, so here you go
Originally started by:RiverRat

Do you belive in Him/Her/It/Them? Why and what are your beliefs?

Wow, this was wayy old. I dont know what to think, I have no idea on how this whole came to be. So to an extent. i think it was someone/thing that made us and the world we live in. Now, is that god? i have no idea. and personally as long as im still breathing. Im fine with not knowing.
-Nc

I do believe in God. I think there was no other way for the world to be created. I used to question the idea, but I think there is no way of having faith if you doubt it. I do believe there is God, who created the world as well as plays a part in fate.

That's what I always thought..

I agree.

I believe in Him too. I mean if gasses and the big bang made Earth and the other planets, why arent the other planets inhabited? I think He made us for a reason.

I'm an agnostic. I'm one of those people who likes have a bit of proof. I'm not a die hard athiest, but can't come to the concusion one way or the other that a god of any sort exists.

My beliefs on a personal note tend to lean toward Buddhism.

And to reply to Singh: What makes you so sure they're aren't other inhabited planets? Considering the billions upon billions of stars just in this particular universe. Finding a planet containing life is not far fetched. It fact, a life bearing planet within our universe is possible.

The idea of a god making man for a reason seems to comfort people, which is all well and good, but I tend to find the idea a cop out. A simple excuse to make life seem more of a test than a the actual thing. I don't like the idea that life here is some test that will end you in heaven or hell. I don't belive in either. I like the idea of this life being it, it makes your time on earth seem more important.

That is what I believe.
-Q

I believe in the scientific side of things. In my point of view, I believe that the Earth was created by a lava rock expanding through metor showers colliding with the earth. Also forming land and clement shifts to make the earth what it is today. The earth was once a supercontinent until the shift in oceans shifted them, today called "Land Shift".

True Quills. While my name should be a dead give away as to my religion(anyone with Singh(for males) or Kaur(for females) is automatically a Sikh) i also tend to have a mixture of Daoism, Buddism, and Sikhism beliefs. I do think there is other life out there, i meant our local system, the one created by the big bang.
My interpretation is different. We are here for a reason, whatever it maybe. I dont believe in a divine plan or a test for heaven and hell,but something more complex. in fact, i dont believe in Hell at all.

I also have a sort of warped view on how Humans came to be. I know the big huge fuss people are making nowadays about evolution vs. creation. I may not be the first to think of it, but i did invent this theroy independently:
God created life, but instead of BAM BAM BAM!!! Humans here, trees out of no where, lakes out the air, He was all nowing. He began life as the itsy bitsy bacteria(or watever it was) that 1st inhabitited this planet, knowing that it would evolve into us today. Cannot science and religion coexist? I think so

Because Earth contains the necessary elements to sustain the forms of life we see on this planet. Other planets do have lifeforms: bacteria. I know, they're not sentient beings but they're still life and they're considered the greatest of all living entities on the scale of success. Just because there aren't any bipedal beings on our nearby planets doesn't mean Earth is solely inhabited. The majority of the universe hasn't even been explored so ruling out the possibility is like when man thought the edge of his country was the edge of the world. You cannot judge other planets by Earth's standards anymore than you can compare a piece of fruit to an oil tanker.

I am fairly open minded. I don't believe in God, capital G, because it assumes a single deity appropriate to the ones written of in the various existing religions. I believe they are logical entities crafted to represent what we cannot be but strive for; perfection. I do however accept the possibility of a god or gods existence because science and the paranormal are not mutually exclusive. Not every creation need have a designer but given we have no absolute truth the possibility remains. So essentially I reject the pantheons of the religions and while I lean towards science, I know that there may well be a divine being. I'm quite on the fence I guess. Sensible place to be for me given I have no religion but I possess spirituality and a sense of logic thus the answer, without absolute proof, is inconclusive.

Some people believe that asking for proof will persuade them to believe in any religious activity and in my mind, that makes no sense. Scientist can provide facts and maybe true opinions but they can’t provide a proof statement without experiencing the experience live or on documentation (which we can’t do). As you may see, the earth was created far a before bacterium (which was created 4 billion years ago) and with that statement, that shows that nothing is documented from billions of years ago.

Even before the Clements and the earth starting forming into modern day earth, it was still way before any of us had anything to prove it. Yes, maybe pictures or engraved writing but most of the pictographs or languages used were and are dead for some time now. I still believe in the scientific way more then believing in “let there by light” sense. So basically, no. There is not proof, but a good opinion can persuade some people into believing there belief or there god or Christ.

I have to call you on this one.

Microorganisms have been found on Mars, and we've yet to get below the surface. What if humans get to Mars, dig and find a skeleton? You see, we've just not observed life like us on the other planets of the solar system, most of the planets are uninhabitable, but some are and some moons are. There could be microorganisms on Venus even! Life is found in the weirdest places on Earth, so there could be life on any one of the planets that we just don't see.

Honestly, there are one hundred billion stars in our galaxy, with an average of five planets per star, and there are a hundred billion galaxies. We've just not seen life yet, just as we've not yet seen air but know it's there. :)

I belive in God. I love God, i am Chrisitan, and i think that we all, some way or another, beivle in God.

So you don't believe in a God, yet you think it is possible that their is a God. That is called a mixture of atheism and agnosticism. Which one are you because you can't be both.

Whether their are lifeforms on other planets or not is totally irrelevant to this discussion. Let's try to stay on topic. ::shifty:: :)-

Actually, no, they are not mutually exclusive nor is that an accurate depiction of my beliefs.

I'm what is known as an Agnostic Atheist (I prefer lazy Agnostic myself but meh). Basically I do not believe in God or Allah or any other named deity. I do however accept the possibility of a god or gods existing. This is no different to the fact I don't believe in Martians but do believe in the possibility of intelligent life existing somewhere.

And of course that doesn't cover my spiritualist, Buddhist and Pagan beliefs. That's the thing with me: my beliefs are not confined to a single religion or way of thinking, rather it is a mixture of beliefs derived from various religions and self-beliefs that match up with what I believe and experience. You can't fit my views into a box because I'm not spiritually monotonous.

Singh raised a valid point and I and others have discussed it. Such is the natural progression of discussions; it's wholly relevant to people who don't contain debates within the boundaries of the single question asked.

That would be Agnosticism.

I think not! :)-

The question asking "why arent the other planets inhabited?" has no relevance to:

But let's settle this in a PM if you'd like so that we don't turn this into a spam war, lol. ;)

I don't believe in God since I have seen no proof in one nor have I found a reason to live life according to something a book tells you about someone making everything..

I Believe in God :)

If you don't believe in that book (the Bible) then how can you believe in other books?

I believe in God... And if the big bang ever did happen then what made the people? ZING! :P

-IGNORANCE REMOVED-

I heard the big bang was Two little particals that in a one in a Bigabobobillionultramillionbaziilion chance, hit eachother. forming everything as we know it. I believe the science to and point, i think evolution is all real. but life.. someone made it.
-Nc

Nope, that wasn't it. Like I stated above, it was a really small and dense particle that exploded.

Big bang might be true and all, but if it is, it might just have been God's way of creating us.

I would like to say something before I argue my point:

I see the Bible and Christianity as a all-or-nothing religion. You either take the Bible as wholly and completely true, or you reject the entirety of it. There can be no middle ground; you cannot say "well, maybe God just used evolution/big bang/some other scientific theory to create people/the earth/whatever. God either created the world in 6 days or He didn't. The Bible is either God's Word on earth, or it isn't.

My personal belief? God created the world in 6 days, then He rested on the seventh.

You might ask, "now how can he be so sure of this God?" Well, good question, I commend you. I am certain because I know evolution to be false. Why? Scientists rush to say, "The human race is billions upon billions of years old!" Nope, wrong.

Know that although I use old dates, the basics would still hold true today.
The population of the world according to the Berlin census of 1922 was approximately 1.8 billion. The population of the human race would have to double itself 30.75 times to make this number. According to the chronology of Hales, based on the Septuagint text, 5077 years had passed since Noah's flood (in 1922), and 5177 years since Earth's ancestors numbered two (Noah and his wife). By dividing 5177 by 30.75, we get the number 168.3. This is the average number of years it would take the human race to double its numbers. It seems reasonable, does it not? As the human race grows in numbers, it would take longer to double its population, thus producing a number that is not 40 or 50 years, but greater.
Also, according to Hales, in 1922, 3 850 years had passed since Jacob married. Also, the numbers of Jews in 1922 were recorded as being about 15.4 million, resulting in a number of doublings equaling 23.8758, meaning an average doubling time of 161.251 years.
Examine these numbers closely. Do they not resemble each other? This may not be enough for some, however, so I shall present you the other side of the argument: evolution. Scientists admit that there were an original man and woman who gave birth to the entire human race. This alone is a hard blow to evolution, yet, I shall proceed with that in mind. Even if this original pair of humans existed but 100 000 years ago, that would require a doubling time of 1 612.51 years! Is this number not shocking? It is completely unrealistic!

That is a major reason why I believe in creation, and not evolution. If you would like to know many other reasons why evolution is false, please visit http://www.ldolphin.org/wmwilliams.html
This is an old text, and some arguments may not hold true. However, I accept many of them to be true.

Another reason why some people don't want to believe the Bible is the true word of God is because they blame human error. Well, let me tell you a few things about the Bible and how it was passed down. First of all, the Jews had special people set aside to copy the Old Testament onto new scrolls; scribes. Know that a scribe had to copy each letter one by one; no reading a word and copying the word, read one letter and copy one letter, read one letter and copy that letter. If a single mistake was made, the scroll was to be thrown away (likely burned) and they had to restart from the beginning. This was to prevent mistakes. Further, each time the scribe came to God's name, they had to go take a bath before they could write His name. Can you even imagine how many times it says the Lord's name in the Old Testament? Each and every time, before writing God's name, they had to take a bath. Very good deterrant to get it right, I'd say.


That is but a sample of why I believe what I believe.

If you look at the facts it contradicts that idea. But many think that; in fact I was pondering on this subject before and I myself thought of that before.

Yes I believe

I do believe him, but he's really real. I say something and he do it, it's amazing!

In my naivity all my life I have hidden my atheistic beliefs simply because I felt I would be persecuted for such. Now that I live in a much more tolerable society, I am "out of the closet" as one would say.

One of my problems with the belief in God is the margin of error. Technically the Western World is mostly atheistic on the subjects of Greco-Roman mythology, Native American mythologies, Germanic and Gothic mythologies; these mythologies as well as many others have now become tales specifically for entertainment rather than for actual dogma. What should make anyone else think that Yahweh is supposedly the one "true" deity when many others have been somehow "disproven" to be "untrue?"

Okay big bang is stupid. where did those two little particalls come from? another bang perhaps? and was there one before that to make the other bang? there is no logic in this nothing would have made the universe.
I believe in god and jesus christ.


Its funny the bible said that god is a creater, he loves to make things for his and our pleasure, their seems to be no end to the universe and NASA finds brand new things all the timethings that are not a billion years old, maybe they keep finding new things is because god is still making things.

What about evalution? why did the apes and other animals stop evolving personally if I was a gorrilla I would rather be human, hey why cant we evolve? is it just not time?
How did evalution start what where the first creatures of the earth where there always males and females or where the both? if somone can answer these quistions then I would give you all my money and my computor but you have to answer every single one. no "I dont knows, Maybe. its possible, I'm not certain, or I'm not a scientist." if you can do it without using any of that I will burn my bible.

There is nothing wrong with the Big Bang Theory. It was merely the start of the universe. Nothing more nothing less. The Big Bang actually proves the existence of a deity if you use Causality. Because the universe could not have caused itself, there must have been a deity to cause the universe (which is who we call God).

There is an end to the universe as it is impossible for anything physical to be infinite. Infinity is conceptual.

The question isn't "why can't we evolve?" Because people think we can evolve and they think we are. Darwin states that evolution happens small and subtly.

You might want to read up on the Big Bang; it wasn't simply a magical explosion, rather it's a cosmological model that refers to universal expansion ignited by super-heating. The very early universe, as we call it, isn't believed to have been mere nothingness. What existed is poorly understood for obvious reasons but it's speculated that while the existing universe didn't exist, certainly something was there which then super-heated and began to expand. Wikipedia's Timeline of the Big Bang better explains the various theories.

It's called natural selection, a random process through which some but not all experience evolution. While an entire species is likely to go through the same microevolution, not all will experience macroevolution. If you think about it, there is an exceptional number of primate species in the world which share a common ancestor with the Homo sapiens. Why then are there not two primate species, humans and apes? Because at some time or another they underwent different mutations for different reasons, much of which is connected with adaptation and survival. For the same reason, many species have become extinct naturally because they weren't a part of this random selection; they didn't adapt and thus they died out. How exactly this process occurs is difficult to determine scientifically because it's rather like trying to find out who authored an anonymous book; there is a reason [author] but we don't know what [who] it is and chances are we never will.

Evolution arguably began when life was created though we can date it to the first organisms. The first organism to inhabit the Earth were the prokaryotes which, through symbiosis, would evolve into the eukaryotes. Prokaryotes continue to exist today and are a deeply evolved form of their primogenitors. Some evidence suggests this could have been anything up to 3 billion years ago, though you can't really determine that to be the starting point of evolution given that prokaryotes underwent their own macroevolution throughout history and very likely did long before they evolved into eukaryotes. I'm not sure what you mean by your gender question. Is this related to Animalia or all living things? The most basic lifeforms, including the first organisms, don't have genders because they're bacteria. Because asexual reproduction generally only occurs within single-celled organisms, it's likely the first multi-celled organisms (i.e. primordial animalia) had both genders in order to reproduce.

Appealing to ignorance? Don't even attempt to assert that science surveys pure, indisputable fact because that is not even remotely close to the very premise of science. "Maybe, it's possible" and "I'm not certain" are all perfectly valid responses because there is much beyond the scope of mortal eyes at this moment in time, thus science does make full use of its available evidence to hypothesise the most probable explanation however it does not assert it to be absolute truth. Just because we don't have the exact, precise answers to things that pre-date our very existence doesn't mean it disproves a theory that has stood the test of time. Anyone can conjure up a mystical entity and claim something divine, beyond our understanding, did all this; it requires neither effort nor understanding of the universe, indeed it plays on the idea of ignorance and uses "faith" as the ultimate answer to everything, believing in something. requiring nothing more than a willingness to accept what one's told is true. The point of scientific research is, with empiricism as its backbone, it attempts to get those answers using everything available to us. It doesn't mean we will, because so much isn't accessible to us, but it tries.

The irony of it all is, if I turned around and asked you for evidence of God you could simply play on the enigmatic nature of a deity and His omnipotence as a reasonable enough form of evidence (or rather an explanation) of His existence. Why? Because God is enshrined within faith, the premise that evidence isn't needed, just the belief. Even with so much still unknown and beyond our capabilities for finding and understanding, the theories [read: law] of evolution and the Big Bang are far more logical than some conjured deity. Not because of plausibility or probability but because the former both have empirical evidence supporting them, the latter merely has deep-rooted faith that began as a primitive method for explaining all that we didn't know, inspiring people and bringing some form of hope to comfort our base fears.

Yaa I know all about the big bang :) I was going to be a scientist so I know all about it.

Science is an umbrella term for the various schools of science, and scientist is a rather generic term - what field were you thinking of going into? But even so, I would have to wonder how someone who was "going to be" (were you studying or merely contemplating?) a scientist with some implication of having studied/looked into the Big Bang theories would find there being little logic behind them. No offence, but for someone who was considering going into science you rather easily dismissed centuries of research and work with some very basic questions that don't even begin to take into account the complexity of the subject.

Of course, if it conflicts with your religious beliefs I can understand, I just find it odd that someone alleging to have considered a field based around empirical research would be so quick to shoot down these theories and scientific laws. ::unsure::

If you know all about it, then why do you still doubt it?

Because I know differently, I'm Christian.

There is nothing atheistic about the Big Bang Theory.

The Universe is expanding and that is a fact. So if you reverse the effect it all comes down to one point in which there was a "bang" which is totally misleading as the word bang is a sound, but it means simply the start of the universe. There is nothing Atheistic to the start of the universe. In fact when the Bible states that God created the Heavens and the Earth that even is described as the Big Bang.

I beeave in god because life couldnt have just appeared out of no where. I also beleave that adam and eve where the first people to walk the earth as well.

To believe that life cannot appear from nothing is totally contradicting God. Life isn't infinite. God created life out of nothing.