Posted on 08/01/2006 12:42:58 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
"Yes, but then we're left with the question of why those levels of killing did not go on in lands that did embrace worship of a Creator."
There's a problem with that. Consider the Islamic countries. They certainly worship a creator, yet are quite warlike and destructive.
I fear that the mere belief in deities does not preclude a society from being warlike or even genocidal.
I will give you another: me.
Well, I served in the military, too, but was never in combat, so I can't claim myself as an example. I did have dogtags that said "Atheist", though.
To quote the wise Calvin:
"Sometimes I think the most sure sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is the fact that it hasn't tried to contact us yet."
I still have mine. And I did have to jump into a foxhole once during combat (I hate artillery, at least on the receiving end), so I qualify.
Really? A majority of Stalin's victims were either starved to death or shot, not killed via bombs or artillery.
If you think one example disproves the statement, you're not understanding it. The point of that saying is not that THERE ARE NEVER ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES EVER EVER. "There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an absolute statement; it's hyperbole to make a point.
Except when one man's truth is another man's heresy!
If there is only one "truth", why so many schims, sects, denominations, cults?
The old way was better--the rain god, the sun god, fertility gods, etc.--at least you can see whether it rains or not. The sun god is pretty reliable.
Yes and no. They have been a distinct groups for that long, in fact longer, out to some 400 million years. And most all would have been outwardly recognizable as "sharks" to the average observer. Yet "unchanged" seems a totally inappropriate word to apply to sharks. Within the broad paradigm of "sharkiness" they've proven highly adaptable and variable.
In modern sharks you have everything from the "normal" mid water predators (some of which must remain constantly moving to "breathe"), to lugubrious bottom feeders like the nurse shark, to huge behemoths like the "whale shark" that filter feed on plankton at the surface like baleen whales. There's similar diversity, with the occasional "odd ball," among ancient sharks. (IIRC there are well over 2,000 species of fossil sharks. Compare to well under 1,000 species among all dinosaurs.)
Please do.
Yes, but you're dodging the issue raised, which is that those with Atheism as their official religion are the worst, by an order of magnitude by far, when it comes to murder.
Because of the vast size of the galaxy it's entirely possible for life to be common in terms of absolute numbers, but yet to be so thinly dispersed in space that we are too far away from the nearest neighbor to readily contact or detect it.
Also possible that life as such is common, but the evolution of intelligence (and technological civilization) is rare.
Even if intelligence and civilization is common, it's possible that interstellar travel is a practical impossibility, or too costly to be a desirable activity. Communication by radio or other electromagnetic signal might also be too expensive (if you want to make the signal detectable over really long distances). Even if this is not so it's possible that civilizations might decide, once they have the ability to broadcast strong signals ubiquitously, that it might not be such a good idea to betray their location to unknown others.
"A majority of Stalin's victims were either starved to death or shot, not killed via bombs or artillery."
And most victims of the Khmer Rouge were killed in even lower-tech ways (clubbing or hacking to death) to save ammunition.
It isn't just "creationists" who make these estimates. Physicists and cosmologists think that tiny changes in a number of fundamental physical constants (like the charge of the electron, etc.) would have resulted a universe in which life of any kind would be impossible.
(The Truth is the truth and there is no other Truth.)
>Except when one man's truth is another man's heresy!<
God gave man free will. You make your choices and you earn the consequences.
Romans 1:21-23
For although they knew God they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, and their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
That goes to population. There weren't 20 million expendable people in one geographic location under anyone's control at that time. I doubt there were many more than 20 million people in all of Europe at the time of Charlemagne.
The only animal that can have faith or needs faith is one primate..
I remember when I used to be a primate back before I was born again..
Even then God was a question I accepted or rejected by faith..
Faith is an expressly human trait.. and its true those that have faith in nothing will/can beleive anything.. Consider Tom Cruise..
Have you read any of Gerald Schroeder's stuff, or Francis Collins'?
Schroeder is a nuclear physician; lives in Israel. Came to believe in God after years of scientific atheism. Collins is interesting. He headed Int'l Human Genome project and after working on that came to believe in God also (the 3.1 billion did it for him).
Just an FYI. I think I recall that you are an atheist or agnostic. I think what you said is interesting; that apologetics don't constitute evidence, but if you think logically about what comprises evidence, most of what is used as evidence in apologetics, indeed, is legitimate evidence. Just like in a court of law, not all evidence is forensic.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.