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Except for the nazis. They thought murder was ok. Their society had no issue with murder.
Murder of outsiders, yes. Murder of fellow Germans, no.
In group / out group morality.
Seriously, the roots of morality have been discussed over and over. Theists just ignore it, which ironically for the Abrahamic religions means they are inadvertently admitting their god is an immoral monster.
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Originally Posted by BaptistFundie
Gotta say. I wasn't expecting anyone to actually attempt to justify Nazis.
Read . more . slowly . the . next . time. It . helps . comprehension.
The question I have is...why are you guy so hell-bent on seeing the ark fail? Why does it irritate you so much?
Who is hell bent? I am just enjoying the show.
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Originally Posted by BaptistFundie
Don't answer back that you feel bad for the poor taxpayers! Because our government has a looooooong history of making stupid investments and blowing money. If this was simply that, why aren't you mad about all the other stupid investments?
No...there is just something about this that really sets you guys off. It's really kind of interesting to watch the melt-downs.
Because the government is not a Christian organization with alleged superior morals.
Whoopdy-doo. So what if some location or site connected with the Bible slacks off in attendance. And this is in some obscure town, in a relatively poor state near the bottom for tourism anyway (Kentucky).
For comparison sake, the steakhouse down the street also might start seeing less business. It doesn't mean steak and steakhouses are worthless and meaningless. It might just mean that that particular entity isn't up to par, and/or isn't meeting expectations. And that can happen even in a high-volume area.
Religion-haters here are obviously so desperate that they are reduced to this pettiness; grasping at straws. You guys are only making yourselves look bad; pathetic and desperate.
A Christians with alleged superior morality is screwing people over, yet we are the bad guys for pointing this out?
You people are only making yourselves look bad; pathetic and desperate.
Yeah ok, so we should only trust atheist sources like the friendly atheist? lol I would be shocked if any atheist can surrender their pride and admit that this attraction actually was a great investment for the region.
Great? That is the problem. A great investment for Ham, yes. For the region, not so much.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
It could generate a billion dollars in the local economy and your side would still trash it.
a) Having to use the same "tube" to both breathe and eat, resulting in the choking deaths of untold thousands if not millions of people over the years -- the majority of them children and infants.
b) An inefficient digestive system that uses only a tiny fraction of the food we consume, causing us the need to "take a dump" -- which is little more than a brown ball of fatal bacteria which, in and of itself, has caused more deaths by disease than all the wars ever fought by humanity combined.
c) An optic nerve that hangs right down the center of our vision -- because God apparently had NO idea how to create an eyeball without a lot of complicated rods and cones, thus causing a blind spot when we look directly forward. This is why people are always "catching things out of the corner of their eye." We actually see better peripherally. If we try to look directly at anything, we lose a bit of clarity thanks to that optic nerve.
d) The inability to regenerate teeth -- despite Judaism and Christianity being both desert religions. This is important considering how many mummies have been found with extreme abscesses that would have been exceedingly painful while the person was still alive. The poor condition of Egyptian teeth was caused by sand getting into everything, including food -- and the sand acted like an abrasive that very quickly wore away the enamel of their teeth causing a lot of premature tooth decay. You'd think knowing that dentistry wouldn't take off for another 4,000 years, God would have been more merciful in that department.
e) How about a sex drive that never ever turns off? Women lose a lot of it after menopause, but for men, the overwhelming need to stick their you-know-whats into you-know-where never stops. Is it any wonder then why so many marriages result in the husband finding a younger woman with whom to have sex?
Most animals have rutting periods where they are "in heat." Only during that time are their sex drives active. But not only is the human need for sex a constant, non-stop issue, the push to have sex is such a burning, biological imperative that people have given up everything they were, are, or ever would have been just for a couple of seconds of orgasm. Look how many people have been destroyed by sex scandals.
So .. instead of God doing the smart thing and making us far less horny all the time, he created us extra horny with an inescapable desire for sex whilst simultaneously sending us literally HUNDREDS of rules regarding when to have sex, who with, in what way, for how long, the rituals that go with it -- and this means hundreds more rules regarding marriage. NONE of which would even be necessary if God had simply designed our sex drive with a bit more intelligence and A LOT more foresight. Didn't God know that we have the potential to literally overpopulate ourselves into extinction?
Well, I could give example after example after example of why it is inconceivable to me that such a flawed body as our own is the pinnacle of God's creative ability. Some parts of our design are so stupid it ends up being comical -- like farts, for instance. God couldn't figure out a way for humans to release excess gas in a much quieter and less stenchy way than big rips that can rattle the rafters and stink up a room so badly that everyone runs for the door?
If we are God's masterwork, then God must lack imagination. We are far more similar to animals than we are different. It doesn't take any sort of genius to see that. We don't even act all that different from them. We just complicate things like mating with complex rules, expectations, and entitlements that animals don't have. We even sound like chimps when we laugh, scream, and make other noises beyond actual language. This delusion that we're special, that we are somehow "above" the natural order of things is dangerous -- and one reason why some Christians are in a deep state of denial over climate change. We'll see just how "special" we are when we're killing each other by the millions over the last few drops of clean, drinkable water ... if the climate change scenario does its worst.
The argument of poor design is a highly flawed argument especially in the context of Christianity.
For one thing, you can't legitimately claim poor design unless you have a universal level of knowledge akin to God and can come up with a better design that doesn't cause other problems. Who knows, a design with separate tubes may cause even worse problem than a risk of choking. Our current system works pretty well considering how many times a day human beings swallow and out of millions and millions of people times the number of times of swallowing, only an average of 5K die a year from choking. Your criticism on this point ignores the many mechanism that run on auto pilot which ensures that food goes down our tube as a smooth mush.
Another problem is humans are often responsible for their own demise. It is silly to claim design flaw because the human body isn't built to combat every one of these situations. For example, if someone crams too much food in the their mouth and swallows without fully chewing then it's their fault that they choked, not a design flaw. If someone swallows a lego brick and it gets stuck in their throat, that's their stupid fault. It's not a design flaw that the body wasn't made to process lego bricks.
As for defecation, how do you know that another design would not cause more problems? The body doesn't absorb a lot of what we eat because we eat a lot of crap that our designed bodies were never intended to digest like processed foods and massive amounts of carbs and sugars. If you designed the body to fully digest everything then what would happen is someone swallowed a penny? Thankfully, wwith our current system, it passes through and completely out the body. For every design flaw you present, I can counter with examples that show a foreknowledge and remarkable design. Like how our stomach has acid that can eat through wood yet causes no harm to our tissues. Or how we can house miles and miles of nerve wires in such a small space. OTOH, your eye example demands a solution for a problem that doesn't really exist. With both eyes working together, we don't have problems with blind spots.
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As to the blind spot Butler speaks of, your average human with two good eyes doesn’t have to worry about a blind spot since they are in different places in each eye. Each eye covers the blind spot of the other eye, so the field of vision is unhindered. Moreover, the blind spot is in reality so small as to be unnoticeable even when you put your hand over one eye. There are simple tests you can do to find your blind spots. But unless you are specifically “looking” for them, you most likely won’t find them. So the blind-spot argument holds little weight, and is fully accounted for in vertebrates, all of whom normally have two eyes.
As for sex drive, to me, that is one of the greatest signs of creativity. God designed intimacy so couples could experience a deepening bond together. He created the sex drive and made it very pleasurable so couples would want to bond in this fashion.
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Originally Posted by Shirina
This is only because our lives are so incredibly complex compared to that of an animal that we have far more variables impacting our formative years. We are who we are largely due to our life experiences, not because we were "created" with some sort of computer program that forces us to behave a certain way or that our personalities are engraved in stone even as infants. Even so, genetics play the part of your magic. All of what you're talking about is determined by the genes you have -- not by some god individually infusing each human with a unique personality. Are we Cabbage Patch dolls come to life? I can just see the reaction of some kid getting me for Christmas. "Mom! *whaaah!* You bought the atheist doll! It's going to eat my puppy!"
I am genetically nearly identical to my father. Yet we couldn't be more different. He has an incredible mechanical mind, able to fix nearly anything. OTOH, I'm lucky if I can hammer a nail straight. But I am musically talented. He can't carry a tune. Genetics can not fully explain how people get certain talents and abilities. Another thing that puzzles me is that if evolution is true, why so many variations of only the human species? Take a single body part like the human nose and notice just how many different sizes and shapes of noses are out there. I don't see nearly that type of variety in any other animal.
Life experiences could explain why one person finds a certain joke funny and another one does not, but it can't explain why everyone has a different laughter sound.
Again I'll let Shirina answer herself, but already you are up the creek. Poor design is there because we can think how we could design it better ourselves. Our back problems come from a four -legged skeleton that evolved to be upright. We can see poor design in Animals, too. The Giraffe's neck evolved, taking a blood vessel (I believe - I'll look it up (1) in an absurd and unnecessary loop that would never be there if a god had made it that way.
Argument from different personality is a non -starter, too. You may not be able to understand where personality comes from, but others can. My character comes from my parents. My mother was a briliiant scholar. My father was a cheery humourist. Unfortunately I inherited my father's scholarship and my mothers' ability to be likeable.
Just because You can't explain it Jeff, doesn't mean that nobody else can, and it never means "God mustha dunnit" Ever.
(1)In biological homology, the laryngeal nerve can be spotted in a wide variety of animals, from fish to mammals. The structures around the nerve and the nerve itself are homologous to each other and so evolutionary theory postulates that animals evolve from others by distortions and changes in these structures. In fish, considered to be more evolutionarily primitive, the nerve heads straight from the brain, down to the larynx. However, in mammals, the structure of the head and development of the neck from fish-like organisms cause the recurrent laryngeal nerve to become "trapped" under the aortic arch in the thorax. Given a slow and gradual evolution from the biology of a fish to the biology of a mammal, there is no way for the nerve to magically jump from one side of the aortic arch to the other. And so, in mammals the nerve controlling the larynx first delves deep into the chest cavity and then finally up to the larynx.
This considerable detour is consistent with how embryological development entwines with evolution, but less consistent with the idea that organisms were made as they appear to day, individually by an intelligent designer. (Rational Wiki)
The article goes on to say that in Giraffes, this detour of the nerve becomes which absurd, but evolution produced a perfectly absurd design that a god simply would not have done if the giraffe had been made in one go. You could of course play the "God had his reasons for that" card, but really is that a valid argument? It is no more than waving away evidence that doesn't fit your Faith.
the Giraffe -neck has been quite a battleground between Creationists and evolutionists, notably in trying to push Irreducible Complexity. As well as a discredited Explanation being ascribed to Darwin (2) but is actually Lamarkian. But of course incremental changes in functioning organs put paid to I/C and it went down at Dover, forever.
(2) as though not being right every time would invalidate everything he wrote - but then, Bible apologists think in terms of a one -shot win, as one shot hitting them does destroy their entire Faith -case. Which is why they deny Everything, and can NEVER admit to being wrong about doctrine. Though they can sneak back a month later (even under a different name) saying something else and actibnglike it was what they'd always said. But then, doesn't Christianity at least always do this?
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 09-27-2018 at 08:38 AM..
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