Science and Relgion - thoughts?

Religion is a way to control what people think. A way to control what they do, and recently, who they might vote for.

Ofcourse, you can believe in any god without following that god or gods' religion. Its called spirituality.

I'm an apathetic agnostic humanist. I choose to believe in humans and human nature. That some of us will do bad, while there is a counter balance of people that will do good. And the apathetic agnostic, I don't know if a god or gods exist, and it doesn't really matter to me. "I am a god unto myself, so I will decided what is best for myself"

And the holy books are just fables to show a person how best to live. If you follow that anyway.

Your friend is in a long line of Christian apologists who try to reconcile the Bible with the past 600 years or so of scientific findings. His explanation presupposes that God had something to do with writing the Bible.

There is an alternative and much more likely explanation that is supported by all the known scholarship on the Bible's origins -- it was written over 2000 years ago by many people over the course of hundreds of years, and these people had a pre-scientific understanding of the world. God had nothing to do with it.

If God was a halfway decent sort of an author he would have come up with something more plausible and better written than the creation myth. He might have mentioned that the earth was round, not the center of the universe and was billions of years old. The creation myth is not just a simplified version of the truth -- it is wildly misleading and nowhere near the truth.

I think its perfectly fair to judge people for their beleif systems. For instance, what you say of many Christians is right - they do lay blame as you say. However, the facts do not support them. Pedophilia, for instance, is almost exclusivly carried out by heterosexuals, and most frequently by family members. Simple statistics. Atheists have been repsonsible for most of the moral advances on which modern society relies, including the human rights movement. So successful have these life affirming ideologies been that Christians often lie to try to claim false credit for them. Simple history. And research has shown that belief in god itself is sufficient to lead people to do great evil - wars and so on. Its not that they make it an excuse - it is the cause. Taking a non-religious example - do you think every German in 1940 was an evil, genocidal maniac? If so, how come those SAME people built an ultra pro human rights society and an ideology of peace post 1945. Reason: they were poisoned by an idea, and that idea was no different to any belief in god (incidentally, Hitler was a practising Christian who claimed in Mein Kampf to be completing Jesus work on Earth).

Theistic Evolution.

While i believe that naturally us humans have evolved a touch from thousands of years, I don't believe we came from another species and etc. all the way down to we started off as non-living matter.

God lets us know that he created Adam and Eve (humans) in his image and I don't think he first created us as any other kind of species (or animals) but humans. =)

God Bless

That would be apologetic. Basically, you're explaining away Biblical discrepancies.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for updating dogma to suit new and current information, just try to explain that to the fundimentalists who insist on being stuck in the past.

It is a desperate attempt to keep the religion "alive" for lack of a better term.

Religion is being blinded by the light of science and doing what it can to explain itself as science bears down upon it.

I don't think so. evolution was a very basic concept to understand

"a fish was changed into a salamander. a salamander into a gila monster. a gila into a dinosaur. a dinosaur into a small lizard. a lizard into a rat. a rat to a pssom. possom to primate. lemur to monkey. monkey to ape. ape to man"

once you say "God did it", there's your evolutionary track. note, I just changed it because that's the simplest and closest creatures I know that fit the description. don't you think Noah could've understood the above description?

it makes less sense to say "God used evolution" to me, cuz of that reason. Moses would've been able to understand the "fish to man concept".

That's one theory. I don't ascribe to it, but I've heard it and I'm not convinced that it was likely. However, I'm still open to the topic.

How can you not have faith? Look around you