I was recently told by a Catholic that Lutherans "are a lot like Catholics."

Topic for Religious Debate: is this as dumb a statement as I think it is?

No.

I lived in Wisconsin for 4 years. They're pretty much the same animal.

Truer words have never been spoken (or written).

The kittens thank you, SD. They thank you.

Actually I'd love to hear who else you think fits this criteria? Honestly, who else fulfills those items, and within their first 100 posts to boot?

These threads never have a happy ending.

I don't normally contribute to religous debates on internet forums, and probably shouldn't here either, but jeez, I spent the last hour reading this entire thread (for some unknown reason), so I might as well...

As was said pages and pages ago, there is a massive gulf between the believers and non-believers that will never be bridged in conversations like this. It's that simple. Please people, think of the potential RSI injuries and give it a rest.

Secondly, the banning and the like, well, I come to this message board for random & zany threads centering on video game, sports and other random (hopefully not religious or political) topics. Anything that increases those threads and decreases ones like this gets my vote.

Go Cavs!

I think there is plenty of time in life for both sex AND football.

That means she's read every post history that he's read the post history of, too! "Milhouse, we're living in the age of cooties! I can't believe the risk you're running"

(EDITED for formatting)

SI

I actually thought she was relatively well behaved, well improved at least. If you had just banned her when you suspended or rather re-suspended her, I I'd not had any problem with it. I think she was just strongly advocating her position in this thread.

I'm apparently finicky. Cause I thought you should have apologized to her for banning and then just suspending her before you lifted the suspension....Then I'm reasonably happy that you boxed her. Now I'm disappointed because you've banned her, when compared to her previous actions, she was on relativley good behavior. I do tend to agree with your last sentence there, but still would rather err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion.

I certainly don't relish your position as moderator here.

I also consider FN's likely departure a loss as well. He is inflamatory, but he is a contributor here as well.

Depends on how irreverant you want to be. As a Lutheran, I say the difference is that they get a few more sacraments, are slightly more uptight, and we make jokes about them but they don't make jokes about us (that I know of). From what I've seen Lutheranism, particularly the more conservative branch (LCMS) is as close to Catholics as Protestants get. Catholics probably feel a bit differently- they're probably still bitter about the whole nailing up of theses thing and split in the church ;)


*snicker*

SI

Wow at this thread. I rarely if ever go into political and/or religious threads here (only linked into this one from SkyDog's other post) and am absolutely astounded by the lack of reason in some people on this board.

as for my own opinions:

I can't fully trust nor fully respect those with devout religious beliefs because, to me, it reveals a distrust in one's own moral compass. As for someone who believes God would advocate the hurricane or the holocaust (!), fuck that--I don't worship murderous tyrants of any stripe, even if you capitalize their pronouns.

If this is what counts as evidence, what is the evidence for the proposition "we need personal first hand verifiable examples" to believe something to be true? It would seem that there are a lot of things we believe without personal first hand verifiable examples. I'm trying to understand this 'lack of evidence' argument from the atheist/agnostic perspective.

I didn't read much of this thread, but now that FN's SO is banned, I just hope some good can come out of this thread...like FN re-joining me over at the Child Molester thread. I posted like 5 or 6 articles yesterday and received hardly any comments. It's lonely over there.

Come back, FN, come back! Google News Alert beckons you!

Well, that would be a good start, since that's what you rely on in every other aspect of life, why should there be a special category for supernatural claims? Why should they not be held up to the same standard? There should be no cognitive disconnect.

As for facts that I don't know about (eg, some scientist telling me about the surface of Mars/Jupiter), I trust scientists because they put their theories out there, publish them in journals for peer review, and things are tested time and time again, by a wide range of people. Science is self-correcting and based on observation and the logical conclusions that follow.

Let's say a the earth passed through a trail of a comet and everyone on earth suffered from amnesia. We forgot everything. As we started to rebuild our minds, I am sure we would still have science and religion, but our science text books would eventually look quite the same; because people would observe the same phenomena and base logical conclusions on them. Our, bibles, however would probably look a bit different because religious thought contains no such self-correcting method it would just be a matter of chance of what type of stories we would come up with and what early manuscripts would be accepted as gospel.

Here's a good piece by Carl Sagan on this very topic.

The Dragon In My Garage
by
Carl Sagan


"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage" Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility.

Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative-- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons--to say nothing about invisible ones--you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages--but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

I give this thread 5 stars.

I said it mainly to tease Daddy Torgo.

But to clarify, the person in question said it to me as if this were a surprising new fact. I was raised Lutheran as well, and found it amusing since (a) most everything Lutheran derived from Catholic roots; and (b) it's ironic to make such a statement, given that little thing called the Reformation. ;)

So you're suggesting that we rely on empirically verifiable sense data in every other aspect of life to make decisions and that this is the evidence we use to act in the world. Does this test apply to the foundation of science itself? How is the idea that 'we need evidence from our senses' evident to our senses? Can we walk around in the world and find physical, scientifically verifiable proof that 'we need evidence from our senses in order for something to be true'? It would seem that the answer would be something like 'that's just the way things are.'

Sagan asks us to test assertions through a conceivable experiment. What scientific experiments have been performed to test the assertion that 'we need scientific, physical verifiable evidence to to know if something is true'? Does Sagan reference any?

Edit: Removed because I should really read the rest of threads before posting in them.

Demon Haunted World was such an excellent book. Thanks for posting that, HB!

I too like to discuss things like this - I hate how the ineveitable flamefest occurs but my goal is to have a discussion, to converse with an opposing viewpoint and not to try and beat people who don't agree with me over the head with a Bible.

The thing is Jim that we don't know how the world started. There is no proven fact - you have beliefs just like me - you just believe in different things. I believe that God created the world, I assume you believe in a scientific explanation. You can say that organized religion seems like a manipulative system but I can say the same for science. No scientist can prove that the world began with a big bang just as no religious person can prove that God created the world.


But there has to be an answer doesn't there? When I put my faith in God that there is a reason some event happens that I don't understand I believe there is a reason for it - just one I am not meant to know.

Since you didn't answer one thing I wanted you to I will ask again. Why do some children in the same situation as your son not survive? There's not some doctors who always save the child and some doctors who never do. Why is the doctor skilled enough to save one child and yet not another under the same conditions?

Thankfully your son survived and I'm very glad he did but what if he wouldn't have. How would you have come to grips with that? Would you have blamed the doctor for being unskilled or wondered if you and your wife were cursed with bad luck? Could you go through life being ok with saying "I don't know"? If in my world God is allowing the death of an innocent child then who or what is allowing it in your world while others are able to live through the exact same situation?

I guess I just find myself in the same struggle trying to look at things from the other side - what factor can cause one child to live and one to die when they suffer from the exact same problem and are treated by the same doctor and is that factor something that cannot be explained? Isn't believing in luck or karma the same as believing in a supreme being? Its like the age old intangibles question - sports fans believe they are there but they can't be measured so are you foolish to think that sports outcomes are determined by more than simply the physical abilities of the players on the field? Is it foolish to think that the life or death of a child in that situation is determined by something more than the physical ability of a doctor or scientist?


First, I'm very sorry for your brother-in-law and all your family at the loss - I can only imagine how devastating that must have been for your entire family.

But you mentioned that he didn't "beat the odds". Religious faith is not based on probability whereas science and math are. So what are the odds of surviving? How can you possibly calculate such a thing and does the fact that with the enormous complexity of the human system you could never calculate the true odds of such a thing give you any unrest? When I play poker I know I have a A:B chance of catching the card that will win the hand. Those odds can be calculated because I know how many possible cards could come up so when I play poker I don't "pray" or "have faith" that my card is going to come up - I play the odds. But in a situation like Noah's I don't need to calculate anything - all I can do is trust that God has a plan and that whatever the result it was the way it was meant to be - that gives me peace.

I respect your stance and opinions as I hope you respect my beliefs. My questions are because I'm curious as to how someone else sees things. I also know that for someone who isn't religious or doesn't believe in religion its very difficult to understand how someone could place so much trust in something they never will see and can never scientifically prove exists but if you did understand that then you would probably be religious.

i'm gonna stop you right there, before i read further. science *has* proven many things, and has shown how various wonders are possible. religion hasn't. science is black and white, religion lies in the grey matter of "sometimes God works in mysterious ways", that all too popular brush that's used to make broad strokes to paint over lack of evidence or compelling arguements.

think of it this way:

Michael Jordan scored 63 points in one game once (i believe it was against the Celtics in a playoff game). over the course of his career, he's had many 40+ scoring games, including 55 points against the Knicks one time. he's a proven explosive scorer. you're a fan of Vlade Divac, one-time Lakers and Kings center, who over the course of his career has generally topped off at the 20 points per game range.

someone tells us that either Jordan or Divac scored 100 points in one game in a game that wasn't ever witnessed by anyone - no one attended the game and it wasn't televised. based on Jordan's track record if you were to tell me he was the one who scored 100 points i would believe you. he's proven himself to be a highly potent scorer. you believing Divac could have scored the 100 points requires a lot of faith. he doesn't have a history of being that kind of player, so yes, while it's *possible* he could have scored 100 points it's so highly unlikely that it's foolish for you to entertain such notions.

this is the difference between science and religion. when religion, like science, can use hard facts and evidence to prove its claims i'll probably be more religious.

Arguably, every scientific experiment that's ever been done confirms the assertion that science needs to be based on empirically verifiable data.

The modern scientific method didn't come about because some guy came up with it one day and everyone took his word for it. The scientific way of doing things evolved out of countless early observations and experiments. Hypotheses that did not stand up to testing were weeded out - this is what I meant about science being self-correcting.

The implied hypothesis "I do not need to base my scientific experiments on empirically verifiable data" would not have stood up to scrutiny because experiments based on other kinds of "data" would not have had cohesive results and could not have been repeated by other scientists.

For example, pretend we're both ancient scientists testing a cure for a disease. You decide to base your experiments on observations you have made about this disease in the past, and I base mine on revelations from my dreams. Whose patient is more likely to die? And thus whose method is more likely to be repeated by other scientists?

Thousands of years of human curiosity and its consequences have honed and perfected the scientific method to be the way it is now; there is no one experiment you can point to to "prove" it. Very few ideas in science work on the "smoking gun" principle - instead they rely on a preponderance of the evidence. And I guess sometimes that evidence is so well-established and overwhelming that it appears to be "just the way things are".

I didn't say that nothing has been scientifically proven - I said it can be used to manipulate people the same way religion can.

Tell me what is black and white about how the world was created? Tell me what is concrete black and white proof that man evolved from ape? Science has its theories about those things as religion has its beliefs and those who believe in religion tend to believe God created the world and man - those who don't believe in religion I would imagine lean towards the big bang and man came from ape theories. Either way the followers of each group are basing their beliefs on what others say happened without any proof.

Ok. Here's my bit on evolution. The sentence in bold is ricockulous. Yes, evolution is a theory, but this whole debate (evolutionary theory versus intelligent design/creationism) is predicated upon scientific illiteracy.

“Theory” when used by scientists means something very different than when it is used in casual conversation. People hear that evolution is a theory and they think it means “conjecture” or “guess. This is simply not true.

A scientific theory is an established paradigm that explains the available data and offers predictions that can be tested. (By this definition, “intelligent design” is not even a theory.) Theories can develop and change to incorporate newly uncovered data, (like the theory of dark matter) but they will always be theories - there is no further advancement. It’s not like they are just failed or immature facts.

Do you know what else is a theory ? Gravity. That things fall when we drop them is a fact – but the explanation of the force behind it is a theory . Let’s say I believed that invisible gnomes held everything to the ground with invisible strings, and I wanted to challenge the “theory” of gravity that says massive bodies exert gravitational force on each other. Should I be able to peddle this crap on schoolchildren, with recourse to the disingenuous argument that gravity is “just a theory”?

Or take the atomic theory of matter. Could I successfully argue that for a long time people believed that everything was made of the 4 essential elements, and after all no one’s ever seen an atom, so let’s take it out of textbooks?

It’s so infuriating to see so many people arguing from a position of such profound ignorance. People rely on scientific theories every day – they put their lives in their hands. Would you fly on an airplane that had been designed by an engineer with an “alternative” theory of gravity, or who had a “different understanding” than the theory of aerodynamics?? Would you take a medicine that had been formulated by someone who dismissed the germ theory of disease as “just a theory”?

Yet the same people who see how ridiculous the foregoing is think that evolution can be cynically challenged with vague pseudoscientific bullshit, with no consequences. Fer fuck’s sake. Evolution is not just some footnote in a ninth grade textbook – it’s the grand unifying theory of biology. It can explain phenomena and make accurate predictions in diverse fields like biology, sociology, behavior, pathology, etc. And nothing in biology makes sense without it.

If we as a people had a resonable grasp of the most basic principles of science, this would not even be a public debate. Science is a brutal competition of ideas, not a tea party. You don't just get to believe whatever makes you feel good. If you want to believe that you were magically poofed into existence by some omnipotent being, I have no problem with that. But it's not science and it never will be science.

I think the most obvious thing is that you're never going to have the exact same situation. Every instance of a baby not breathing at birth is going to be different. There are thousands of variables that could not possibly all be exactly the same in multiple situations. Thus my answer would be that it is those differences that lead to a life saved in one instance and a life lost in another.

because 1+1=2 is fact. there is no manipulation involved with that. Jesus walking on water, ehhhh...now that's a different story.

my statement is this - given the track record of sciene (has been able to make statements and hypothesis' and prove them true or false), and that of religion (relies not on facts, but faith, and hasn't proven any claim at any time), if i were to hear a theory on something regarding how the universe was started i'm going to believe what science says because it's currently a more consistently credible source. you don't have to believe in 2+2=4, it's there where you like it or not. faith gets checked at the door.

your arguement is this: nevermind all the things that science has proven and discovered, because we can never really know (in our lifetime) how the universe started the theories of science are as likely as the theories of religion.

Perhaps the invisible gnomes also had magic powers to make all sorts of different monkeys that made us THINK we evolved from them? Hmmm?

:eek:

Fucking gnomes... :mad:

Faith is about believing in things you cannot see or understand, correct? My faith in God is not rational because I believe in a higher being that I can show no scientific proof that exists, right? Science isn't about faith - its about testing theories and then when they are proven to be true they are real, concrete things you can believe in, right?

I know without a shadow of a doubt that an airplane can fly - its been proven - people fly in airplanes every day. Everyone accepts the fact that an airplane can fly. I don't see anyone going around saying airplanes can't fly. Where is the proof that man evolved from ape? Im not saying there aren't people who have attempted to prove such a thing but I am saying that its not fact. Regardless of how many theories there are about it or what potential links there may or may not be there is no 100% proof that man evolved from ape. If you believe that man did then you are believing in something that may seem reasonable but is not proven fact just the same if you believe that God created man you are beliving in something that is not a proven fact.


I don't for one second claim religion to be science - they are completely opposite. Science means nothing is accepted until proven - religion means accepting things on faith alone knowing full well you can never "prove" them. I am just saying that not everything has been proven scientifically nor do I feel everything can be proven scientifically.

Gary,

I'd reccomend you check out the following site for more on this topic:

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html

It's probably the single best popular resource on evolution there is.

I agree 1+1 = 2. This has become to be universally accepted as true. How the world was created has not been proven. You are arguing that because science has proven some things to be true that its much more likely to have the correct version of how the world was created than religion. That's like saying because I know how to change a tire I know how to build a car engine from scratch. Just because science has proven some things to be true doesn't make anything unproven any more likely to be true than anything else.

Religion isn't about proving things to be true - its about having faith knowing full well that what you believe in is not something you can setup a scientific study to prove. All the things science has discovered and proven true do not let either of us know how the universe was created. You believe it to be one way based on things you have read and have been told - those things make sense to you and so you believe it. I believe it to be created another way based on things I have read and have been told - things that make sense to me. I don't really see how not being able to prove one thing is any different than not being able to prove another.

Sometimes when I fart it smells really bad, other times there is no smell at all. Why?

Thanks for the response HB. So every scientific experiment ever done confirms the assertion that science needs to be based on scientifically observable data. Later experiments might confirm the 'truth' of the original idea requiring scientifically observable data but these experiments are already assuming the original idea to be true. Isn't that a bit circular? I would expect later science to confirm a scientific method as the assumption of its truth is inherent in any experiment. I guess I'm still struggling to see where the scientific data comes from for the original idea that we need physical, empirical evidence for something to know that it it is true.

Fixed.

Gary, remember what I said in my earlier post: science isn't based on 'smoking gun' principle.

The FACT is that the preponderance of observable evidence OVERWHELMINGLY supports the theory of evolution. The claim that there is no difference in the factual supports for creationism and evolution is DEMONSTRABLY FALSE. If people want to believe in creationism, fine, but why do they feel they need to disparage science to do it?

Sorry about that. I went off on a tangent there. You're right, you didn't make that claim at all. My bad.

proven "some" things? quite and understatement, don't you think?

for the record, i say my prayers every nite. i pray for being thankful for what i have, i ask for a long life, and i pray for God to keep my wife safe, on top of saying one Our Father and one Hail Mary. i'm not a Godless person. just not a blind believer.

My comments on all of this comes from a brief thought: What would Jesus Do?

I am an unorganized, sort-of-Christian(but maybe not). I think Jesus was/is the greatest example of living in the harmonic and loving way that God would want us to live in. It is in my heretic belief that we can certainly all be saved by learning from his actions. You can accept Jesus as your savior all you want, but its not going to do you any good if you don't accept his actions as the good for you to live by, and don't cast away basic evil intentions like murder and hate as bad.

So WWJD. I love the phrase when it is actually really thought out and carried out. Who could not love people who advocate peace love and tolerence? Lets make an assumption, big or small, that gays, the city of New Orleans, or any other number of controversal groups of people are committing sins in the eyes of God. Would God and Jesus want us casting stones of hate and anger at them in God and Jesus's name? Ridiculous. And how some people can so miss the boat that is seemingly so fucking obvious is beyond me.

Anyway I guess that is far from the religious warfare this thread turned into, but I enjoy getting on my soapbox and yelling at an empty crowd, relieves stress.

Since I see CraigSca lurking around the board, let me just add to this discussion:

Science fails to recognise the single most
potent element of human existence
letting the reigns go to the unfolding
is faith, faith, faith, faith
Science has failed our world
science has failed our mother earth
Spirit-moves-through-all-things



:p ;)

Well explain to me why religious beliefs are held to a smoking gun principle then? How does one know that God does not exist? What of the cures to people that there is no medical explanation for? What about the sites where people have documented miracles taking place? I realize there are debates over how the Bible is translated but did none of those things ever happen?

People come up with many reasons why miracles and visitations and the like do not exist but they cannot prove those reasons. They just chalk them up to being unexplainable because they have to do with God and they can't see God so God cannot exist so there has to be some reason for those things - just one they can't figure out yet.

Yet for science you're willing to accept that. The research and theories produce things they can prove that support their argument that man evolved from ape but they can't say with 100% certainty that it happened that way, can they? But for science like you said, you don't need a smoking gun. I'm asking why do you need a smoking gun then to believe in God?

I'm not trying to disparge science - I don't believe that one day an airplane just magically flew off the ground. I'm only trying to point out that an opposition to religion is that you can't prove it - that things we believe to be miraculous events are just dismissed as odd occurances because there is no readily available scientific explanation for it. Those things are our proof that God exists just the same way as fossils and DNA studies and whatnot are the way a scientist proves evolution. I'm not saying thier studies are invalid and complete rubbish - I just don't see or accept a concrete link between ape and man just the way you don't accept that God created man.

Nice post by Tigercat there.

God gave us free choice right? I doubt he would want faith entered blindly. True faith should be blind once its achieved, but faith entered blindly, before realizing what is at stake, is nothing at all.

It seems to me that if you never fully question the aspects of the beliefs upon which faith is built you are not giving yourself up to God, but rather the circumstances of your socialization and birth. Unfortunately, I think that is quite often what people do.....

I'm not a blind believer either - I don't disregard science. When I'm sick, I take medicine. When I'm hurt, I see a doctor. If I have to go far away I get on an airplane - I don't just sit there and wait to be miraculously transported to the next city.

But I do believe that there are things science cannot prove and that those things are works of God.

There are things science cannot prove today.

Are there not examples of things throughout history that people attributed to a higher being that were eventually borne out to be scientifically explained?

I think that's a great post and therein lies where the difference in this thread started. Some people feel that because the church pastor put that sign up that he was being hateful to the people of New Orleans despite the fact that the actions of his church were the exact opposite in that they were not only praying for those people but also doing things to help the relief effort. His words, to me anyways, were meant as a wake up call to get our lives in order and stop committing sins before we face a tragedy like that in our own lives and not as some pretentious comment meant as a silent rejoicing that a city had been flooded and its people were dead or displaced.

Great post, HB. I agree with this 300%. The fact that supporters of creationism are allowed to get away with presenting their view (or their New Coke formulation of their view, ID) as basically some vague generalities about things evolution has problems with, and this is accepted as a valid alternate theory, amazes me. Where's the scientific evidence? Where's even the attempt to scientifically validate their beliefs? People say that scientists don't like to accept challenges to their closely held theories, maybe so, but science has been changing in relation to new discoveries for hundreds of years. If ID supporters can provide at least some kind of scientific proof for their claims, or at least a scientific framework under which such claims could be proved, I think they'd make a lot more headway.

On the surface I see how it could seem circular, but to my understanding that's how science works. You hypothesize something, and then you set out to disprove that hypothesis. At the outset you have to assume your working hypothesis is true in order to set up your experiment, but this isn't really circular reasoning because you don't really accept any of your assumptions as true until thy have survived testing.

I agree that it's hard to imagine an experiment in which "I need empirically verifiable evidence for something to know that it is true" is acutally set out as the hypothesis - you're right that it's an assumption that is inherent in any experiment. But that's exactly my point - by being contained in every successful experiment ever done, this assumption has withstood some pretty rigorous testing, albeit indirectly. Like I said, prepoderance of the evidence

Stupid example: let's say I've done 50 experiments on the boiling point of a liquid, and for each one I've used the same beaker. Those experiments have indirectly confirmed that my beaker can withstand high temperatures, even though that wasn't the actual point of the experiment. Does that make sense?

This is just my understanding: I might be way off base and I am certainly being very simplistic. (I hasten to add that I'm not a scientist, though I'm sure that's obvious.)

WWJD...well, look what happened to him. I don't want to end up like that.

So as long as science might prove it sometime down the line that's good enough for you to prove that God does not exist?

Couldn't I turn that around and say because science may never prove something that it is proof that God must exist or that someday someone may disprove a scieintific theory accepted today so I should not accept any scientific theories as truth because the opposite cannot be proven today?

I agree. When I was a young'n back in Catholic school, we were definitely taught that Jesus' message and actions were essentially ones of kindness and compassion.

I haven't practiced for years, but I think this is the takeaway that most mainstream Christians get. This really stands in contrast with the beliefs of some of the more conservative elements in Christianity--I sense very little kindness or compassion from many of those who profess the faith.

It certainly demonstrates that you can't just lump Christians together, since it is apparent that different sects within Christianity believe in wildly different things...

To be sure that it is possible to have the scientific means to explain everything in the universe to make the universe enclosed and isolated is a type of faith.

Devote Aethism(note: not agnostic, the two are not interchangeable despite the fact that many use them as such) is as much faith based as devote Christianity, and frankly no different in terms of its approach to assumptions or faith before questioning.

I too think it's a great post and what I always thought Christianity was all about (back when I was a Christian (Catholic)). But, as is clearly evidenced from my reaction to the initial post of this thread, I interpreted the pastor's words as meaning something wholly different than Gary did. Wholly different.

You know what though? Even accepting Gary's interpretation of this pastor's view and assuming I believed in god, if this was god's way of sending us a "wake up calll to get our lives in order and to stop committing sin", I'd say "Fuck you, God. I have no place in my heart or life for a being that decides to kill hundreds of people (mainly the sick, the poor, and the elderly) and ruin thousands of lives simply because he feels we are 'sinning' and need a wake-up call. You're just going to sacrifice those poor people in hopes that we 'get with the program'? Blow me."

I would also, as a Christian, ask myself, WWJD? Would Jesus send a hurricane to pound away at the poor, the sick, the elderly (these people do appear to represent the majority of those who have died/suffered the most due to this tragedy) to send us a message? Not any Jesus I know. And if he did, see my response to "god" above.

That whole paragraph, of course, is hypothetical because I don't believe in god and, in turn, I can't hate him or be angry at him anymore than I could hate or be angry at Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, unicorns, pegasuses(i?), or ligers.

Here's the thing.. if the pastor had put up a sign that said something like "What if the hurricane had hit YOUR town? Would your soul be prepared?" then I think we'd all agree that his message was just meant as a wake-up call. But no, he said "The big easy is the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah." We're all well aware that the Bible story is that those cities were specifically destroyed and all the people in them killed because of their inhabbitants sins. So what the pastor is saying is that the people of New Orleans got what they deserved.. that the Christian god killed them and destroyed their city because of their sins.

Bitter Raiders fan!
:D

Then again if you believed in God you would also believe that He would even send His own Son to His death in order to save the rest of us. I understand that without that belief its impossible to comprehend how God could let such destruction and death happen so don't take this as me trying to bible-thump on you - just explaining the viewpoint from the other side of the fence.

This is what's known in theological circles as the Jordan-Divac Conundrum.

It's corollary, of course, is that a comparison of Jordan and Divac is like comparing filet mignon and bologna.

*strums guitar*

"My bologna has a first name, it's V-l-a-d-e. My bologna has a second name, it's D-i-v-a-c..."

I just spent A WHOLE HOUR READING THIS THREAD AT WORK AND GETTING PAID TO DO IT!




And it still feels like a colossal waste of time.

Don't worry, I certainly don't take this as bible-thumping at all. But, if God sent His own Son to His deth in order to save the rest of us, why did he have to go a kill all those old, sick, and poor people in New Orleans? Didn't Jesus' death already accomplish all that?

Even assuming I did believe that God sent His only Son down here to die for Our sins and to save us, I still don't see how that would excuse what he did in New Orleans to all those people. Is this supposed to be like a Jesus Redux? That all of those poor, sick, and eldery folks (all God's children) were also sacrificed to "save" the rest of us?

I think the problem with that type of flood today(and attributing anything like it as God's attempt to influence ______) according to the tradition of the Jewdao-Christian God, is that he is very hands off now. Floods for Old Testiment times made sense. For the Jewish tradition, the old testiment and the acts of God within serve the purpose of letting the people know that he has a covenent with them. By the time Jesus came around the knowledge and existence of that covenent was secure. By now its all about having Jesus as the example of the right path, and letting human beings decide to go on the right path of their own, without having to interfere with free choice.

Thats why we needed Jesus isn't it? It wouldn't make sense to smite the wicked for the benefit of redemption anymore. Redemption is in the individual's hand now.

Go Lions! Go Wings!

Pavel Datsyuk wont decide if he'll play for the Wings this year or not until next week (according to his agent). Hanson is unsure if he'll be able to go next week.

There, some relevant info to make it all worthwhile. :)

Everybody dies in the end; one central message of Christianity is that we need not fear death. Yes, Jesus died for us, and suffered for us, but more important, He is judged for us. This is a concept that often eludes non-believers trying to wrap their minds around Christianity.

I refer to Tigercat's post which said what I was implying much more clearly. Also, I was raised Catholic. Did First Comunion, been confirmed, went to sunday school, the whole nine yards. I was a Christian for the first 27-28 years of my life. It wasn't until just recently (last 3-4 years) that I became an athiest, so it's not like I am approaching this whole thing from a completely foreign prespective and these concepts are so alien to me that I can't wrap my mind around them. Then again, I probably was never "really" a "believer" in the true sense or at least haven't been one for sometime now.

Cronin, if you don't accept the existence of God then you do need to fear death under Christianity because there is a special place in hell waiting for you. And therein lies one of my biggest problems with Christianity. Take two men, one a pedophile who embraces God with all of his heart on his deathbed and another who lives a life of servitude to his fellow man but does it for his own motivations and does not believe in God. What happens to these two men when they die?

If you ask an atheist, they are both dead. End of story. No afterlife. But if you ask a Christian, they tell you that the pedophile is saved through the grace of God, which does not extend to the man who lived a good life as judged by his fellow man but not as judged by God.

If there is any one deal-breaker for me in Christianity, this is it.

Also, I'm glad to see that this thread has begun to resemble a good conversation between people who respect each others views.

There's a lot to cover this morning. I'll start with the simplest.

This is a common misconception. Atheism is pretty simple, though. It is the absence of belief in a god in any of the forms put forth by theists. It requires no faith.

By the admissions of most philosophers, it's impossible to prove their god exists. It exists on faith. Some say it's up to scientists to prove there is no god, but that can't be done - you can't prove something doesn't exist.

Atheism is the willingness to say "I don't know" with no strings attached. I'm comfortable not knowing everything about how the universe was created. I don't think there's any controversy any more that there was some sort of Big Bang. But what created it, whether it was the first Bang, one of a series or even one of a set in parallel universes is just speculation right now.

I don't know. And what's more, I don't even care. It's not important to me. I've got nothing vested in the creation of the universe. I'm much more interested in other aspects of science.

Let's say someone came along tomorrow and repeatedly demonstrated some supernatural ability, something I thought was impossible, but was part of some religion. Scientists tested him, made sure it couldn't be a trick (like the carnival games of professional tricksters like John Edward). I'd have to incorporate that into my world view.

I don't think that will ever happen, but it may, some day. An atheist accepts that the answers to some questions may be surprising. So far, though, no answers leading to anyone's concept of any useful god have ever been proven. It isn't exactly a leap of faith to believe, for the moment, that will continue.

So the atheist's answer is better to you for what reason? Your sense of justice?

So I jump ship in Hong Kong, and I make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over there in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper,..a jock. So I tell 'em I'm a pro jock and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama himself. The Twelfth son of the Lama; the flowing robes, the grace, bald... striking. So i'm on the first tee with him, I give him the driver; he hauls off and whacks one - big hitter, the Lama - long...into a ten thousand foot crevasse right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says: 'Gunga Galunga... gunga, gunga-lagunga.' So we finish the 18th and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, 'Hey, Lama, hey. How about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know?' And he says, 'Oh, uh, there won't be any money. But when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.' So i've got THAT going for me. Which is nice.

I have always had this problem too. In fact, I got into a long, extended argument with some religious folks who came prostelizing to my door during the 2000 NHL Awards ceremony (I only remember this because during the debate I told the pair to hold on while I watched Yzerman win the Selke :D ). I brought up the exact same arguments (though I think instead of a pedophile, I used a mass murderer who had killed and raped a dozen nuns as my example). There was no good answer and despite my pressing the issue and wishing to continue the debate, it took about 20 minutes or so, but I finally got rid of them. They never came back.

Yes. I cannot subscribe to a code that strikes me as so fundamentally flawed. I cannot fathom teaching this system to my children, if I'm someday lucky enough to have them. The scenario described above does not feel like God's love. It smacks of petty hatred to cast the 'good man' to hell for his lack of faith while embracing the pedophile in Heaven for eternity because of one moment of clarity/faith/whatever.

Ok, that's what I figured.

There are several answers to that problem, probably none of which you will like.

First of all, no man is so good that he doesn't require the intervention of Jesus when it comes time to be judged. All of us commit sins.

Second - the atheist's answer shows no justice, either. No matter what, when your clock is up, there's no future. How does that square with your sense of justice?

Third is the mystical answer, which I won't get into because it will take too many paragraphs and will likely be incomprehensible.

Well, short answer is yes. I put my "faith" in science since I can see the tangible results of science. Even though science theories have been wrong (the whole Earth is flat thing for example), they have been far more positive than negative.

I'm sorry, but I do not know of any theological theories out there (other than the normal it must have been divine intervention). Are there any that have been proven? That to me is the difference between science and religion.

Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hangin curveball, high fiber, good scotch... that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, I believe there ought to be a Constitutional ammendment outlawing astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft core pornography, opening your presents on Christmas morning rather than on Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three nights.

If you're looking for a pragmatic rationale for religious belief, you just need look to the many, many examples of people whose lives have been made better by faith.

See I would characterize you as agnostic. Atheism, by my definition at least, is the rejection of theism. You don't sound like you are rejecting theism at all. Fully rejecting something that can't be proven or disproven requires as much faith as fully accepting it.

For the last few pages this post has taken a turn for the better. This is some of the most interesting stuff I have read around here for a very long time.

That's a good point...however, who made their lives better? God or themselves? I consider God a mental placebo for those people if you're talking about "living" their lives better.

The counterpoint is that God has also made their lives worse. A house burning down? A child dying? A hurricane?

I find this thread interesting only because I don't understand why this got into a deep philosophical/religious debate. The problem I see is that the pastor decided to put up the sign shortly after the incident. It is just a matter of disrespect and has nothing to do with his beliefs. Why would he feel a need to put up a sign when he can already talk about these beliefs to the people of his church? Do you think that placing that sign out there is spiritually uplifting and will draw more people to the church?

If an Islamic person were to place a sign outside of their mosque quoting that New Orleans deserved death because of their beliefs, those same people defending this guy wouldn't think that person should ever have a voice for such an opinion.

I just don't see how anyone can defend someone who is clearly using this opportunity to promote his own beliefs over the tragedy of others. Sure, he has a right to put it up there and I don't think someone should intervene and take it down. But I still believe this is very disrespectful to those that just suffered.

Umm...its not quite as simple as you make it out to be. Simply embracing God on your deathbed does not clear the way for you to be standing outside the pearly gates. You still have to make reparations for your sins and if you've committed a lifetime of them simply apologizing and asking God's forgiveness before you die doesn't cut it. In order to be forgiven you must make reparations and that happens in the afterlife.

We as Catholics believe that when you die you are judged and sent to Heaven, Purgatory or Hell. If your soul is clean (obviously not the pedophile in your example) then you get to enter heaven. If not you enter Purgatory or Hell - the difference is that Hell is eternal. Embracing God and renouncing his sins may save the pedophile from Hell but he or she will still have to make up for those sins in Purgatory and a soul can spend any length of time in Purgatory to attone for those sins until the end of time.

You make it sound like you can get spend your lifetime raping and murdering and pillaging so long as you were baptized and that before you die tell God you are sorry for what you did and you'll be whisked away to Heaven for eternity. That is not how Catholics believe it to work.

That is my chief beef, too.

If you concede that God is responsible for their house burning down, then you are already a believer.

If we are still discussing pragmatism, it is certainly conceivable that religious faith is what allows some people to work hard to rebuild their lives instead of stealing tivos and whisky.

No, I don't believe God is responsible for someone's house burning down...which is interesting.

If you are a Christian and your house burns down, who do you "blame" in each example:

1. The fire inspector finds no cause for the fire.
2. The fire inspector finds that it was faulty wiring of some sort.
3. The fire inspector believes it's arson.

If you believe in God, then do you blame him in each example? If you don't blame him in #2 or #3, then couldn't he have prevented your house from burning down?

I don't necessarily believe in God...but if I did, yes, I would take the good with the bad.

From what I recall, most protestant Christian faiths don't do the whole purgatory thing. It's just either heaven or hell. And all you gotta do is say "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior" and mean it and you got your Get into Heaven Free card.

How can it be proven? Let's say someone is dying of cancer - has two weeks to live. Doctors have stopped treatment and are just trying to let the patient die in peace. The family prays for a miracle cure. A month later the patient is not only still alive but fully cured of the cancer. Is that proof of divine intervention?

How many years of research and study of the individual without being able to obtain the reason for the dissapearance of the cancer would you be satisfied with before attributing the cure to a higher power? Would you ever? At the end of years of research exhausting every possible reason for the cure to no avail would you just say it must be something we still haven't made the connection on or a factor we haven't considered like how many Diet Cokes they drank in that time or would you consider that proof of divine intervention?

The people who believe in divine intervention will see it that way from the minute the person is cured - those who do not will spend a lifetime looking for any reason but that to be the case. When a scientist tests a theory he or she is willing to accept a result different than their hypothesis if its proven to them and they reformulate the hypothesis and test again. How can you possibly prove God's existence or divine intervention to someone who will not accept that as the answer?

Exactly.

In the examples above, it is certainly possible that somebody might be angry with God. This is not unusual; even Moses and Jesus were at times angry with God.

But in the end, as you concede, life is overwhelmingly GOOD and BEAUTIFUL, and it all flows out from God.

To be honest I couldn't tell you how Protestant Christians look at it - that's why I only spoke from the Catholic perspective. If that is the case I certainly could see why there could be skepticism of something like that but again, I'm Catholic so I don't want to speak out of turn with regards to anything else - maybe someone else who is Protestant can explain it.

It's easier on me, obviously. I don't have a horse in this proverbial race. I was raised without religion. I try to respect other opinions, though it's sometimes difficult when I believe that someone is using religion in a cowardly manner (like taking shots at the people of New Orleans while they're down).


As I said in another message, there's no longer debate among scientists about whether there was some sort of Big Bang. Too much direct evidence. There's a lot of discussion right now about what led to it.

The thing is, science is always open to new theories, as long as scientists can back them up. Religion isn't. That's the fundamental difference between religion and science.

In science, you base hypotheses on known and repeatable observation. In religion, you modify observation with one static hypothesis formed a long, long time ago.

I wish religion would just stay out of science entirely, let these people do their jobs without interference. Obviously, there are religious scientists, and good ones. But they have learned to separate their religious beliefs from their work.




I answered your question. I said I don't know. Obviously, the conditions were slightly different from every other case that ever took place. Our child was out of danger within an hour, though they kept him in the ICU for four days.




I would have tried to figure out what actually happened. We know we had a healthy baby, according to ultrasound, at 41 weeks.

If it were just bad luck, we'd've found a way to deal with it. I'm not religious. I understand some people "lose" their religion over events like this. My in-laws didn't.



Everything can be measured. We just haven't discovered a theory that accounts for those intangibles in baseball.

Karma, superstition, religion. They're all essentially synonyms. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way. A religion is a more evolved and organized set of superstitions.

Luck is just what it is. Sometimes you hit a line drive straight at the center fielder. Sometimes a weak grounder finds its way between the shortstop and the third baseman. I think there's a lot more luck in baseball than any other sport. The better team wins with less certainty.




Eventually, we will develop ways to calculate survival under those circumstances. Noah was given a near-zero chance of surviving until adulthood. I have no idea if that was accurate and I don't care. "Beating the odds" is just a figure of speech.

You didn't mention that you would pray in a case like Noah's. I was going to say that if there is a mystical plan we can't possibly understand, who the heck are we to ask for interference? Prayer seems a waste of time, given that belief.


True enough. I simply accept there's a lot I don't know. I think you do, too, you've just accepted a more complex explanation.

Good questions. I don't think I would believe a theory through process of elimination...so I would keep searching for an answer.

Note: the following is an extreme, but I think you get my point
What if in the example you noted the person who was dying of cancer were a convicted serial murderer and on death row? Would you assume that it was divine intervention? If you did, would you campaign to get him out of there since God obviously spared him from death and has something meant for him?

Gary, have been raised in the Episcopalean faith I was trying to reconcile what you had said here about purgatory. This was not something I recalled as part of the Sunday sermons, nor something I recalled reading in the Bible. So I ran a Google search to see if I was just running into a huge hole in my memory of the teachings of the Bible - it has been about twenty years since I regularly attended.

In short, Purgatory does not appear to be mentioned in the Bible:
http://www.gotquestions.org/purgatory.html

The use of this link is not meant to validate gotquestions.org - it is just one link that I found among many at the top of my search "Bible purgatory" that covered similar ground. Another link that seems to take more of a "pro-Catholic" slant is:
http://www.dioceseoflincoln.org/purple/purgatory/#5

Now I'm hardly an expert on this. And I did not want to make this a discussion about Catholicism, per se since I'm less familiar with this than the general teachings of the Bible. This is why I used the term Christianity in my initial post, which I understand to be a more generic umbrella for the set of religions that subscribe to both the Old Testament and the New Testament in the Bible.

Before this search my only exposure to the concept of purgatory was in English lit classes. Think it was Chaucer ...

Fine, I'm agnostic then. I also, technically, can't reject the infamous Flying Spaghetti Monster, for the same reason.

I think there's about the same probability that your God exists as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

However, most definitions of atheism are more simply a belief that gods don't exist. I believe that to be the case, understanding that it can't be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

A lot of really wonderful posts here on this hot topic.

To the discussion of why should we believe science about things it can't explain any more than we should believe in GOD I say this:

Science can at least give me something understandable, something tangible as evidence of WHY it should be trusted.

GOD is Faith, I should beleive in GOD because.....why? Give me SOMETHING here. I cannot and WILL not simply take a theologins word on something so profoundly life changing as a leap of FAITH. FAITH alone is NOT enough, for anything.

What do you base this "flowing from GOD" comment on? Life is INDEED overwhelmingly good and beautiful. I have only to look at my Daughter to understand that concept, however I have no illusions that such beauty came from an omnipresent superior power. Life is all around us, why must there be a supernatural reason for its existance? Why is a mundane scientific view so unbearably impossible for those of faith?

Yes, but it seems that people would rather argue about their beliefs rather than look at this particular situation as a whole. It's amazing to see how far people will go to defend someone when they know it is wrong and usually are good hearted enough not to do this themselves But yet, it seems that if anyone opposses the spiritual/religious/political viewpoint of a person that shares a similar belief, then people will go to no ends to defend this person. Just an observation.

Purgatory is definitely a Roman Catholic invention. I don't think Eastern Orthodoxs even believe it and Lutherans are fully against it, as back in the day they associated it with selling of indulgences.

Its importance varies by family, by church, and so on. It has an official place in Catholism, but its specific purposes and prominence is a little murky. I have heard some talk of it as if all must spend some degree of time there to atone for all the sins we have. I have heard others talk of it as a special place for certain people not full fledge hell worthy sinners, but ones that still must atone for their ways. I have even heard it mentioned in conjunction with unbaptized babies who will one day be taken from purgatory up to Heaven.

Okay...this is a perfect example of how religion doesn't work. What proof is there that there is a purgatory? We believe it because a man said it was so? Even other Christian religions disagree with this concept. So who's right, or is neither right?

As I've tried to explain in other posts, science and religion are NOT in conflict. There are many very good books written by people smarter than me as to why this is a false dichotomy. Science answers questions of quantity; religion answers questions of quality. There is no reason why a person of faith should reject science; and in fact, most do not.

In any case, the post you are responding to was explaining the point of view of a believer, not trying to convince anybody of anything. You're completely missing the context of my post.

That's true - I won't deny it but how could religion possibly be? With religion you are following the teachings of the be-all, end-all. You can't just one day wake up and say oh, I guess God was wrong for 2000 years. If you don't believe that God is perfect and therfore the teachings you are living your life by are perfect then why would you devote your life to Him in the first place? With scientists there is no ultimate scientist or whatever. Someone is right until someone else comes along and proves him wrong and then everyone believes that person is right and so forth.


I would be praying non-stop because I believe that is the only thing that I could do to help. I believe that things can change with prayer - that the impossible can happen. I know that if I pray for it that doesn't mean it will happen but I know that if I don't there is no chance of it happening. Sometimes God allows things to go differently if there is enough prayer. That's what I was trying to bring up with the same doctor, same symptom scenario. I believe that God is the determining factor and that there is always the chance that He will change the outcome with enough prayer.

I know that springs the inevitable question "what kind of God allows suffering and possibly death just so that you will pray to Him" and that's fine it people want to see it that way and some people can't get a handle on why they should worship a supreme being and that's fine too. I don't expect everyone to understand that. But if you look back to stories in the Bible, Jesus didn't walk around going door to door asking if anyone needed healing. People came to Him and asked to be healed. The point is that I believe you have to make God important and you have to keep God as the center of your life. God is not just there when its convienient for you or when you need something and sometimes He sends a reminder that you're forgetting about Him.

I'm not saying that your brother-in-law and his wife had their son die because God was trying to send them a message. I have no idea why Noah died nor will anyone probably ever and I'm very sorry that it happened.

Yes, I would believe it was divine intervention and no, I would not campaign to get him off of death row if he was rightfully there. God may very well have something meant for him but that doesn't mean that has to be in the public. Perhaps He would be using the man as a sign of a miracle to get others to believe. Maybe it would be a way to get the man to convert before he dies as an attempt to save his soul. A miracle doesn't have to be a worldwide changing event - sometimes it is just meant to change one person.

I think I understand what you're saying. Interesting.

I read those posts and I can pretty much agree that they are not in conflict. I apologize if I was unclear. What I'm trying to grasp here is WHY someone should accept one reason for existance instead of the other. As the case is with Creationsism and evolution.

The whole concept of being a "believer" I think is the hardest thing for me to understand. I just cannot come to grips with giving up my "free will" to accept something that seems to me, to be so profoundly ludicrous.

Again, I am not trying to insult anyone, I'm seriously trying to understand how and why FAITH can be so powerful. It is based on..nothing, it is founded on words transcribed by men a million times over. Inneffibly falible at that point, let alone the specific intervention and editing done by man over the eons.

I really WANT to understand, to at least have a glimmer of why people would simply brush off what is physically before them, and isntead embrace a philosophy that offers nothing substantial and answers none of the real questions of the world with anything concrete.

Again, not trying to be snippy or anything, I'm sincerely wanting to get a grasp of this FAITH thing.

Faith as definied by Websters "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence"

How can it be more than what it is? Faith is not about being able to prove whether it exists or not. Either you believe in it or you don't. If you do not believe God exists then you don't believe - if you do then you do. If it has to be proven to you then its not faith and even if it was proven to you would that make you believe? If God appeared before you would you believe in God if you didn't already? My guess is not without having the original faith that He exists.

Don't look at me for a specific God! I live in the land of possibilities myself. And since I can find shiny happy thoughts and harmony I aim for by considering certain unproveable possibilities, I go for it. If there was a 2000 year old story about a giant zombie meatball that promoted harmony between men in the name of flying noodles, I would probably think that was such a great thing that I would bow to ragu sauce myself.

And hell, if there is a creator of the universe, something that created something from nothing, than the universe is the number 1 and "God" would be the number 2. Because God would have to be everything in the universe and more. Meaning that everything in the number 1, including all our descriptions of God, incooperate some part of God. So, yes, I guess my God, if I have a God, is indeed a flying piece of speghetti.