I am not trying to 'troll' here but I'd like to post my opinions and perhaps someone can, if they disagree with them, explain why they think I'm wrong. Personally, I'm an agnostic because I do not like either side's answer.

As I understand it, metaphysics is branch of philosophy which undertakes the study of the characteristics of the universe which are unprovable. You're allowed to ask questions - oh, metaphysics has such lovely questions - and you can offer possible answers as long as you qualify them by saying they aren't necessarily right. But if you offer an answer to a metaphysical question, it's no longer philosophy, it's religion. (If we ever get a verifyable answer to a metaphysical question it stops becoming metaphysical.)

I came across a new (to me) line of thought recently. I'm posting it here to kick the tires, so to speak. Before anyone seriously flames me, I don't take the argument to seriously. (For instance some of the terms are left a little vague.)

Can God (the Abrahamic one) do evil?

If God cannot do evil, then we have two possibilities. 1) God is not omnipotent, because there's something he cannot do. 2) God is still omnipotent, but evil doesn't exist. That is, there is no deed that can be called evil.

Well, really there's a third option. One could say that God can only do what is logically possible, and so it would be logically impossible for God to do evil. This limit on God's omnipotence is usually used to address absurd questions like, "Can God make a rock that he can't lift?", or "Can God make a square with three sides?" But, the question, "Can God do evil?" is not an absurd question. Saying God can't do evil because it's logically impossible is answering the question by fiat. Besides, I am aware of no passage of scriptural that adds limits to God's omnipotence.

For the past few days I have been in a long and mutually frustrating debate over whether Theological Faith by definition is so irrational and unsupportable that it lays the groundwork for a little irrationality to spawn extreme irrationality and give birth to theocracy.

I have laid out my defense for theological faith already in that thread, quite extensively. Here I would like to make another case for the hot spread of irrational reasoning. I would like to state my case that the complicit values which spread irrationality are primarily cultural, I make no bones about admitting and stating that irrational theism is the culprit and conspirator behind the spread, however, I will point out here that neither the methods nor the means support a blanket assertion that theological faith is the blameable "complicitor".

How do we see or observe other things really ? Is it god's gift in some manner ? Lets see if this discussion helps to start this off.

Q1 - How do you see things ?

A1 - I use the eye.

Q2 - Is the eye matter ?

A2  - Yes it is 

Q3 - Does only your eye help you see ?

A3 - No , not on its own?

Q4 - Then how do you see things ?

A4 - My eye receives light rays which is reflected by a thing, it gets converted into impulses and travels to my brain to primary and secondary visual cortex. This gets processed by the brain thus.

There has been plenty of discussion of faith lately on this board.

I'll start by saying wonder is human nature. Hell, it is the very base of science! Many scientific discoveries worked on wonder.

'I wonder why the sky is blue?', or

'I wonder why diamonds are hard?'

In essence, science starts from wonder and works up, trying to figure everything out. That is the essence of science.

However, science can only go so far. it may not explicity explain everything, every little detail, and even if they come up with mathematical matter, it may not be testable. For example, the energy of the Big Bang was over 10^20 Gev. We may never get the technology to reproduce the effects, or even begin to understand exactly what happened due to the fact physics breaks down at these imense energies. We may never be able to harness negative energy via the casmir effect (bring two conducting plates to 10^-33 m of seperation.)

If homo-sapiens have been around for roughly 200,000 years, why'd god wait until the last 4000 to mention his existence?

If you believe in the Christian god, why'd he let all those other god stories float around for so long before revealing himself? 

Why'd he wait until 2000 years ago to mention this hell thing?

Wouldn't it have been better to mention this stuff a lot sooner?

What happened to all the humans before we invented religion?

Since there was no "actual" Adam and Eve, who was the first person that God decided to put under the "Law"?  How much suckage for that dude!

The question of the Earths creation and the likely hood of it being made for us is something that most creationist love to give as "proof" of gods existence. lets look at the facts and come to our own conclusion.

70% of the planet is covered by water. That seems fine, humans need water to live. but out of all that water 97% of it is unusable to man. In fact out of the 3% of water that is usable to man, 1% of it is stored in glacial ice and 1% of it is underground. so out of the 70% of the Earths surface only 1% is usable to humans, the rest of it will kill us.

We spend so much time talking about what makes a person leave Christianity, I think it will be informative to see what it's like to convert.  This article is a great example of what happens to a person who converts as an adult.  I'm going to embed a few comments in particularly crucial passages, but I'm not editing the post at all.

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I didn’t want to become a Christian. A year ago I’d have laughed at the very idea. Last spring, I was 31 years old, and I’d been a strongly atheistic agnostic for as long as I could remember. I’d never looked for God and never felt the need to; I felt that any rational, well-educated person like myself (I have a Ph.D.) would agree that religion was a social invention and that Christianity was a particularly annoying superstition.

And now I’m writing this, a baptized Christian, witnessing to my faith and to the power of God in transforming my life.

Some time ago I was reading through apocryphal Christian texts, various Acts and Gospels and Revelations and such. I remember one of the texts described a vision of Hell. It was sort of an early version of Dante's Inferno, where individuals are shown receiving different punishments based on their sins. I remember some people -- adulterers, I think -- being hung over fire by their genitals, and I distinctly recall homosexuals being required to walk off a tall cliff and then march back up to do it again, over and over. I can't remember what the name of the text was, though. Any help?

This article illustrates just what kind of nonsense people will believe.  While it's easy to dismiss this as silliness, it's important to realize that the exact same rationale is what theists use to believe in god.

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That's the spirit: Belief in ghosts high
By ALAN FRAM and TREVOR TOMPSON, Associated Press Writers 2 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Those things that go bump in the night? About one-third of people believe they could be ghosts.
And nearly one out of four, 23 percent, say they've actually seen a ghost or felt its presence, finds a pre-Halloween poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos.
One is Misty Conrad, who says she fled her rented home in Syracuse, Ind., after her daughter began talking to an unseen girl named Nicole and neighbors said children had been murdered in the house. That was after the TV and lights began flicking on at night.
"It kind of creeped you out," Conrad, 40, of Hampton, Va., recalled this week. "I needed to get us out."
About one out of five people, 19 percent, say they accept the existence of spells or witchcraft. Nearly half, 48 percent, believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP.
The most likely candidates for ghostly visits include single people, Catholics and those who never attend religious services. By 31 percent to 18 percent, more liberals than conservatives report seeing a specter.
Those who dismissed the existence of ghosts include Morris Swadener, 66, a Navy retiree from Kingston, Wash.
He says he shot one with his rifle when he was a child.
"I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a white ghost in my closet," he said. "I discovered I'd put a hole in my brand new white shirt. My mother and father were not amused."
Three in 10 have awakened sensing a strange presence in the room. For whatever it says about matrimony, singles are more likely than married people to say so.
Fourteen percent — mostly men and lower-income people — say they have seen a UFO. Among them is Danny Eskanos, 44, an attorney in Palm Harbor, Fla., who says as a Colorado teenager he watched a bright light dart across the sky, making abrupt stops and turns.
"I knew a little about airplanes and helicopters, and it was not that," he said. "It's one of those things that sticks in your mind."
Spells and witchcraft are more readily believed by urban dwellers, minorities and lower-earning people. Those who find credibility in ESP are more likely to be better educated and white — 51 percent of college graduates compared to 37 percent with a high school diploma or less, about the same proportion by which white believers outnumber minorities.
Overall, the 48 percent who accept ESP is less than the 66 percent who gave that answer to a similar 1996 Newsweek question.
One in five say they are at least somewhat superstitious, with young men, minorities, and the less educated more likely to go out of their way to seek luck. Twenty-six percent of urban residents — twice the rate of those from rural areas — said they are superstitious, while single men were more superstitious than unmarried women, 31 percent to 17 percent.
The most admitted-to superstition, by 17 percent, was finding a four-leaf clover. Thirteen percent dread walking under a ladder or the groom seeing his bride before their wedding, while slightly smaller numbers named black cats, breaking mirrors, opening umbrellas indoors, Friday the 13th or the number 13.
Generally, women were more superstitious than men about four-leaf clovers, breaking mirrors or grooms prematurely seeing brides. Democrats were more superstitious than Republicans over opening umbrellas indoors, while liberals were more superstitious than conservatives over four-leaf clovers, grooms seeing brides and umbrellas.
Then there's Jack Van Geldern, a computer programmer from Riverside, Conn. Now 51, Van Geldern is among the 5 percent who say they have seen a monster in the closet — or in his case, a monster's face he spotted on the wall of his room as a child.
"It was so terrifying I couldn't move," he said. "Needless to say I survived the event and never saw it again."
The poll, conducted Oct. 16-18, involved telephone interviews with 1,013 adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.