Hello, this is the first time I have posted on your site although I have been reading your comments for quite some time. I am a strong Atheist and have been a debater for quite some time without any formal training. While always looking to improve myself I was hoping this insightful forum could help improve my technique.

Included is an example of my work, if you could could criticise my insight and help me improve, I would apresiate it extensively...

I am Deliciously_Saucy: http://rmrk.net/index.php/topic,13865.0.html

Again, thank you for the time, and please excuse if this is in the wrong place~

Yeah Im an agnostic. I just can't help it.

Seriously I have another thought that hit me after I watched the ABC debate with that growing pains guy. Brian talked about all the horrific things that have been done by christians througout history. He even mentioned a more up-to-date hypocrite like Ted Haggard. But is this really a valid argument for the case of athiesm? I don't think so. I think Brian needs to put the shoe on the other foot for a moment and then rethink his thought here.

Here is what I mean. A man in the audience at this debate asked Brian and Kelly about horrible things that have happend in communist countries, countries that where athiestic. Kelly even mentioned some by name such as Hilter and Stalin. Now if Brians condems one religion because of all the hypocites and nut-jobs then he must apply the same logic to athiesm. If christianity is bad because of the Crusades then athiesm is bad because of the Holocaust or the actions of Stalin.

On TV you conveniently neglected to mention the SECOND law of thermo dynamics, which states that all matter and energy is changing in ONE direction, from a state of order to a state of chaos. So the sun will eventually expend itself and all the stars will expend themselves, and there will be nothing to put them back together (unless something put them together in the first place). If this LAW is true the universe cannot be infinitely old, because everything would have been in a state of complete chaos infinitely long ago.

As it stands, 99% of the cosmologist community in the U.S. accept the expansion of the universe as predicted by the big bang and 99.85% of biologists and earth scientists accept the old earth and evolution. 96% of the scientific community in the U.S. (including members of the scientific community not in the cosmology and life sciences fields) accepts the old universe and evolution. This percentage figure is only higher amongst foreign countries.*

I don't want this to degenerate into an argument over whether or not evolution is correct or whether or not the big bang is correct, but rather, I had an interesting question. If evolution and the old universe are so blatantly wrong, what accounts for this? How are so many scientists fooled, even the religious ones?

Human beings are clearly the only species on our Planet that believes in a god or any gods. Obviously, my cat doesn't believe in god.

So, my question to theists of any religion is, do you recognize the fact that your religion supports a thought that humans are the only important species on earth, and all of the other tens of millions of species are useless and not important in the eyes of your god.

the truth is that so many humans believe in god becuase we are the only ones who needed one. all the other animals on our planet can just be, but to humans that just wasn't enough. thousands of years ago, when there were no scientific facts to support anything, poeple made up gods, and a vast majority of people today still believe in these myths. to me, this is ridiculous.

Here is a question that my mind is having trouble with. I just watched the ABC debate and their was a lady who seemed pretty upset about cancer. Here is my trouble...if there is no diety who played a part in the creation of the world, and everything that is formed came as a result of evolution and a Big Bang, then what right do I have to complain about evil or suffering? A Christian friend of mine posed this to me. He said, "If everything happened by chaos then why should we expect anything else?"

The only real explaination that I can come up with is that we evolved into something that is open to getting cancer or AIDS or anything else. Is complaining about the problems in our world a good argument to use.

If I'm sitting on my porch and I see a red ball bounce past, I 'know' a few things about it:

1.) The ball is bouncing.

3.) The ball has speed, direction, and, by consequence, velocity. 

4.) The ball is red. 

Now.. things I can deduce.

1.) The ball has the ability to bounce.

2.) The ball has always been red.

Now.. things I can infer, (all things being equal, i.e., assuming the possible existence of perpetual motion), but not deduce.

1.) The ball has always been bouncing.

2.) The ball has always had this same speed, direction, and, by extension, velocity. 

How can a perfect God create an imperfect world? or “If God is all-powerful and all-knowing why didn’t He create people who couldn’t sin?” Christians usually respond by talking about free will and how love requires a choice. For true love to exist we need to choose to love.

While I believe that is true I think we should examine another answer: He is. God is creating a people who will posses the ability to love Him and free from the temptation to sin. Life is about God creating us to be the people He desires us to be.

If we go with the premise that love needs to be chosen, then if God desired creatures who, not only could He love, but also would love Him in return, then He needed to create creatures who also had the ability reject Him.

No preconceptions, assumptions, or one liners, PLEASE.

"If all of life is meaningless, and ultimately absurd , why bother to march straight forward, why stand in the queue as though life as a whole makes sense?" —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There

If everyone completely passes out of existence when they die, what ultimate meaning has life? Even if a man's life is important because of his influence on others or by his effect on the course of history, of what ultimate significance is that if there is no immortality and all other lives, events, and even history itself is ultimately meaningless?

I posited this position in an earlier conversation but never carried it out to its proper conclusion nor received any opinion on it-- so here it goes. This is not what I NECESSARILY believe, yet, for arguments sake it seems to be useful as well as not, NECESSARILY, contradictory to my beliefs.

So here we go:

God is everything. This is not to say that everything is God. A proper analogy would be this:

"In the same way that a group of particles creates a sentient thing known as 'your brain', all things create a sentient thing known as 'God'."

In the same way that one would not consider a sodium ion a 'brain' it is part of the 'brain'.