Abortion: again, it is not *life* we’re arguing about, but being human. what do you mean my argument is so lame? could you elaborate? then who draws the line on what constitutes human and what does not? god? how will we know where he drew i…t? how do you know he draws it at the sperm touching the egg? an apple tree is not an apple tree until it doesn’t look like one. until then, it is just a seed. if your morals prohibit the killing of trees, you can still go into the ground and remove the seed, because it is just a seed, and a seed by definition is not a tree. human “seeds” if you will are not human beings, hence doctors are not “annihilating generations of human beings”, because the fetuses were never human beings to begin with, and whether they are or aren’t is 100% subjective; or is there an objective, absolute, ultimate standpoint on that? what is it and why is it objective, and what is it based on? feel free to express why you think abortion is outrageous, answering these questions in the process.

i think the word delusional needs some explanation: it is someone who believes in something with certainty in spite of massive evidence showing the contrary. now, what part of this applies to doctors performing abortion? because you just called them delusional (and evil, but being evil is subjective here, because it is based on your opinions on this matter, while being delusional is not, so i’ll just deal with the delusional part).

you’re going back to your “everything around us screams of a designer” argument, which i dealt with a couple hundred times during our discussion. just because our limied human mind cannot comprehend the workings of the universe, does it mean that there surely is a creator? not in the slightest, so the “this is too complex to have been a coincidence” argument is null. i repeat, null. if you think it is not, explain why not, but please, stay away from subjective claims, such as “i as a human being think (thus it must be true) that the world is too complex to have been…” because this argument is based on comprehension of our human minds being in accord with the universe’s workings, and that our concept of “too complicated” can be used when defining why the world came to exist; and those are some seriously wrong suppositions.
you gave me no objective examples that even suggest that there is a designer. all of your examples can be explained via non-god-involving ways, but if i missed something, and you have something truly objective in mind, feel free to share.

you still don’t get why i’m not religious. it has nothing to do with me not wanting to be held accountable for my actions, but everything to do with me choosing not to believe in something that there is no evidence of.
of course i could be wrong! but that DOESN’T mean you’re automatically right!
person a: might be anything, i’m not sure, i might even be wrong.
person b: it was god. i’m 100% sure. i’m so not wrong.
which mindset is better suited to consider other possibilities other than what it currently believes? person a? you bet. imagine someone who believes in another, false religion so blindly that there is nothing to convince him otherwise. for me, you are that person.

“I and the millions of other TRUE believers in the world are completely out of our minds, wrong, and have been the cause of all the problems in the world today. THAT, my friend, is a rash, judgemental statement to make.”
did i say that? not exactly. religion itself is to blame for many problems today, however not for ALL the problems of course, and i never said that, neither that individual peaceful people mindig their own business are the cause. i said religion as an idea, as a way of thinking does that, not individual people. that’s why i have no problem with religious individuals, it’s just the effects of HALF THE WORLD being religious that i hate, because it sways the whole of humanity towards “not thinking”.

“When one loses connection with the Creator, he has to invent his own form of reality”
haha, there’s no way i’m going to be the one inventing a form of reality. oh, no. i have all the evidence i need to know that the world i live in is the actual world i actually live in. YOU and half the world are the ones who invent unseen, unknowable, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient beings. i only believe in what i am sure of, and i am only sure of what i can sense with my senses. i don’t “believe”, i “know”, and i “know” because i “experience”. you “know” because you “believe”, and that is a huge difference.

another thought: saying that through abortion, doctors “[annihilate] generations of human beings” is like saying i’m slaughtering puppies because i got my dog sterilized. preventing someone/something from being created is not the same as killing it.

Bringing coincidence into the picture is real interesting. There are a lot of things we don’t know and consider coincidence, in turn it is easy to see divine intervention in them. Also there are things we do know, like the building blocks of life, but the fact that those particles when combined make life can still be considered a coincidence and again a place for divine intervention. We could keep going on like this forever as we learn more, we find more that still needs to be learned. This is actually looking for god in the unknowns of our understanding, but even if we learn them, there is still the question of why and how it turned out to be like that.
We may know the building blocks of life, but do we know the building blocks of the soul, of conscience, of thoughts. We may be able to see the nerves firing when we use our mind with the right instruments, but where do they come from, where does creativity come from, inspiration?

Having Faith and wanting something aren’t really the same thing as far as I understand (and according to my dictionary ). Having faith in something means that you believe it is right, doesn’t have to be correct, but for you it seems like the right thing, like having faith in a leader or an ideal.
If I believe, it will be so … now that really is a good one. If I believe, it still doesn’t mean it will be like that. With certain things, believing will either get you into the mind-set or make you take action to having things turn out like that, but that is more than just believing. With other things, you just got to have faith, just hope that it turns out for the best.

Pro: onto your facts. the two that you mention are not actually facts. first, the world all around us “scream[ing] of a creator”. let me rephrase your words. “the world seems so complex that there’s no way this could be a coincidence.” now, the information we collected so far seems to indicate that even the most intricate things – anything, essentially – can spring into existence merely by chance. if you can’t wrap your mind around that, it’s okay – I can’t either. my point is that looking around you and declaring “okay this is too complex for me so it can’t happen by chance, only by a creator” is kind of a selfish supposition. just because you (as a human being) will never be able to wrap your mind around how the world came into existence and how it functions the way it does, does not, again, directly imply that a creator is involved. it just proves that we are all too stupid basically.

second, evidence of Jesus. whether or not being able to prove that he really existed as a historical figure is irrelevant to me, because as far as i’m concerned, he was just a man. what is important though is whether or not he was the son of god. when i say evidence, i mean first-hand experiences of his miracles, HIS writings (not the bible, which is only word of mouth, and wasn’t being written until like a hundred years after his death). the problem is that according to you, there is only one Jesus-scenario: his body hasn’t been found because he ascended to heaven. period. if he hadn’t been divine, he hadn’t ascended, thus his body would have been found, so CLEARLY, he did ascend, so he WAS/IS divine. in actuality, there is another scenario, which doesn’t have any divine elements to it. bodies from 2000 years ago simply can not be identified. he probably died, buried, and did not ascend. did any of the 500 witnesses leave first-hand evidence that they themselves actually witnessed his revival or ascension? nope. not a single shred of that exists – only the bible, which is by no means first-hand, also, i wouldn’t like to get into it (yet).

yes, i CHOOSE not to have faith in Jesus’ divinity, because faith by definition is believing in something without evidence, i.e. the process of “not thinking”. science is appealing to me because it is something based on logic, evidence, and reason. it is about setting up hypotheses, then trying to disprove them. thus, a scientist is always asking questions, sort of always being sceptical about his own ways. religion however discourages, or i’ll go so far as to say prohibits rational thinking by turning beliefs with little to no evidence into unshakeable truth. i don’t need to have “faith” in the physical world, because i have all the evidence that i could ever want.

denying Jesus’ divinity might remind you of people denying the holocaust, but let me add one teeny-tiny detail. holocaust is a fact. everyone knows it happened because there is unshakable evidence to support it. anyone who chooses to simply ignore the cold hard facts is out of his mind. now, do you think that a couple of people telling tales of Jesus long after he died is in the same ballpark as actual, verifiable historical records? if they were, we wouldn’t call it religion, we would call it history.

let me ask you the following: do you think something will be the way you’d like it to be if you have faith in it? would a million dollars fall from the sky if i wanted it to? of course not. but you yourself say: you have faith in god (according to you, your belief is faith+fact, now i’m only talking about the pure faith part). in other words, you believe in him because you choose to, not because you have any kind of evidence. so you DO think that i would be closer to that million dollars just by having faith that it can actually fall from the sky. i didn’t mean to ridicule you, i just wanted to show how absurd the idea of “if i believe, it will be so” is. scientists don’t have “faith” in the outcome of experiments, because they know very well that it changes nothing. god won’t be any closer to existing just by having faith that he does. what is left after we subtract faith? facts, from which, let’s admit, there’s not much of. facts, by definition, can be verified using experiments. name one experiment, containing no ambiguity whatsoever, that even comes close to proving god’s existence or Jesus’ divinity. just to make it more interesting, make it so that it can be used towards proving the christian god or Jesus, but not the other gods or prophets. after realizing there’s no such thing, you will realize that your faith in god is not based on faith and fact, but solely on faith.

i thought of a carrot when you asked, and you know what happened? electrical charges surged through my brain, finding their paths among billions of neurons, stimulating correct ones so that my brain called forth the image of a carrot. thought itself only exists as a stimulus in one’s mind (mind = the consciousness of the brain). if we had the technology, we could actually see charges racing past neurons, we can’t now, but we DO know what thoughts are; by no means mysterious semi-existing somethings, but electrical connections between the neurons of our brain. there’s no mystery here, the only reason why we can’t see thoughts is that we don’t have the proper equipment yet to make them visible real-time. see, there isn’t anything which is “real but undetectable”, because things which are not energy, nor mass do not exist. we might simply not possess the required technology to measure everything, but then again, not being able to measure something and something existing AND NOT BEING ABLE TO BE measured is two different things. the latter is just a hypothetical concept, because if something exists, then it can be measured somehow, we might not possess the required technology to do so just yet.

because of this, so-called “unseen things” or “unmeasurable things” can and do exist, but one day they will be probably revealed for what they are, just as people figured out lots of things since the beginning of christianity that they attributed to god before discovering otherwise.

Pro: The fact that i had to “accept” and “cope” with the conclusions indicates that reality is frightening. It is for everyone who isn’t religious. knowing that your life probably means nothing great, that you’re not part of some giant plan, that your existence is merely an accident, and when you die, you will simply cease to exist, no heaven, no angels, just the nothingness you came from, is pretttty frightening.Still, i prefer to live a life in the real world, than to comfort myself with a delusion, that, by the way, will always prevail, because people will never accept that one day, everything as they know it will simply cease to exist, and there’s nothing that they can do about it.

Answering your question: there could be something bigger, of course. no one will ever know. Hell, there could be millions of gods playing cricket with galaxies. no mocking intended, i just wanted you to see what “can” be. anything what you can believe. still, you (or many people) believing something doesn’t make it real. people make gods, not the other way around.

Intelligent design. oh, how i love this topic. Are you familiar with the infinite monkey theorem?
Briefly: suppose you have a monkey, an infinite amount of time, and a typewriter. if you make the monkey type randomly for eternity, it will eventually type a body of works, all the works of Shakespeare for example.
if someone happens to born when the monkey starts typing say Hamlet, that person would swear that the monkey is in fact intelligent, that there’s no way that this is a coincidence. yet, it is, and it is because time is infinite, and pretty much what can happen, will happen.
same thing with the universe(s).

no, there’s probably no intelligent creator out there, we probably only have come a looong time since the beginning of time, and many (as in really many) things happened before this universe came into existence.
people are simply too primitive to understand “beginning of time” for example, and that’s why we have to fabricate imaginary beings to fill these holes, because not knowing bugs humans.

Con: Thanks but I must disagree. It’s the “not knowing” as you say which is a clear, scientific indication of the greater knowing that each one of us knows, and that is that there is a greater design and a great Designer. You and others like you have settled for the “lesser” reality when the greater is yet to be known. But you have accepted what you can see and figure out with your limited human reasoning when the reality is that the unseen world is bigger and much more powerful than the seen world. This is something that really messes you and other people up who believe that only what can be seen, felt and touched physically is really real. If I asked you to explain scientifically what personality is, you couldn’t with any sort of solid scientific basis whatsoever. Same with love. You can say it is a chemical reaction, but in reality, what you “feel” in your body is the chemical reaction called reproductive organs wanting to reproduce and be satisfied. That is not love. You did not address my question about increasing number of high-level scientists who are realizing that there must be a creator. What do you as one who truly has no ultimate purpose in life deal with these colleagues of yours who have been at it much longer than you have and have reached different conclusions? Or, are you limiting yourself to the scientists who agree with your standpoints? You see, I have heard all of your theories and studied these things myself. But, in reality, my question for you would be have you ever honestly and forthrightly asked the unseen creator to reveal himself to you? You see, I do look at science, but you seem to refuse to take an honest look at how science is a reflection of something much bigger. You seem to have limited yourself to the physical manifestation of science rather than recognizing that it cannot answer every question. To me, the saddest part of atheism is that everything is absolutely meaningless….all relationships are meaningless, all work is meaningless, when in reality, every person on the planet knows innately that life has meaning or else you wouldn’t get up in the morning and go and do whatever it is you do. That fact in itself points to something beyond the chemical combinations firing in our brains. You have never died…how do you know that we simply cease to exist? You believe that because that’s what scientists have said is true. There are plenty of examples of people who have quite literally died and come back to life to say that there is life after death…but scientists don’t give those any credit because it would blow their theories about life being completely meaningless. On yet another note, why should we even look for cures for diseases? Why not simply die and let people die because life is meaningless and we go to a non-existent state anyway, so why even try to have life? There is something IN us, Bence, that screams that there is meaning and it is much bigger than we want to give credit to because we have a very false understanding of the One who created it all. By the way, I am enjoying our intelligent, non-combative discussion here. I always appreciate it when adults can dialogue without offense.