Has anyone else recived e-mails from religious fanatics in the last few days saying Christ is coming?

Hokay, first of all I was reading the beginning of this thread and you guys started talking about free will. I just want to say, that we do have free will. God just sets obstacles in front of our path to see what we do.
For example an elderly woman crossing the street.

Higher path: You help her cross the street.
God sees this as a check on the way to hevean.
Middle Path: You do nothing.
God sees this as a sin but not a major one.
Strike that, all sins are the same in God's eyes.
Lower Path: You hit the lady, pickpocket her etc.
God sees this as a sin too. But, sadly, all sins are the same in God's eyes.

I'm talking about an old woman who who needs help.

Now if you wxcuse me dinner is calling.

First of all why are you asking me what I ate for dinner?
second of all if you're wearing a Boyscout uniform it always works.

Ok lets use free will on the dimensional scale that seems to be the rage here. This is all hypothetical.

Because all possible pasts, presents, and futures, places and beings are all contained within one point on the tenth dimension, its possible that this could the dimension that God functions at. At the tenth dimension, you have no free will because everything you could possibly do is contained within that one point. Divine preordination lives.

However, being 3 dimensional creatures, we function not on the 10th, humans can't perceive infinity (i.e. possible pasts, presents, futures etc). Because we can't possibly know everything on the 3rd dimension, we have free will in our lives.

That's what they are, my thoughts. I've been on forums were saying something of that nature got me into trouble. While I know people here are more open-minded, its simply a precaution from getting yelled at.

We've talked in great detail about heaven and the exsitance of god, but what about hell and the devil? I have heared originally lucifer was only a minor problem, but the church in the dark ages played him and hell up to attract people to the churches. I even heard that the church declared Muslim bath houses demonic.

According to Dante, he is the most tortured of all the things in hell. His betrayal was the ultimate.

One of the theories that I've read is that he is the most tortured because he had a taste of paradise and is now cast out from it, whereas all of the other damned souls just know their existences on Earth and in Hell. Maybe it's because he is so tormented that he knows how to torture the newer souls in ways that others could never imagine...

He would be tortured by his memory of paradise, just we might be tortured by a warm summer day out the window of a class room in summer. Except worse.

I don't think I truly believe in satan and hell. I do believe the church overplayed that card and just created him to bring more people to church, whether they thought it was the right thing to do or not doesn't really matter now. Kind of like the whole Mary being a hooker. Load of crap that one pope decided to go with to make the "lower" women feel more comfortable coming to church. I think people need to realize that the bible we see today could very easily be taken out of context. The church sat down and decided exactly what texts were to go into it. Leaving many out. MAN chose what to put in the bible.

i think the church has told lies but to protect themselves, rather than people who go to churches, or to attract more people to their religion..

oh yeh who here agrees with me that religions should stop advertising themselves?? i mean it's okay to tell people about their religion but when you see people in markets trying to give out quotes from the bible or qu'ran, or when you see people coming from door to door trying to convert you to christianity.. don't you think this is wrong??

"God is this special person in the sky. He is knows everything and will always be your friend. He has these ten things that he doesn't want you to do. If you do them, you'll go to a special place with fire and brimstone and you'll suffer and scream until the end of time. But...He LOVES you!!"

The point of religion, and God, is to simplify the beginning of the universe, a way that skips the statistical improbabilities of random chance. But, when you think about it, the it is even LESS likely that God was created by random chance. If something created the creator (remember, only big, complicated things can make less complicated things: ie. a spearmaker can make a spear but a spear can't make a spearmaker) than that something must be EVEN LESS likely to have existed by random chance.

God was also used to explain the seemingly designed complexity of of all the organisms in existance (and many that have gone extinct) on Earth. But lets use the analogy of Mt Improbable. The top of the mountian is where we are at. The bottom of the mountain contains only the earliest single cell organisms. We look down the North side of Mt Improbable, a sheer cliff all the way to the bottom and think: there is no way we could, in one leap, come from the bottom to the top. But, as Darwin's theory of evolution suggested, Nature crawls up the gentle slope at the South side of Mt. Improbable. I know there still exists the improbability of the cosmos itself existing but remember: The existence of God is even less likely then the existence of the universe. (all the athiests can now smile smugly)

P.S. (Thankyou Richard Dawkins for writing a great book "The God Delusion"

basically, if something created something, then what created the thing in the first place, for example, the big bang explains where all of the planets are made from, however what caused the matter which met together in the big bang to get together, and how was this matter created initially?? etc. etc. its not about the creation of the earth as there is an explaination to that but there is no explanation to the explanation if that makes sense

G-d said "let there be light"

*big bang*

and there was light

(and a lot of noise and rubble)

Critdragon don't ask obvious questions. Everyone knows that God was created in a sweatshop.

Yeah, is it American?

A sweatshop is a horrible thing that some businesses imploy to save money. Their hire usually illegal immigrants and pay them very very low amounts of money (illegally) to do tedious jobs all packed into small rooms. Very close and hot, hence the sweatshop.

By the way, you should all keep in mind the the whole big bang theory is just that, a theory. There isn't really proof of it, it was just the best explination they could come up with so far :0). I do like the thought that once upon a time I was a pile of goo though.

Fizzer, the alternative is even less likely than the Big Bang. Never forget, God is just a hypothesis; its just one that can't be proven or disproven definitely at this moment in time.

Posted By: Militious

Sorry I keep posting but I read some of the earlier stuff again,

If God has a plan for everybody, then do we really have free will?

I believe not, as I said.

Who's to say God is a being? although he may be divine and flawless, he may not be what we can perceive or imagine as a being. What God truly may be, assuming he exists, is something more complex than a being, unknown to our knowledges or religions, and may never be.

Before the big bang, assuming the theory is correct, there was nothing, no space, no time, no light,no temperature, nothing except for absense. It's a difficult concept for humans to grasp, so it isn't. The same, I believe is the case with God, or a devine ruler.

It is probably hard for most humans to grasp that they can't grasp alot of things aswell.

My bad,

For everything else, there's MasterCard.