A baseless assertion.

Perhaps

Religions are designed to allow a few to control many.
The control is in the form of rewards and punishments.
Do this you get this, do that you don't get that.
Believe what I tell you or you will burn in Hell.
Believe what I tell you and you will be rewarded in Heaven.

Life is eternal so you better do what I tell you or you will be punished forever.
Life is eternal so when you do what I tell you you will be rewarded forever.

You are a sinner, only by believing what I tell you and doing what I tell you is there any hope for your immortal soul.

It all boils down to believe what I tell you, do what I tell you.

Religions don't like independent thought. Too many questions that can't be properly answered. Too much nonsense spoils the control.
Believe what I tell you, do what I tell you.

As for the non-believers that are happy and in control of their own lives, lets not talk about them.
Believe what I tell you, do what I tell you.
They will get whats coming to them, just you wait and see...wait, you won't see. Well I tell you, they will, so heed my words and believe what I tell you and do what I tell you.

Its a Caveman Bob scenario.

baseless? lol...are you gonna go to hell if you believe otherwise?

I am not being controlled, if that's what you're trying to suggest.
I spend my money as I see fit. I donate to whatever cause(s) I see fit, and set the amount that I see fit to give. I try to live a decent life where I don't hurt people or take advantage of them.
If there is an afterlife for me, fine.
If there isn't an afterlife, ah well, I won't know about it because I'll be dead, and I won't have missed out on much in my lifetime.

For an atheist, however, if there is an afterlife, he will miss out on a lot (an eternal life of experiencing wonder and joy, given up for about 70 years of selfish pleasure-seeking.)
And if there is no afterlife, the atheist is no better off than the believer.

I don't know what religious bodies you're referring to (perhaps the catholic church?) but no religious body is controlling me in any way. I'm free to attend, and free to stop attending. I can spend my money as I see fit. I can vote however I want.

The only "pressure" I experience, if it is even right to call it pressure, is the gentle encouragement to follow Christ to the best of my ability and to improve and become ever more Christ-like.

better safe than sorry, huh...

Have you ever met an atheist? We're not all selfish pleasure seekers, the only difference between us and you is we don't spend 100% of the day trying to please a mythical person...

YOU are responding personally to a general statement.
My focus was not on YOUR religious beliefs but religion in general.
I'm sorry you felt compelled to defend yourself, it was not my intentions.

Actually, I'm fully convinced of the reality of God and that He will grant eternal life to those who seek Him. But I wrote that previous comment more from an agnostic's perspective so that you could more easily relate to it.


Selfish pleasure seekers is kind of a broad term, and it doesn't mean that I'm saying you're all hedonists. It just refers to people who live life for themselves, do whatever they want to do and whatever pleases them, rather than doing what God would like them to do.

Well you put that to me, so naturally I feel like you're saying this of me specifically. And of course I can only give you my personal experience of religion. Other people's milage may vary, but I'm sure that within the same congregations that I've attended their experiences have been pretty much the same as mine.


You say "religions" as a general term, then use a caricature of the Christian religion specifically to "prove" your assertion. Even then, you're not really proving your assertion, but showing us your interpretation of what religion is about. You're not proving that it was "designed" to control people. Who were the people who wrote the scriptures then with the intent to control people? When did they write all these scriptures? How were they going to benefit from this exercise? How did they manage to create and then bury all these archaeological artifacts for later generations to dig up and "confirm" the scriptures as true? How did they manage to perpetrate this hoax without being caught out?
You better have concrete answers to these questions if you're gonna claim that religions were designed to control people.


Funny! In my church we meet in small groups about an hour before the service starts to discuss the bible and the meanings of the passages we've read that week. We think about what the message(s) in those passages might be. We think about how other parts of scripture might shed light on the meaning of the passages we've read. We ask questions. We answer questions. We probe deeply into the scriptures to discover what they're telling us.
There's a lot of independent thought going on there. And there's no pastor or other church authority figure there to "control" the flow of the discussion or to "direct" us what to think or believe about the passages we've read.

Seems to me you've got a rather distorted view of the Christian religion, or else perhaps you've had the misfortune of having attended a more cult-like sect where they like to control their flock tightly.

I better? No, buddy, opinions are our own, no matter what you think.... If you can't handle someone who's opinions differs from yours, than you have a problem... Fact, imo, that religion started as a fear of what people didn't know or understand... It started harmless enough, but then someone learned that when you threaten someone's imortal soul to a firey put in hell, they do what you say...

So do you think god was an alein? Back then, anyone with a bic lighter could pass off as a god..

No, God is not an alien. That would not explain our existence. Evolutionists already have a HUGE problem trying to explain abiogenesis. If some alien seeded life here, then you're just moving that abiogenesis problem to some other planet.

I think you give the ancient less credit than they deserve. They had technology back then you know. Surely you've heard of the Baghdad batteries, and the Antiketera (spelling?) mechanism? And how did the ancients build the pyramids, and Macchu Picchu, and many of the other wonders of the ancient world that we can't figure out how they did it?
The Israelites spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and during that time they constructed an entire portable temple, complete with various metal items cast from bronze, silver, and gold. There were also items that involved intricate wood working, and weaving of fine embroidered cloth. Pretty impressive for a people moving around while living in the desert. Could YOU achieve that?

sorry to burst your bubble, but evolution is more fact than theory...there's not one area of science where any scientist has all the answers

Evolution doesn't qualify as scientific, because it can't be repeated and tested in the lab. And as for it being more fact than theory... that's not right either, if evolutionists themselves are anything to go by, as can be seen from the following selection of quotes:

"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated, the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. ...
The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp.
It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances regretfully, as one could say.
We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists."

Wolfgang Smith,
Mathematician and Physicist. Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University. Former math instructor at MIT. Teilhardism and the New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of de Chardin. Tan Books & Publishers, pp. 1-2


"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.…
Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study."

Professor Stephen Jay Gould,
The Panda's Thumb, 1980, pp.179-181.


"This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists."

G. G. Simpson,
Tempo and Mode of Evolution (N.Y.: Columbia Univ., 1944), p. 106


"Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence for sustained trends in the evolution of most complex morphological adaptations."

'Species Selection: Its Range and Power,' 1988, p. 19


"The evidence given above makes it overwhelmingly likely that Lucy was no more than a variety of pygmy chimpanzee, and walked the same way (awkwardly upright on occasions, but mostly quadrupedal).

The 'evidence' for the alleged transformation from ape to man is extremely unconvincing."

Albert W. Mehlert,
Former Evolutionist & paleoanthropology researcher. "Lucy - Evolution's Solitary Claim for Ape/Man". CRS Quarterly, Vol 22, No. 3, p. 145


"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, was ... it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it.
That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. ...so for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people.
Question: 'Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true?'
I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence.
I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing – it ought not to be taught in high school'."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist. British Museum of Natural History, London. Keynote address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, November 5


"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future.
Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."

Malcolm Muggeridge,
Well-known Journalist and philosopher. Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo


"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the GREATEST HOAX ever."

Dr. T. N. Tahmisian,
Physiologist. Atomic Energy Commission. As quoted in: Evolution and the Emperor's New Clothes, 3D Enterprises Limited, title page


"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."

Prof. Louis Bounoure,
President Biological Society of Strassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum, Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research. The Advocate, p. 17

The bible is a book written by men I've never met and it doesn't matter what anyone wants to say as far as proof cuz..none of us were there. Do I think that man evolved from ape no..man has always been man just in a primitive form and all that has evolved is his thinking and his environment that he has changed in his evolutionary line of thinking.

We strive to find the answers to our existence because we don't know the answer so we adopt the answer that best suits our line of thinking..no one is wrong unto themselves works out rather nicely.

In my opinion we are what we are because that's what happened in the beginning of time as we know it.If we see that we are all part of the earth whether it be mineral or water .We are part of the whole and depending on what parts of the whole we possess makes us what we are whether it be plant or animal..jmo

We are as big as we are because we have an up close view but as we travel farther and farther into space the smaller we become until we become microscopic .We rationalize and realize our existence in our big microscopic world because it's how we think it is.

And until something comes along to offer up more intelligence than what we think with present day we will continue to think along the lines of intelligence possessed ..No telling how far from the truth we could be..or how close..none of us know no matter what we tell ourselves..back 2 square one..

One question: how do you explain Lucy then?

http://iho.asu.edu/about/lucys-story

An extinct form of ape as described by Richard Leakey in an article by the Institute for Creation Research..check it out..

I thought Lucy was the first full T-Rex fossil found?

edit: oh no, that was Sue.

Gotta look into this Lucy ape thing. Might prove interesting...

So you see here Tom is just another reason why the world should tune into the forums here ..No telling what one might learn... ..yea I'm joking..Of course that may be the next invigorating topic here..Did mankind evolve from the T rex..I will say one thing it's a nice break from all the politics..

adri, even older than Lucy...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091001-oldest-human-skeleton-ardi-missing-link-chimps-ardipithecus-ramidus.html