[quote]...because God is in control my life...[/quote] What? Are you saying that God controls your life?

[quote]I simply replied with: "They are not TRUE Christains."[/quote][url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman]No True Scotsman Fallacy[/url] [quote]This is what I believe with all of my heart and all of my soul. Nothing will ever change it.[/quote]So you're blatantly admitting that you're stubborn and you won't listen to people when they criticize you? Gotcha.

I'm mixed. I don't really believe God built the Earth in just 6 days, I believe the Earth was built and has been around for billions of years. I do, however, believe in their ideals and their morals. Of course, I go to an all Catholic private school, so I was bound to pick up some sort of belief.

:D

So essentially you claim to be able to pick and choose the parts from the bible you agree with, and let that define what a Christian is. To be a true christian in the sense of the bible you have to agree with slavery, as the bible condones it. If you don't agree with slavery or you think homosexuality is not an abomination you are not a true christian, fact. This however is a good thing. You can believe in your crazy fairytales all you want but when you start to try and represent this ideology as being something even close to being moral you are going off the deep end of sanity.

These types of posts are allowed now?

None of this changes the fact that your beliefs are painfully stupid. At least if you believe all of the crappy stories like virgin birth, Noah's Ark, water to wine, walking on water, and all the other Bologna. But even that doesn't help if you believe it's more likely there's a benevolent being than someone made up some things to take advantage of people. The fact your a Christian means nothing to me except the fact that you're likely gullible.

That picture pretty much sums it up. If you'd never been told all those stupid stories as a child, you would not believe in it. In the UK, primary schools begin teaching and making you sing hymns and "praise" God from about 4 years of age. As children are easily influenced, I myself believed in it all for several years. When I got to around 8 years old, I thought to myself, what we are being taught is absolutely ridiculous, and as I was old enough to think for myself a bit more, I stopped believing in it and learned about science instead. Not everyone my age did the same thing, and for some reason it annoys me that because we were indoctrinated as children, we have people still believing in an outdated religion. I wasn't taught about evolution in school until I was 13/14, and I think that it's wrong that my generation went through 10 years of brainwashing before we learnt about the other point of view in any detail. Perhaps if the education system went about it in a different way it wouldn't irk me so much, but when Christianity is shoved down your throat, and they tell you ridiculous stories, it is hard not to bash it.

No one is a [i]true[/i] Christian. Religion corrupts people and entire societies. Science and logic (which religious people often lack) can move humanity forward. I hope that one day we will be able to travel to other solar systems and create new societies on other planets. I hope that we'll figure out how to build working quantum computers and that we'll make new discoveries that'll help us understand how our brain works. But unfortunately there are those who argue against science and even logic. People who deny evolution just like people who deny the holocaust, people who think that creationism should be thought in school and that organisations such as NASA should get even less funding than they do. [i]"Science flies you to the Moon, religion flies you into skyscrapers"[/i] Not all religious people are bad for humanity, but religion is often used as a tool to get power and influence over people. It does A LOT more bad than good. /rant

Let me guess your preist told you that [quote]Jehovah witnesses, Mormons, Catholics. They all have their own little different belief that is not from the Bible.[/quote] Though I am biased towards JWs (My parents) I can possitivly say they and other "unconventional" religions follow more closely to bible standards then a lot of modern christianity. I have heard aguements from lots of leaders seeing as my extended family seems to have a hand in every possible faith on earth (Obviously not but does seem like it). In everyone that I have heard there is something that I could argue that they dont follow by christs example. 1. Christ preached why doesnt the majority of christans preach? 2. celebrating holidays which are obviously false (Halloween) ETC,ETC. In the end it determines how one interprets the bible, and what each religion decides to follow. IMO modern christianity would not be fairing so greatly in gods eyes. PS Jws are considered christians . They just get bashed because they wake everyone up on a saturday morning and that they follow bible principles more closly then many leaders care to do.

Thank you very much OP. You've basically encompassed everything that I've been thinking. Glad to see that I'm not the only one on here. It is kind of funny though. People today always talk about "tolerance tolerance tolerance," yet in reality they are some of the most intolerant people in the world. They always bash us Christians simply because we believe something that they don't. I can tolerate (no pun intended) someone being respectful about presenting their opinions, but a large majority acts like we're complete and utter idiots.

God: "Dont worry I will love you unconditionally forever and ever but if you dont believe in me I will send you to suffer for eternity" /thread.

How do you become born again? I really honestly want to know :) I have done things i'm not happy with, I want to be free from the worries of my past sins. Do you know how to become born again?

I'm Catholic (in a sense, I pick and choose what I believe) and I go to a Jesuit school (basically Catholics with liberal views on interpreting the Bible and social matters) and I have no idea what you are talking about OP. Christians are humans and no better off than anyone else. All Christians are imperfect and have free will and can be a Christian and be full of hate. Look at many Church's views on gays, that's completely hateful. Being Christian means nothing more than believing in Christ. And Satan doesn't exist. The temptations in the desert? That was Jesus's human self just tempting him to abuse the power that he has. The only other main mentions of Satan? In the Old Testament as a way for people to scare each other into acting nice so that they wouldn't be sent to hell. I see a Christian as someone who has a belief and follows it, there is nothing special with them.

My favorite character in the bible was Judas that dude was such a badass. It was an OK story I felt lost at time do to lots of plot holes and the many characters. I may read it again in the future.

You're right. People say Christians are full of so much hate, but in the bible it says nobody can judge but God himself. So people who do those things, or say things like God hates fags, those are not REAL Christians. My girlfriend is Christian and so is her family, I'm atheist and they love me, and they are some of the nicest people around, because they know they cannot judge, that's God's job. So whenever you see a self proclaimed "Christian" spewing hate, tell them to their face they are not a real Christian and bring up the fact that in the bible itself it says you cannot judge. How can they argue that??

That may have been me, I still have the conversation thanks to this new site. I wasn't the one who instigated it either. The initial conversation was in a thread of which I don't remember much. And I've already heard that reply/explanation so many times. It doesn't change across many of the various sub-context interpretations of the same belief system. If you believe something, that's fair enough. If you wish to hold it close to you, I have no problem with that unless you're using it as an excuse to be a prick. What I [b]don't[/b] like is when people start preaching to or pushing their beliefs upon other people. There's no need for it and all it does is cause friction and unease. If I know what religion you follow from any other way than visual cues or other people, you're probably talking about it more than you should be. I do have my own beliefs, and they aren't encompassed by the simple labels of "atheist" or "religious". Does anyone know what they are? -blam!- no, because I understand that they're MY personal beliefs and until asked, I won't even [i]consider[/i] talking about them because, you know, NOBODY ELSE NEEDS TO KNOW. The problem with the "But a lot of *certain religious people* are nice people. It's just the extremists that are like that" excuse causes issues too. The more you allow people to practice their own hateful or damaging version of beliefs under the title of a certain religion, the harder it is to distance the two and separate the dangerous ones from the inert ones. The saturation of "good" practitioners amongst the community essentially defends the beliefs of the extremists. THAT is what is so damaging about such a widespread and self protected religion under a single label, even if their beliefs differ greatly. We’ve heard it a million times: “The version of religion you criticize is a fringe minority. It’s not representative of the whole. Christianity is not the Westboro Baptist Church, Judaism is not the orthodox hassidim who insist that women sit at the back of their buses in Brooklyn, and Islam is not the terrorists and the men who stone women to death for daring to regard themselves as anything other than a shameful second class citizen/object whose only desire should be to please the man who owns her.” So say I’ve got myself a machine gun. Don’t laugh. British transsexual women can have imaginary machine guns too. Now let’s say I fire my imaginary machine gun into a small cluster of lizardmen. Let’s say out of the two dozen imaginary bullets I fire, fourteen miss. Were those bullets any less lethal than the ones that hit their mark? Ridiculous and violent metaphor? You bet! But bear with me. Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes religious beliefs end up manifesting amongst people who are kind and decent. But the kindness and decency is not necessarily resultant from the religion, and while it mitigates the danger of the religious belief it doesn’t necessarily make that belief any less dangerous in and of itself. The fact that religion often fails to manifest as violence does not in any way detract from the underlying potential it carries for violence. Religion doesn’t necessarily make a good person any more good, but it can make a dangerous person a lot more dangerous by giving them conviction, certainty, and an excuse. Let’s say we have 100 believers, and 99 of them are people with enough compassion, empathy, common sense, and understanding of consequences to not take the passages in their spiritual texts about stoning adulterers seriously. One of them has genuinely hostile misogynist attitudes, and extremely violent feelings towards his ex-wife who cheated on him. He himself may not necessarily act on those attitudes, but this holy book of his tells him it’s okay, and his faith in God, armored from criticism, in which the intellectual brake lines have been cut, gives him all the rationalizations he could ever need. Meanwhile, his congregation, the 99 fellow believers who would never dream of capital punishment for adultery, egg him on in his faith and his belief and his adherence to the holy book. They thereby maintain the mentalities that though for them (luckily, incidentally) are not dangerous are for him a ticking time bomb. They not only maintain it, they fuel and celebrate it. Spurned on by his faith, which he uses to excuse his hatred of his ex, he one day murders her, permitting and forgiving himself by believing it had been the will of his God. The 99 believers say “it wasn’t us! It’s not our fault! We’re not ALL like that!” But it was them, too. They collectively participated in the conditions that allowed the crime to occur. There is harm in the absence of critical thought, though it doesn’t always manifest everywhere this absence occurs. There is harm in ideology. There is a dangerous potential for violence in every religion… which is often only a potential, except when it’s not.