monte the statement was not to determine if God's existence can be proven. It was more of an exercise in rhetoric. I guess the point of it was that as evidence of God falls into the past, a scientific minded cultures belief in God will naturally wain.
What i am trying to say i guess is that the evidence is there, its a matter of is it legitimate evidence, or just fairy tales.

This is where I wanted the conversation to really go in the fist place. The real reason for the creation of religion was the lack of knowledge we have about our environment (be that locally, globally, cosmically, etc.). We simply haven't know much about the outside world/universe in our time of existence. Every leap in science we make requires theologians to make an equal leap in faith to "reinvent" their belief structure to match our scientific understanding.

The Greeks and Romans didn't know shit about weather, so they created god to explain it. Zeus with his lightning bolts, Poseidon with his mean seas, etc. Once science advanced to give us an understanding of what we couldn't explain, the need for that portion of religion faded and went away.

We will continue to make advances that will reach further and further into outer space. Will this answer the question of where existence began or why? Probably not. But every step we take gets us closer to the answers we all seek.

I think philosophy and religion is both the easy way out, and the hard road to hoe (not to Kehoe's house....just hoe). Religion allows you to take other's personal BELIEFS and expound on them with your own personal twists. The search is almost always within than it is outside yourself.

Opinion - If societies spent less time devoting themself to the different religions of the world and more time trying to advance ourselves, the world would be a better place.

Quick math (all conjecture) - 7 billion people on earth.....average time spent worshipping per day = 1 hour?....365 days per year (excluding leap years)

7,000,000,000 x 1 x 365 = 25.5 trillion hours per year spent on religion

Imagine using that time for something more constructive...

If Thraxle = YOU in your statement dete........then I'm all for having monte and dete as my slaves.........(I'd sell monte......he's a manipulative mother fucker and all those smiles are used to give me a false sense of security.....he'll backstab me and take my home and wife one day)

my opinion is that without religion our world would be a very depressing place. I mean think of how much good various religions do. How many less hospitals would we have in the world without the Catholics. How many more people would starve or freeze without help from their local church? And if you say somebody else would just step up to the plate, that is a huge cop out. The whole notion of helping somebody who cannot help you is a religious idea. Without religion you can say goodbye to wellfare, universal healthcare, foreign relief efforts, and pretty much any other goodwill program that any government on this planet has. Because i hate to break it to you, but throughout history societies with little or no religion have not been very kind to their meek.

Without religion we wouldn't be fighting 2 wars in the Middle East right now. Plenty of money would be saved from that and used elsewhere. There'd be a huge influx of extra taxable cash that would be taken away from the religion industry here in the states.

Good doers wouldn't disappear just because religion does. Their efforts could be placed into completely different areas of charity.

i dunno monte,

you seem to have received proof. or at least proof enough for your satisfaction.

most people don't have experiences like the one you had. why do you think that is? an infallible deity would know the precise level of proof each of us needs to believe. you got yours? why are the 67% of the non-christian world denied of that same courtesy?

"For me though the end goal is to be pleasing in the eyes of my creator."

how could an infallible being experience pleasure as a result of the actions of puny humans? how small are we trying to make god here?

thrax,

not only could we be doing something more productive with our time if we didn't invest so much of it in theological contemplation, sometimes religion is actually counter-productive so i think its an even greater hole than that.

"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."

~ Cardinal Bellarmine, at the trial of Galileo in 1615

finding pleasure in your creations is not belittling.

Also the wars in the middle east have little to do with religion imo. A lot of these so called "Islam extremists" Islam supports violence no more then does Christiandom or Buddism.

god has a boner