Is being gay a sin according to your religion?

[SkepticThinker]

Read what an extremely prominent, atheist, biochemist said. If his words are wrong, argue with him, not me. I personally give his words an edge over yours. He knows better than you what is impossible re the issue. The experiments you cite have very serious flaws based upon the presence of oxygen, or not, and the process of disociation. You simply can';t have it both ways, which you are trying to do, no oxygen, no life, oxygen, deconstruction of the alleged life forming compounds, spontaneous generation of life can';t happen either way. Your experiments are out of date, as are the assumptions they are premised on.

He's not here to argue with. You are. If you don't want to defend quotes you provide, then why bother providing them in the first place?

Miller-Urey is not the only experiment:

http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/new-study-revisits-miller-urey-experiment-quantum-level/
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news-archive/8975.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/primordial-soup-urey-miller-evolution-experiment-repeated/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003986161900339
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13731262

 

[SkepticThinker]

Poor Dr. Gould. I wondered how many times he had to spin in his grave considering how many desperate creationists in the quest for scientific confirmation quoted him as an example of anti evolution.

You seem to ignore entirely what he said. Which gives now overwhelming evidence that my interpretation of micro evolutionist was correct.

He just objected on the basic mechanisms of evolution (puntuated equilibrium vs. gradualism) , but he never doubted for a second about evolution and common descent (e.g. The hominous fish in our family album). He actually fought fiercely against any attack to evolution in public schools. Maybe its time to render him honor by quoting him correctly.

Yes, I quoted the Bible when I said that we and chimps are the same kind. Who else would use the word "kind" when applied to modern biology?

Ciao

- viole

He also fought fiercely against being misquoted by creationists.

 

[InChrist]

Why do the poor caterpillars have to pay the price for a sin they never committed?

I don't see it as caterpillars "paying the price" for sin, nevertheless, they and all the animal kingdom are suffering the repercussions and impact of human sin because God gave humanity dominion and stewardship over the earth. Human, sin, failure, and fall brought corruption to all the physical systems. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Romans 8:20-21

The animals, not having moral natures, were not guilty of sin, but they also shared in the curse, for they were, as Adam, made of the dust of the ground. Like Adam's body, their bodies also must return to the ground. There is death and suffering in the world only because there is sin in the world. Humanity bears this responsibility and I think it is all the more grievous because it so negatively impacts innocent animals. Yet, God is using this time of decay and death on earth to permanently deal with and get rid of sin.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:23

...there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. Rev. 21:4

 

[SkepticThinker]

I don't see it as caterpillars "paying the price" for sin, nevertheless, they and all the animal kingdom are suffering the repercussions and impact of human sin because God gave humanity dominion and stewardship over the earth. Human, sin, failure, and fall brought corruption to all the physical systems. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Romans 8:20-21

The animals, not having moral natures, were not guilty of sin, but they also shared in the curse, for they were, as Adam, made of the dust of the ground. Like Adam's body, their bodies also must return to the ground. There is death and suffering in the world only because there is sin in the world. Humanity bears this responsibility and I think it is all the more grievous because it so negatively impacts innocent animals. Yet, God is using this time of decay and death on earth to permanently deal with and get rid of sin.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:23

...there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. Rev. 21:4

I'm glad I don't worship such a god.

 

[viole]

Yet, God is using this time of decay and death on earth to permanently deal with and get rid of sin.

What is He waiting for? This seems to take forever.

Ciao

- viole

 

[InChrist]

But that makes no sense. If his creation was good, and he is omnipotent and omniscience, how could his creation have been doomed to fail?

I think the possibility for failure was there because human beings are free moral agents with the capacity to fall short...which occurred.

[QUOTE="Shadow Wolf, post: 4675483, member: 2558"I don't to be or try to be a know-it-all. But I do know there are no answers for many of my questions. The Bible says the son will not pay for the sins of the father, but Cain and Abel were punished by being born into the corrupt world and being brought into a corrupt nature because of what their parents did. Why?[/QUOTE]

True, children are not responsible for the sins of the father. I see this as meaning that Cain, Abel, or anyone are only accountable for their own sins in regard to their standing before God, eternal spiritual state and destiny. I think something different is happening in regard to the conditions on earth which has been impacted by the damaging consequences of sin. Because the first humans, who were given dominion and stewardship, chose the way of death instead of life this brought not only a broken relationship with God, but overall death and decay to the earth and all physical life. Yet, I believe God is using this dying earth for revealing how bad sin is and for the process of eliminating it forever.

 

[InChrist]

What is He waiting for? This seems to take forever.

Ciao

- viole

The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is patient toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.
2 Peter 3:9

He is waiting for many more to wake up and come to the realization of the detrimental effects of sin and repent and be set free for eternity. Maybe He is waiting for you.

 

[InChrist]

I'm glad I don't worship such a god.

Why? Do you think God should allow sin, pain, and suffering to go on and on forever without putting it to death.

 

[viole]

The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is patient toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.
2 Peter 3:9

He is waiting for many more to wake up and come to the realization of the detrimental effects of sin and repent and be set free for eternity. Maybe He is waiting for you.

If he is waiting for people like me, then I doubt sin will ever be beaten.

So, is He waiting for us to do His job?

Ciao

- viole

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Allow one of your beliefs to make the point perfectly clear. Harvard biochemist and Nobel laureate, George Wald; "When it comes to the origin of life there are only two possibilities : creation or spontaneous generation., There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved 100 years ago, but that leads to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds, we therefore choose to believe the impossible, that life arose spontaneously by chance "

The thing about a "creator" is that it doesn't have to be god. For all we know, some alien species dropped off some stuff in the oceans, and life on Earth was started in a manner similar to a "sea monkey" aquarium. And there are many proposed hypotheses into how life started here, and they don't rely on spontaneous generation or a creator.

Once again, the sampling is tiny, tiny enough to say that any other representative fossils of the general have not been discovered, If you have a partial skeleton, or two, how is it possible to claim these as representative of an entire population ? Anomalies are anomalies

Except we're pretty good at noticing anomalies, piecing together the whole from a few bones (the bones, after all, never lie and record far more about us than most people realize), and we have never found any homo sapiens outside of our own time era. We find a bone, and even if it's just one bone we can determine were it fit in the body, what it was used for, and even typically the species it belongs to. We combine the data of what we do have, which even with just fragments gives us a clear enough picture to know what we are looking at. You don't need a puzzle to be 100% finished to know what the final result looks like. And we aren't talking about a few fossils, but hundreds of fossils that have been found in numerous places.

DNA and RNA aren't life.

DNA and RNA are pretty much life. Without them, we have no life at all.

In the alleged primordial sea they would disconnect as fast and as easily as they connected. The strands would destruct as easily as they constructed.

Not necessarily. And this idea is not just anywhere out in the sea, but under specific conditions that appear around thermal vents.

If there were no ozone layer, you would die, not get a tan.

But we are still bombarded with UV rays. So much, in fact, it can cause severe damage to the skin and give us cancer.

If the oxygen layer was present to support the ozone layer, then oxygen was present to destroy the alleged life building blocks. If there was no oxygen, no ozone layer, then life could not have existed

Or, rather, as is far more likely, things were simply different, and there was far less oxygen that we have now. There would have been more carbon dioxide, and as life began to develop, these early life forms developed the earlier versions of photosynthesis and took in carbon dioxide and released oxygen as a respiratory waste (the opposite of us, taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide and respiratory waste).
http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/tdc02.sci.life.cell.stetteroxygen/life-before-oxygen/

Three billion years ago single-celled underwater bacteria used sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into tiny oxygen bubbles. Soon plants were turning an atmosphere full of volcanic carbon dioxide into oxygen. As we learn in this video segment from Interactive NOVA: "Earth," photosynthesis created a good home for animals and humans, though not for some primitive organisms. They had to retreat to where oxygen couldn't reach them. Join researchers as they search for these organisms, now considered tiny time capsules from a time before there was oxygen on Earth.

You simply can';t have it both ways, which you are trying to do, no oxygen, no life, oxygen

They are called anaerobic organisms. They have this classification because they do not need oxygen to live.

The animals, not having moral natures, were not guilty of sin, but they also shared in the curse, for they were, as Adam, made of the dust of the ground. Like Adam's body, their bodies also must return to the ground. There is death and suffering in the world only because there is sin in the world. Humanity bears this responsibility and I think it is all the more grievous because it so negatively impacts innocent animals. Yet, God is using this time of decay and death on earth to permanently deal with and get rid of sin.

Actually we do know that at least a handful of other animals do display what we might call moral behaviors. We can tell when a dog knows they have done wrong, we observe complexed social behaviors and even consequences among chimps and bonobos, and even elephants have a lot more going on in their heads than what most people realize.

I think the possibility for failure was there because human beings are free moral agents with the capacity to fall short...which occurred.

But why would god have created this possibility for failure? And if he did create it, then his creation was not perfect, and he may not be so benevolent after all.

True, children are not responsible for the sins of the father. I see this as meaning that Cain, Abel, or anyone are only accountable for their own sins in regard to their standing before God, eternal spiritual state and destiny. I think something different is happening in regard to the conditions on earth which has been impacted by the damaging consequences of sin. Because the first humans, who were given dominion and stewardship, chose the way of death instead of life this brought not only a broken relationship with God, but overall death and decay to the earth and all physical life. Yet, I believe God is using this dying earth for revealing how bad sin is and for the process of eliminating it forever.

Cain and Abel were born into a corrupted state solely because of their parents. They weren't even given a chance themselves. And how is the Earth dying? It's going to be here long after we are, and life on it as a whole has survived multiple mass extinctions. And how are Biblical sins killing it? We know many of them, such as adultery, or taking the Lords name in vein, or lying and stealing, they have no impact. But we can look at "be fruitful and multiply" as being a very real issue that has helped create a severe overpopulation and instilling a mentality that does not care because they have to reproduce, even though we need more people reproducing less often.

 

[shmogie]

Well, you are good at speculating, and I appreciate most of what you said as speculation. Regardless of whether aliens started life here, it had to begin somewhere, which leaves the same question, did life begin by a magical process somewhere, on a rock floating in space, from material on the rock and from whatever could have come from the remnants of the BB in a rudimentary galaxy.

 

[shmogie]

He's not here to argue with. You are. If you don't want to defend quotes you provide, then why bother providing them in the first place?

Miller-Urey is not the only experiment:

http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/new-study-revisits-miller-urey-experiment-quantum-level/
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news-archive/8975.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/primordial-soup-urey-miller-evolution-experiment-repeated/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003986161900339
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13731262

So, I will defend the quote, he is right, you are wrong. He hasn't fooled himself, you have

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Well, you are good at speculating, and I appreciate most of what you said as speculation. Regardless of whether aliens started life here, it had to begin somewhere, which leaves the same question, did life begin by a magical process somewhere, on a rock floating in space, from material on the rock and from whatever could have come from the remnants of the BB in a rudimentary galaxy.

God is also speculation, and god is not exempt from asking for a cause of its own existence.

 

[shmogie]

God is also speculation, and god is not exempt from asking for a cause of its own existence.

Perhaps. The facts are, using the "scientific" concept of the spontaneous generation of life, which is the foundation of evolution, is an impossible concept, so wracked with scientific proof against it, it is impossible. Sir Fred Hoyle, Astronomer, cosmologist and mathematician did a very detailed mathematical study of the odds of life occurring from chemicals in the alleged primordial sea of the infant earth. His conclusion, the odds are 10 to the 40,000th power. Well beyond the number science concludes is impossibility. The concept is bankrupt, Hoyle says " there was no primordial sea, no spontaneous generation of life". . You believe in a scientific impossibility. So as the Harvard Biochemist Harold Wald said, "there are only two options, the impossible spontaneous generation of life, or Divine creation, I choose the impossible option because I am philosophically opposed to the other". Questions about God are irrelevant to this discussion. I'd be happy to talk to you about God in another place,

 

[Shadow Wolf]

The facts are, using the "scientific" concept of the spontaneous generation of life, which is the foundation of evolution, is an impossible concept, so wracked with scientific proof against it, it is impossible.

Evolution does not depend on spontaneous generation. It doesn't matter what started or caused life on Earth, it doesn't matter how it got here, life still evolved, and the theory will not be going anywhere. Evolution is not dependent upon how life got here. It only explains how life developed once it did start. Why is it you cannot separate the two? They are not linked in such a way, and they do not depend on each other.
And it also must be asked, how and why are the only two options a disproven idea and god? It makes no sense that it must be one or the other.

 

[JoStories]

I think God does give answers, but He wants us to come to Him trusting for the answers without assuming we are know-it-alls who already are more knowledgeable than He is. I have found that the more I really seek answers from God the more He gives.

And yet God has not provided those answers. I often see people claiming that they ask and through prayer, they get ''the answers" but I don't see those answers being told to anyone else, begging the question of whether these perceived answers are self delusion. This is a self fulfilling prophecy that the unenlightened don't get to know. Why is that? Why do the answers only come when someone spends these countless hours praying? Why do they not come to those who do not follow your faith?

 

[shmogie]

Evolution does not depend on spontaneous generation. It doesn't matter what started or caused life on Earth, it doesn't matter how it got here, life still evolved, and the theory will not be going anywhere. Evolution is not dependent upon how life got here. It only explains how life developed once it did start. Why is it you cannot separate the two? They are not linked in such a way, and they do not depend on each other.
And it also must be asked, how and why are the only two options a disproven idea and god? It makes no sense that it must be one or the other.

Fine, please give a third option. There actually is a link, and that is the point. If life was created by a creator "intelligent design", then that creator has the ability to create any kind of life. Why start with the most simple design possible, then step away and allow it to bounce around for "billions" of years and wind up as some form of random and accidental creature ?

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Fine, please give a third option. There actually is a link, and that is the point.

I already did.

If life was created by a creator "intelligent design", then that creator has the ability to create any kind of life.

Not necessarily.

 

[SkepticThinker]

So, I will defend the quote, he is right, you are wrong. He hasn't fooled himself, you have

Shadow Wolf just demonstrated that there are more than 2 possibilities, so he is wrong on that. And he's wrong to reference spontaneous generation which is an obsolete concept.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Lately, I've become fascinated with the question "what if god has a god?"