Evidence for religion

[I'm With Stupid]

But, I don't see anything in the scriptures against acquiring knowledge. In fact, the scriptures encourage the believers to look for the signs in the universe and know the Creator.

I didn't say the scriptures, I said religion, which is based on but is obviously greater in scope than the scriptures themselves. It is undoubtedly true that many religions will deny anything that appears to contradict their holy text. Even the more moderate and progressive ones tend to take a long time to acknowledge scientific facts

Homosexual act is considered as 'transgression' and a sin as mentioned by Prophet Lot(as).
[Q 7:81] Indeed, you approach men with desire, instead of women. Rather, you are a transgressing people.

Well yeah, but Lot (assuming he's been quoted accurately, whether he existed at all) is as ignorant by today's standards as a cave man would have been by his. I see no reason why we should give any credence to his views on homosexuality, given that he obviously knew absolutely fuck all about it. Ancient people can have good ideas, the problem is when you start listening to them for all, or even a large number of their opinions, as an appropriate way to live one's life.

Having the impulse itself isn't wrong per Shariah, and it's nobody's business to check what is happening in the private lives of others. They should be acknowledged and considered part of society just like every other sinner (all of us are) is, but to promote something like 'gay marriages' goes against the tenets of all Abrahamic faiths.

Absolutely. And that's why those faiths, or those aspects of those faiths for anyone capable of actually looking at them objectively, should be thrown out as a backward ideas that they are. And that's the difference between non-religious and (certainly more fundamentalist) religious people. The non-religious people can look at certain religious scriptures and look at the advice objectively, deciding whether a particular piece of advice actually makes sense of whether it's simply based on misunderstandings or plain bigotry. For example, we can look at the advice about eating pork and recognise that it might have been good advice at the time, but in the modern age, basically makes no sense. Similarly, we can look at rules about homosexuality, determine that it actually doesn't harm anyone, and dismiss that part of the bible as irrelevant in the modern age. Most modern religious people can do the same, although it perhaps takes them a bit longer. But the more fundamentalist elements, which typically include almost all of the hierarchy in most religious organisations, are unable to actually look at their own religious texts objectively, because they've devoted their entire life to it. They would be perfectly capable of taking some advice from Plato or Socrates and deciding whether it is applicable to the modern age with what we now know from the last 2000 years of scientific advancement, but their faith destroys a lot of their ability to do so with regards to the texts they consider sacred.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

It's not evil if it is something that helps the person in the Eternal Hereafter. If God intervened in every instance, there would be no 'free will'. And God cannot be blamed for the free-willed actions of people.

Your answer here suggests that people's suffering is a result of their own free will, which is getting very close to Glenn Hoddle territory. Obviously it can vaguely be an argument if you use it to talk about suffering that humans inflict on one another. However, plenty of suffering occurs through no fault of anybody. Diseases, natural disasters and other 'acts of God' cause untold suffering every day, and yet God allows it. Now again, you could argue that this pales into insignificance compared to the prize on offer for those who believe, but none of the Abrahamic religions teach that this offer extends to non-believers, including the vast majority of humanity who had no knowledge of or access to such an offer. So some tribe in the middle of nowhere has their land wiped out by a tropical storm, loads of them starve to death in pain, and God's reward for simply never having been told about him is a further eternity (or less, depending on the exact variation) of agony in hell. Not to mention all of the animals who suffer similarly in such an event. None of the Abrahamic religions claim to offer redemption to animals who might equally suffer through a direct act of God. I guess at least they don't burn in hell afterwards.

Of course all of this is fairly easily explained if you drop the god bullshit and just accept that it's the natural way that organisms interact with their environment. All of these hoops religious people have to jump through to explain fairly mundane realities come from their insistence on not only the existence of a god, but the idea that they also know characteristics and desires of said god.

 

[Zubrman]

It's not evil if it is something that helps the person in the Eternal Hereafter. If God intervened in every instance, there would be no 'free will'. And God cannot be blamed for the free-willed actions of people.

Eternal hereafter.

Just let that sink in.

Eternal.

How fucking bored are you going to be after a hundred years, five hundred years, ten thousand years, a million years???

But there's no respite; you are are stuck there FOR EVER.

Count me out.

 

[malg]

Holy fuck. Yes, I realize the use of 'holy' could somehow diminish my point, but holy fuck.

Whatever you're on, it's too strong and you need to lower the dose.

 

[Cheesy]

Eternal hereafter.

Just let that sink in.

Eternal.

How fucking bored are you going to be after a hundred years, five hundred years, ten thousand years, a million years???

But there's no respite; you are are stuck there FOR EVER.

Count me out.

Hell sounds like far more fun anyway.

The most boring people I know are religious types. The thought of spending 5 minutes with them let alone eternity fills me with dread.

 

[Magicpole]

You think that really happened?

If he does I have five magic beans going for a song.

 

[citizen_maine]

Eternal hereafter.

Just let that sink in.

Eternal.

How fucking bored are you going to be after a hundred years, five hundred years, ten thousand years, a million years???

But there's no respite; you are are stuck there FOR EVER.

Count me out.

"The band in heaven
They play my favorite song
Play it one more time
Play it all night long"

 

[cityontheup]

Here is my simple take on it...hundreds, thousands of years ago there were two ways to have wealth and power...royalty and religion. The vast majority of people then were uneducated peasants and religion was used to retain power and wealth by instilling fear in the populace if you did anything deemed sinful.

 

[arfurclue]

Here is my simple take on it...hundreds, thousands of years ago there were two ways to have wealth and power...royalty and religion. The vast majority of people then were uneducated peasants and religion was used to retain power and wealth by instilling fear in the populace if you did anything deemed sinful.

Can you imagine a time - and you don't have to agree with this - that there was a kind of religion that would help the likes of 'uneducated peasants' open to a presence of joy, here and now? Might this have been a threat to those that gained 'power' from teaching that 'you have to listen to us then, when you die, you will come to know joy?' What might then have happened? How might those who felt that their 'power' was threatened, have reacted?

 

[Deleted member 77198]

That's not the perspective that the Prophets taught. They persevered with patience and glorified God despite the calamities that befell them.
[Q 21:83] And [mention] Job, when he called to his Lord, “Indeed, adversity has touched me, and you are the Most Merciful of the merciful.”

Everything will be accounted on Judgement Day.
[Q 99 6-8] That Day, the people will depart separated [into categories] to be shown [the result of] their deeds. So whoever does an atom's weight of good will see it, And whoever does an atom's weight of evil will see it.




He is part of everything in a subtle way. As Prophet Joseph(as) says when the vision he had as a child became reality.

[Q 12:100] And he raised his parents upon the throne, and they bowed to him in prostration. And he said, "O my father , this is the explanation of my vision of before. My Lord has made it reality. And He was certainly good to me when He took me out of prison and brought you [here] from bedouin life after Satan had induced [estrangement] between me and my brothers. Indeed, my Lord is Subtle in what He wills. Indeed, it is He who is the Knowing, the Wise.

You’re quoting, what I will call, shit, from one book written by one goat herder who lived a strange life in the middle of a desert, making stuff up as he went along, hundreds and hundreds of years ago in a thread about “evidence”. That’s even if that bloke even did exist since his (like most, if not all, Tanakhal/Biblical/Qu’ranical people’s) historicity has been questioned.

Give us some historical evidence that any of the, at best, tall stories written in the Tanakh, the Bible or Qu’ran ever happened from outside those three fantasy books.

There are millions of books containing actual historicity. Why are you quoting one that doesn’t, to show evidence of historical fact when it comes to religion?