wow that's one of the most well thought out and compelling arguments about how religion is bad that i've ever read and it's I'm glad that someone finally had the guts to say that since no one has ever said that before.DannyHale09 said:
Humanity's worst mistake
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Not to be rude, but you know why we no longer use barter, correct?Death God said:
Because without money, in order to trade, you have to find someone who has what you want and wants what you have and is willing to make the exchange. Money is simply something everyone wants from another, so it makes it easier than trading your watch when you want to buy gas for a car.
Money isn't the problem. Human nature is.
You want to read passages that promote carnage do you?Glademaster said:
Fine:
"Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death. Such evil must be purged from Israel." (Deuteronomy 17:12 NLT)
"If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives." (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)
"If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death." (Leviticus 20:10 NLT)
"A priest's daughter who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also, shall be burned to death." (Leviticus 21:9 NAB)
"They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman." (2 Chronicles 15:12-13 NAB)
"If your own full brother, or your son or daughter, or your beloved wife, or you intimate friend, entices you secretly to serve other gods, whom you and your fathers have not known, gods of any other nations, near at hand or far away, from one end of the earth to the other: do not yield to him or listen to him, nor look with pity upon him, to spare or shield him, but kill him. Your hand shall be the first raised to slay him; the rest of the people shall join in with you. You shall stone him to death, because he sought to lead you astray from the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. And all Israel, hearing of this, shall fear and never do such evil as this in your midst." (Deuteronomy 13:7-12 NAB)
"One day a man who had an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father got into a fight with one of the Israelite men. During the fight, this son of an Israelite woman blasphemed the LORD's name. So the man was brought to Moses for judgment. His mother's name was Shelomith. She was the daughter of Dibri of the tribe of Dan. They put the man in custody until the LORD's will in the matter should become clear. Then the LORD said to Moses, "Take the blasphemer outside the camp, and tell all those who heard him to lay their hands on his head. Then let the entire community stone him to death. Say to the people of Israel: Those who blaspheme God will suffer the consequences of their guilt and be punished. Anyone who blasphemes the LORD's name must be stoned to death by the whole community of Israel. Any Israelite or foreigner among you who blasphemes the LORD's name will surely die." (Leviticus 24:10-16 NLT)
"However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way." (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)
"When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment." (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)
"Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ." (Ephesians 6:5 NLT)
"As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace. If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder. You may enjoy the spoils of your enemies that the LORD your God has given you." (Deuteronomy 20:10-14)
"If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbors wife." (Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB)
"Lo, a day shall come for the Lord when the spoils shall be divided in your midst. And I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem for battle: the city shall be taken, houses plundered, women ravished; half of the city shall go into exile, but the rest of the people shall not be removed from the city." (Zechariah 14:1-2 NAB)
You were saying?
Oh and before you ask, the Qur'an is pretty much filled with the same hateful stuff as the bible. Im just quoting the bible because I have spent more years studying it than the Qur'an.
Also, before you go "Well Jesus doesn't support that, that's why most of those quotes are from the OLD testament." Consider these passages from the NEW testament where Jesus himself is clearly saying that everything in the OLD testament is supposed to be respected and adhered to if you're supposed to be able to call yourself a christian:
"For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:18-19 RSV)
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place." (Matthew 5:17 NAB)
(the "law" being refered to here is the scripture from the old testament)
"All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness..." (2 Timothy 3:16 NAB)
"It is easier for Heaven and Earth to pass away than for the smallest part of the letter of the law to become invalid." (Luke 16:17 NAB)
Oh, my favourite:
"Know this first of all, that there is no prophecy of scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation, for no prophecy ever came through human will; but rather human beings moved by the holy Spirit spoke under the influence of God." (2 Peter 20-21 NAB)
Whaaat!? Nothing in the scripture is a matter of personal interpretation you say? Meaning that you can't blame all the evil stuff being promoted in the name of God in the old testament can be construed as "euphemisms" or other common bullshit cop-outs that christians and jews make use of to justify those very passages? That it's all supposed to be taken literally and at face value AT ALL TIMES? Thank you Mr. Holy man. You make it all to easy for me to win arguments against religious people.
Oh and another thing: would you claim that the christians in the army and the muslim extremists aren't being "real christians" or "real muslims" if they kill people? Somehow I doubt they'd agree with you...
Um--nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers war with each other pretty much permanently and constantly. Hence why the leader of the tribe is generally the strongest WARRIOR. Not to mention spending your life learning survival skills leaves no time for you to learn to be an artist, philosopher, poet, composer, writer, programmer, chef, doctor or any of the other fun things about life. The remains of paleolithic humans *very often* show signs of violent death caused by tools like clubs, axes, and arrowheads.Housebroken Lunatic said:
Hunting and gathering *needs* to take less energy than agriculture et al because there's less dietary energy available. If you're going to burn calories, you HAVE to eat them. Or else you starve to death. Not to mention the fact that it leaves you completely exposed to the vagaries of nature. Heck, small-scale agriculture even has this problem. Flood this year? Bad storm? Drought? Instant famine. Most of the world is uninhabitable by hunter-gatherers.
That's not to say agriculture is a universal good in every conceivable way (there's no such thing). Agriculture has turned a lot of unsuitable food into mainstays of the modern diet, causing all kinds of chronic health problems. Concentrated populations are extremely vulnerable to crowd diseases. Fortunately proper sanitation fixes the latter, and the study of nutrition is gradually fixing the former. In the meanwhile, increased availability and consistency of food has enabled global civilization to spring up. I'd take that tradeoff any day.
Humanities biggest mistake was that mistake which reduced the human herd to about 1000 individual humans... Since we survived that we have only grown stronger.
All'n'all i love what humanity have done so far, even though i dislike a lot of individual humans. I just hope we get of this rock before its struck by a random asteroid.
All'n'all i love what humanity have done so far, even though i dislike a lot of individual humans. I just hope we get of this rock before its struck by a random asteroid.
how about taking so friggin long to get where we are now? i mean c'mon! i was hoping to become immortal in my life time, but due to our ancestors negligence science hasn't come that far.
Humanity's worst mistake was the ability to recognize mistakes because if we couldn't recognize them there wouldn't be any. Alternatively this thread was humanity's worst mistake. . I mean did anyone expect this not to be a fight about whether religion is the worst mistake?
. I mean did anyone expect this not to be a fight about whether religion is the worst mistake?
no. no we did notJimmy Sylvers said:Humanity's worst mistake was the ability to recognize mistakes because if we couldn't recognize them there wouldn't be any. Alternatively this thread was humanity's worst mistake.
You make many erroneous assumptions there.Byere said:
First of all, what makes you think that hunter/gatherer/fisher-societies WEREN'T based on a group of humans working towards a common goal?
Second, hunter/gatherer/fisher-societies tended to be quite small, just like the populations of large scale predatory species tend to be quite small. I.e the population adapts according to the amount of prey there is to be had.
Also, hunting game was never the hunter/gatherer/fisher-man's primary source of food. In fact it couldn't have been since hunting game of enough quantities to sustain each community required a lot of focused effort and cooperation and sometimes it all ended up in nothing because no game was available at the moment. The primary foodsources were fruit, berries, nuts (which there was a clear abundance of and in no way of meager enough quantities that man would've been able to pick the land clean of it like locusts) along with fish (fish tend to be moer readily available than hunting game).
So no, we wouldn't have been able to "strip the land clean" like you make it out to be. Mainly because if we would ever get close to achieving that through basic hunter/gatherer techniques, then the abundance of humans would die due to starvation and our numbers would've dropped to more reasonable levels.
Another reason why we wouldn't be able to is because the hunter/gatherer society had no need for industrialization. Only during large scale agri-cultural production and farming would industrialization be needed and beneficial, and I think we can both agree on that the industrial revolution has proven to be the main culprit of most of our enviromental problems and annihilation of several species and decreasing the bio-diversity of the ecosphere.
Had we just remained as hunters and gatherer's, then we might not have been as many as we are today (which is hardly a bad thing considering the accumulating problems of over population), but we'd also never had a reason to destroy the enviroment in order to amass financial gain.
Well aren't you pretty much equally ignorant if you basically claim that our quality of life is "superior" to the humans living as hunters/gatherers in the early stone-age?Byere said:
Also, do consider the fact that back then, they didn't have laws against consuming psychadelic mushrooms or smoking stimulating weeds. So an abundance of lesuire time and an entire forest full of stimulants, along with helpful and cooperative humans (they pretty much have to be because they had no way of surviving completely on their own back then). Not to mention all the time they had to engage in copulation, muse over the mysteries of their world and those twinkly lights in the sky, and all they had to do to keep that up was spend a fraction of the amount of hours that we spend each day working, and their spent hours was mainly in housekeeping and little else since they didn't have stuff like an entire economy and industry to support.
So really, who are you to call me ignorant when you, yourself only have some half-assed addage about "reaping rewards" to support your claims that the man of the stone age was much worse off than we are today?
Truthfully? I don't think humanity as a whole has made many mistakes, which is why we not only survive, but are the dominante species on the planet. Most of our "mistakes", things like genocides, wars, and other things are all only viewed that way through the artificial construct of morality that we ourselves created. Even at our worst it can be argued that a lot of good has come of it, wars and genocides result in less people which while not pleasant to think about helps control our overpopulation.Fanfic_warper said:
Religion is an easy target for left wingers, but really more good has come of religion than bad. People tend to look at the wars and bloodshed, but at the same time it's formed the backbones of entire societies that progressed us as a species. People like to go on about wars, but tend to forget about the missionaries who brought knowlege and civilization to primitive peoples. People will oftentimes look at the violet aspects of that kind of thing, but not the situations where it helped, or formed the backbone of tons of selfless aid.
To be honest I think your teacher sort of represents the problem with the current educational system, and one of the big reasons why there are so many complaints about educators become FAR too liberal. From the way you make it sounds this guy seems to basically be argueing an anti-civilization, one with nature, hippie-liberal type point of view. After all without farming and herds we would never have settled into solid communities, developed civlization, technology, and other things. He's probably got some warped utopian view of it like many other people that espouse similar ideals, but in the end it's basically him saying we'd be better off dying by the age of 30 in the mud due to a lack of things like antiobiotics. "One with nature" anti-civilization rants sound great, until you consider the actual realities.
No, I don't, because I did include passages from the NEW TESTAMENT, that pretty much sums it all up that no Christian (not even "sensible" ones) are allowed to ignore the law as it is written in the old testament. In fact they aren't even allowed to interpret it in a personal manner, but have to accept and adhere to EVERYTHUNG written in the old testament weether they fucking like it or not.Generic Gamer said:
And if by "disservice" you mean promoting antagonism towards christianity, then im glad I could do just that. The more intolerance of religion I can cause by using religion against itself, the better.
Compound interest.
The realization that money TECHNICALLY devalues with time leads to investing and to an entire social class that makes money simply by HAVING money and lending it to others.
Karl Marx figured that out but his solution doesn't work. Nowadays we have financial experts able to create complex artificial commodities (stuff with "tranches", etc.) that render trying to outlaw "profit" impossible.
Completely blowing up the ability of anyone to "invest" money rather than "spend" or "save" it would be a step in the right direction IMO.
The realization that money TECHNICALLY devalues with time leads to investing and to an entire social class that makes money simply by HAVING money and lending it to others.
Karl Marx figured that out but his solution doesn't work. Nowadays we have financial experts able to create complex artificial commodities (stuff with "tranches", etc.) that render trying to outlaw "profit" impossible.
Completely blowing up the ability of anyone to "invest" money rather than "spend" or "save" it would be a step in the right direction IMO.
Might have something to do with roughly 800 years of what we call "the dark ages", where religious crazies censored and opposed scientific research if it wasn't in accordance with their religious views.cthulhumythos said:
A scientific solution to death would've never been accepted, since you know, we're only supposed to be able to achieve immortality "through Christ" and all that stuff.
So if you wonder why scientific advances hasn't come further than this, you need not look further than your local church, synagouge or mosque to find the culprits...
I think you're having an emotional reaction to information that does not conform with your preconceived notions. Try actually considering the message and looking into it more. They have a whole series on youtube debunking the overpopulation myth.Grospoliner said:
Lets look at what you wrote:
First sentence: Appeal to ridicule
First paragraph: Red herring
Second paragraph: Red herring
Third paragraph: Appeal to authority
Next you get into an ad hominem.
Are you going to sit there with a straight face and tell me the UN (who all your links get their data from) would not have vested political interests in this subject also?Grospoliner said:
Another ad hominem/appeal to ridicule. Try again.Grospoliner said: