Ok, let's start with the downright crazy parts:
I think everything in the bible can be taken literally
Including the parts about the "firmament" being a roof above the world? The mustard seed being the smallest of all seeds? The bits about stars being tiny objects that will fall down (and burn like a lamp) when Jesus comes back? The hundreds of contradictions?
as for attacks on abortion clinics...well I think that anyone who enforces abortions, maybe should have been aborted themselves.
So how does that work, exactly? Killing people who disagree with you is fine, but abortion is murder? How is a sperm cell and an egg more of a person than someone working at an abortion clinic? And of course, what happened to the whole thing about "letting people believe what they will, as long as it doesn't intrude on others"?
Honestly, anyone who would even joke about people who "should have been aborted" should just go home and never ever open their mouths again. You're a disgrace Christianity, you have just scared me away. I don't want to become a murderer. I don't want to say that the life of a human being was a mistake that should never have happened. And I don't want to be part of the ultimate hypocrisy, that people who do X are so evil that we should've done X to them before they were even born. How's that for hypocrisy? Abortions are evil, unless the fetus was going to become a person who'd one day work at an abortion clinic. That... is... insane.
Now, let's more from the downright offensive parts to the merely ignorant ones:
Carbon-dating is inaccurate, it's a well known fact, search for it on the internet.
you know, it's funny you should mention it, I did search on the internet, and I learned a lot of interesting facts. I learned that hundreds of people have been abducted by aliens. I learned, and you'll laugh when I tell you this, that we've never been to the moon. I even discovered that the world is flat. The internet truly is an amazing thing.
If you're too lazy then don't respond, with a bullshit comment, as seems to be your initial instinct. And enough with the "hard-core", "casual" religious stereotype.
No, you are the lazy one. You have never bothered to research the accuracy of radiometric dating. Once you'd found the answer you *liked*, there was no need for further research.
You may once have "questioned your faith", but you would have learned a lot more if you'd questioned everything else. Very little has ever been learned by going "Hmm, I wonder if this God thing is true. I'd better look it up in the Bible". But a lot has been learned by looking at the universe around us, measuring it, testing it and examining it. And quite a lot of information can be gained by studying what people before you have found out.
It's a shame you didn't question any of these things. You might have learned something.
For example, to take an example completely at random, radiometric dating is extremely reliable. Let's start by a few basics: We have a lot of unstable isotopes around the place. Rocks contain some leftovers from when they were formed. Living organisms absorb some, through the air and through their food and such. And because these are unstable, they have a decay rate, which is well known and very reliable. We know how much Carbon-14 is in a living organism, and we know how fast it decays.
So if we take a look at the remains of such an organism, we can measure the amount of C14 in it. That gives us a very simple formula for determining how long it's been since that organism died.
So far, so good. Of course there are plenty of problems with this.
What if the amount of C-14 in a living creature was different back then?
What if the decay rate of C-14 has changed over time?
What if the fossil (or whatever we're examining) has been disturbed, either adding or removing C-14?
The last one is of course easy to work around. Perform the same dating technique on another similar fossil, and see if it returns the same result. If it does, it's probably not a coincidence.
The others are almost as easy. The trick is that C-14 is not the only unstable isotope we can use for dating. There are plenty of radioactive elements, so we can perform a similar dating process with another element which has a completely different decay rate, and which originally existed in a different ratio.
Because the decay rates vary between these different elements, we know that the tests will disagree if the true date is anything other than what we guess. If the true age of a 200million year old fossil was, say, 6000 years, then *even if the decay rates had changed over time*, the results would disagree. The *only* place all these tests agree, is at the true age. You can plot a graph of the amount of these radioactive isotopes over time, and mark the point at which the remaining ratio matches what we've measured, and see at what time that'd occur. If that time is the same for all our different dating methods then there is very little doubt, even if decay rates had changed or God had otherwise tried to cheat. If that was the case, then the dating techniques would disagree, since the different elements "age" at different speeds. And they don't.
The only way in which these dating techniques as a whole can be flawed is if God actually sneaks around interfering with each individual test, carefully manipulating it to show the *exact* result that we expected, and which fits into our theories. Now, I'm not an expert on the Bible, but I'm pretty sure there's no mention of god having that kind of humor.
And of course there's everyone's favorite, evolution. Here the story gets even better, because not only do we have a ton of evidence in favor of the theory, but *no alternative has ever been proposed*.
That's right. Intelligent design or creationism certainly answers a few questions, like "how was the giraffe created", but they leave a whole range of other questions unanswered, questions which evolution neatly answers. For example:
Why do our dating techniques show fossils that are millions of years old?
Why does the fossil record show a clear progression over time? If our dating techniques were flawed and all species were created at the same time, then 1) there should be no significant difference in how many, and how well-preserved, fossils we'd find from each species. Dinosaurs lived alongside sheep, kangaroos and mammoths. So how come dinosaur fossils are so rare, and generally in a much worse condition? How come the same is true, to a lesser extent, for mammoths? How come they are consistently found in layers of earth that are dated to one specific period? How come we *never* find sheep fossils in 150 million old earth? How come we *never* see dinosaur fossils in layers that are, say, dated as two million years old? And how come the fossils themselves are also dated to fit neatly into the same ages? If our dating techniques were flawed, the results should be all over the charts. The dating of the fossils would disagree with the dating of the ground it was found in (since different techniques are used for fossils and for rocks), and the dating of different fossils of the same species would disagree as well. Why have we never found a giraffe fossil from 200 million years ago, whne we've found plenty of other fossils from that age, all of creatures that no longer exist?
How come it *looks* like dinosaurs existed long before today's mammals? How come it *looks* like they existed after prehistoric blobs? How come we've found a whole range of fossils that look more or less like a horse, and if you lay them out by age, you see that the changes from each to the next are fairly small? Is it coincidence that no horse fossils exist from the time when the "almost-horse" or the "somewhat-horsey" or "only vaguely horsey" creatures existed? Is it coincidence that the "not really horsey at all, but similar to the "only slightly horsey"" fossils that have been found have been dated as older than "only slightly horsey"?
Evolution answers all this. No alternative theory has ever been proposed. Perhaps you have one? Creationism fails not because it makes no sense, but because it fails to answer a large number of question which the theory it's trying to replace *is* able to answer.
You know the pop argument against evolution, that it's like "a hurricane assembling a 747 by flying through a scrapyard"? It's the wrong way around. That is what creationism proposes. Coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence. It just so happens that all the fossils we found *seem* to match what we'd expect from evolution, and don't at all match what we'd expect from creationism. It's just freakish bad luck! It doesn't mean anything.
when you think about it, if you thought your beliefs were the only way to heaven, than you would have to hate someone pretty badly to not want to share it with them.
Aw, that's sweet. I'll sacrifice a few puppies to Satan for you.
When you think about it, it'd be even nicer of you to let them decide for themselves what should happen with their lives.
*edit*:
Almost forgot to answer the actual question. In case it's not clear from the above, the religions I like the most are the ones that doesn't try to tell you to switch off your brain. The ones that don't dictate that "this is how the world was created", or that "those damn scientists who go around poking holes in our holy book ought to be stoned to death", and which don't indoctrinate innocent people with garbage that they have no way of proving. The ones that don't tell you who should live and who should die.
I'm quite fond of Discordianism and Pastafarianism. But of bigger religions, I dunno, Taoism or Buddhism don't seem too bad.
It's a tricky question, kind of like asking someone who's never watched a single episode of Ninja Turtles "alright, but *if* you'd watched it, which one were your favorite?" (Donatello btw
)
Why would I like a religion I don't believe in? Perhaps if there's one which says to give me a lot of money, I'd like that one....
And when that is said, I like plenty of individuals from any religion. I have a good number of Muslim friends (And I've had some fun theological discussions with them. As a whole, they seem much less fundamentalist than what seems to be sadly very common among Christians in the US today.)
I know a handful of Christians who've never tried to tell me that I'm going to hell or tried to save my soul, and that's cool too. I know some buddhists who are just nice laid-back people. And I have a bunch of friends whose religious beliefs I strongly disagree with, but hey, that doesn't mean we can't be friends.
I don't like religions much. And people who hide behind a 2000 year old book, and actively seek to avoid knowledge annoy me. But other than that, I like people as a whole.
