re: "I refuse to be a slave to religion!"

Feel the burn!

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Why don't you just come out and say it? You believe the U.S. Consitution is a racist document drafted by a bunch of old white guys of European origin.

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Because that is the dumbest fricking thing I have heard this week.

It is a brilliant piece of draftsmanship and compromise, cobbled-together by a group of extremely well-meaning men with vastly different interests.

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Even Orthodox Christians don't accept the "inerrant word of god."

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They don't?? Had no idea that God could be wrong about anything. See? We learn something every day.

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MOST people are bright enough to understand that (even if one accepts the underlying notion of "divine inspiration") the collection of ancient books was RECORDED by fallible MEN and that they have since been translated thru (in some cases) a half dozen languages, with nuance lost in every subsequent translation.

Of course, the Religious Right also has its share of jingoistic hicks, who do not speak any language but English and do not UNDERSTAND that NO translation will EVER correctly convey the EXACT meanings of the source document.

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But, this is not an argument from science- as much as it is from reason.

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My critiques were based on reason, not science, though.

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Everything that we know of (ex materia) that began to exist, has a cause. It stands to reason, therefore, that everything that begins to exist has a cause (one really needs to consider the intelligent design argument here).

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That's fallacious reasoning.

Here would be a similarly constructed argument that you'd probably have issue with.

Every conscious mind we know has a physical source, therefore all conscious minds have a physical source (sorry God).

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"I refuse to be a slave to religion!"

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that makes sense. The Almighty wants your love and devotion by your own free will. that's why we are made in His image.

i suppose "religion is slavery" is where lucifer/modernism lead these people.

can't worship God when one fancies themselves as their own god.

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So, who is Jesus to you?

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An itinerant Jewish ascetic from 1st century Galilee.

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You do.

We all do.

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Not really. If people started condemning each other for their choice in favorite color, more people would roll their eyes because it doesn't matter. We know that morality matters, but Atheism doesn't provide a foundation for why it matters. Biblical Christianity does provide such a foundation.

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We're biologically wired to be social creatures. Of course we care (some more than others) what our peers think of us.

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I think you are missing the point. I'm not talking about taking interest in the opinions of others, but having a rational basis for why an opinion matters at all. Why should I care what a complete stranger's favorite color is? And even if I "cared", why should that have any bearing on moral truth?

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Without objective morality, humanity's subjective opinions on morality are all that's left. If that's all that's left, then those opinions not only hold value, they're the only things that have any value at all.

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No, they hold no value outside of the individual. That's my point, and that's the nature of subjectivity. There is no inherent value to an opinion if said opinion is not based on anything objectively true. People change their opinions about all sorts of things all the time for all sorts of reasons that have no basis in reality. A person can change their opinion of something based on false information, or because of a bad experience that was unrelated to the object of the opinion. Opinions are often times based on nothing more than whims, feelings, and ignorance, and not true or fact. Why should an ill-informed opinion or a biased opinion or an opinion entirely formed based on emotion matter in the realm of truth and reality?

When you say something is "evil", you are making a truth claim. You are saying that it is (objectively) true that such and such is immoral, wrong, and should be condemned by others. I'm saying that Atheism provides no rational basis for making such a claim. All you can do is say that you don't like that action, but you can't make a truth claim about it being evil or immoral. All you have is your opinion, and you have no standard to say one opinion is "better" than another. If I think killing toddlers for fun is morally neutral or good, who is to say that my opinion or belief is objectively wrong or that I'm evil and immoral?

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No longer can you just assert that a man picking up sticks on the wrong day of the week should be stoned to death (Numbers 15:32-36), you now need to convince the people around you that what that man did was so horrible he should be stoned to death.

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It's odd that you haven't thought this through. What you are asserting is that moral truth is based on majority opinion. What is "right" is what the majority (or whatever social contract a particular society has) dictates. Hitler's Germany was "right" for murdering millions of people. Islamic countries are "right" for subjugating women and killing homosexuals because it's what those societies determine.

Such a moral standard provides nothing meaningful to morality. "Right" and "wrong" are based on the whims of the masses. You can never actually say "that behavior is evil". All you can say is "that behavior is evil in this society, right now", because that could change.

So like I said, Atheism has a problem with "evil" because "evil" doesn't objectively exist in that type of worldview. "Evil" is whatever society says it is, and society determines based on a majority of individual opinions, so it's always a moving target. So when you or someone else who rejects the Christian God says "that's evil", I would respond, "to whom, and in which society, and in which time period?", because if evil is based on subjective opinion, then objectively, no opinion could be really "better" or "worse" than any other. That's the very nature of subjectivism which you don't seem to really grasp. If you understood it, you would see how silly it is to say anything is "evil" in a meaningful way. You might as well say someone is "wrong" for liking the color green because purple is a better color. That doesn't really mean anything in terms of a truth claim, because it's an arbitrary and irrational claim.

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The writer of the gospel according to Mark lists no sources, and his claims cannot be corroborated. All the other gospels and the pastoral epistles were written after Mark and simply copy or steal ideas from Mark.

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From him or from (the original) Q.

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Hard to say

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Indeed, my friend.

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Hard to say

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Indeed, my friend.

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What most Believers have trouble grasping is that we agnostics are not, for the most part, saying that you are wrong in your beliefs.

We are simply saying that there is no concrete evidence to support those beliefs, and that we choose not to believe things as to which there is no verifiable evidence.

Honestly, I am very skeptical, because I have never seen ANY evidence of ANYTHING supernatural OR of ANYONE documenting anything supernatural. Honestly, you would laugh at me if I asked you to believe that my great, great great uncle Cletus could fly, because his momma told my great grandmother who told my dad that she saw it ... and my dad wrote it down 60 years ago.

PLUS, the evidence of the development of the Abrahamic religions from earlier regional polytheistic religions is compelling.