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Original post by eriol

Consider Pascal''s Wager:
If I believe in God (let''s say as Allah, or Yaweh, or Buddah, etc.) and God exists, then I have won everything.
If He doesn''t ... well then, I''m just dead (non-existant) and I haven''t lost anything either.

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It is silly to say that this could work. First, if you believe in God, and God doesn''t exist, then you have devoted your life to something false, and wasted a great deal of time, and constricted your way of thinking.

Also, what if you choose to believe in a god, and that god is the wrong one. And the true one really hates it when people follow the wrong one and so you have to suffer eternal torment. What then? How do you know which one is the right one?

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Just because you''re outnumbered doesn''t mean you''re wrong.

www.directdeveloper.co.uk

hey moderators - do your job and delete this thread NOW!!!

You know who I worship? Joe Pesci.
Joe looks like a guy that can get things done.

For years I prayed to god to get rid of the guy with the dog that never stops barking at 3 am. Never happend...one call to Joe Pesci and suddenly things are silent.

Pesci bless you my son

I think that''s an interesting discussion. The fact that this is an OpenGL forum doesn''t necessarily mean that we only have to discuss about programming stuff. Well I think that we are no coding machines but humans. So sometimes a discussion about something else is really nice. What NeHe said in one of his news messages is really true. We are a community and so we are some sort of friends. Do you always speak with your friends about only one subject?
And really nobody should be flamed just because of wishing the others good Eastern.

@JOL: If you don''t like this thread, look into the other ones. I think that the mods won''t close it. As I understood NeHe''s news message he was pretty much disappointed about the fact that someone was flamed just because of his wishes for the community. So that''s why I think he won''t close this thread.

god is a piece of poo. Now if you all need anything, I''ll be behind the church buttfucking jesus christ AND his 12 ninjas.

www.haterade.com

watch as I fuck Jesus Christ in the ass...

Ya know what I just realized?

1) It doesn''t matter. Anyone who gets "offended" by this
sort of thing needs to understand two things;
The definition of offended, and that it doesn''t matter.
Anyone can believe whatever they way.

2) Also, the bible contridicts the speed of light theory,
which has been proven by the time lags between interplanetery
communication. Appearently, for the bible to hold true against
the theory of the speed of light, the entire known universe has
to be compacted into a sphere surrounding the with the size
of at most around 10000 light years radius. Why?

The Andromadae galaxy, for example, is an estimated 2 million
light years away. That means that the light from it has traveled
for 2 million years before we can see it. If we can see it,
and the universe was created around 10000 years ago over
the course of 6 days, than it must be somewhere within
the lightyear distance equal to the age of the universe!
A galaxy that size, if it was 10000 light years away, would
be merged with the milky way. The only way for everything
we can see in the universe to be visible to use after only
around 10 to 15 thousand years implies they must be very close.
For them to look like they have the sizes that they do, they
must be shrunken, big time. Appearently every star in the sky
is super small, extremely bright considering their sizes,
and really, really close by.

-Posted by The Frapazoid!

We are on an OpenGL forum, aren''t we ? So what are we doing: we''re striving to build realistic virtual worlds. In maybe 100 or 200 years we will be able to create worlds that are so real they will be indistinguishable from reality. Artificial intelligence research will be very advanced aswell, so we will populate our world with millions of little AI agents and watch them evolve. Maybe the impossible will happen and they will develop consciousness.
Just by pure curiosity of what will happen (or unintentionally for debugging purposes , we will manifest ourselves to them as a kind of ''super-beeings''. We can do everything in our world, we created it, we set the rules: we are omnipotent, we are it''s gods.
Our AI agents won''t be able to understand what they witnessed, they will develop religion(s). In order to gain objective results on our evolutionary theories, we will let them alone, let them evolve.
They will explore their (virtual) world, discover it''s rules. They will ask themselves where they came from, how their world was created. There will be wars, people (AI agents...) will die, they will ask themselves: ''if there were omnipotent god(s), why aren''t they doing anything about this ?''. We will be watching, we don''t care about individual agents (we can''t even see them but on a statistical display...), only the evolutionary process is interesting.

And then we will have other projects, our little virtual world full of AI agents and their philosophical questions will be technically outdated.

One day we will simply push the reset button.

Who knows ?

Hahahah! I agree with most of your points, especially that the boeing 747 doesn't take into account evolution at all, which I was going to point out. (biceps you stole my idea ) All that needs to happen is a couple of chemicals merge to start a self-sustaining reaction, much like fire, and then evolution eventually starts in.
Also about unexplained phenomena being explained by Gods... yes that has happened for a ver long time, and it would be nice if that stopped sometime soon. Pascal also did not put much thought into his wager... suppose there is a god of Atheism who sends all atheists to heaven and all believers to hell? Or suppose Satan is the only God and is angry at everyone who believes in God?
What I was trying to say a while ago when showing the infinite possible religions is that there is one chance in infinity, otherwise known as zero, that you can choose the correct religion so there is no point. If there is a hell for people who believe in the wrong religion, EVERYBODY will go there.
It is easy to find evidence against any religion, but I've never seen any evidence for one.

"If God is all-powerful, why doesn't he convert all non-Christians?"

Any God that chooses whether people go to heaven and hell based on whether they blindly believe in fairy tales would be pretty stupid. Heaven would be a very boring place. Plus how do the doctrines Christianity account for the millions of innocent people tortured and killed in it's name?

About the universe being created: the pro-god argument seems to be "who else could have started the Big Bang?" a giant super-being seems about as likely as, say, a big piece of dynamite, or a nuclear bomb, or the Allmighty Lightbulb suddenly turned on.
Many religious people just stick with God because they think they are being "faithful" and they don't want to "betray" God, in an argument they feel that they are on the side of 'good' and atheists or agnostics are on the side of 'evil'. That might be a fun thing to pretend, but it just is not true, there are more christian murderers in the US than there are atheists, many people actually kill in the name of christianity.
I am talking about christianity specifically, but it is also infinitely unlikely that any other religion is true.

"Fantasies of super-powerful entities like Superman and God might be fun to believe in when a child, but many outgrow them by the time they reach adulthood."

Edited by - david20321 on May 14, 2001 5:26:03 PM

Unfortunately, I think people will not stop giving "supernatural" entities credit for currently unexplainable things, until we know it all (if that day should ever come). And even then, there will most likely be people claiming it''s all a big hoax. These people are the ones that are too lazy/gullible/afraid to investigate anything further than the local reverned''s word.

Oh well, parts of mankind obviously never learn from their mistakes.

Ok. I''m a Christian and I would like to answer a few questions.

Q:Why would a loving God send people to hell?
A:Because he is a just God and he must judge the sins of others.

Q:Why then supposedly aren''t Christians going to hell?
A:Because we have acepted God''s free gift of eternal life payed for my Jesus Christ''s death on the Christ and have made Him Lord and Saviour of our lives.

Q:Are Christians perfect.
A:As you should already know, Christians are just like anyone else. They make mistakes do bad things but two differences is that they are forgiven and have God liven inside them.

Q:If God is all powerful why can''t he convert Muslims?
A:Because He has chosen to give man free will to do what he wants.

Q:What is a Christian?
A:A Christian is anyone who has accepted God''s gift of forgiveness payed for by Jesus Christ''s death on the cross. They also must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is relying on the blood of Jesus for his forgiveness. Anyone who has not/is not done this is not a Christian.

If anyone wants to ask questions e-mail me. pwa180@yahoo.com


Jesus Freak,
Jesus Loves you. He is the Alpha and Omega the Beginning and the End.