Only read if you are NOT religious and/or do not believe in any 'supreme' being (othe

Religious christian people I have a question for you:

Who did you believe to be god before jesus (since I believe it's a known fact that jesus was born jewish)? Did you believe in the jewish god?

Because even from the time of adam and eve and abraham god spoke to the people, and jewish religion pre-dated christianity?

If you didn't believe in the jewish god, then there had to be polytheism, and christianty does not believe in polytheism. Just a thought.

What is more important, God's Grace (A truly loving God would never send someone to hell) or God's Justice (How can Hitler get into heaven)?

Many times when I am troubled or confused, I find comfort in sitting in my back yard and having a vodka and cranberry along with a quiet conversation with Jesus. This happened to me again after a particularly difficult day. I said "Jesus, why do I work so hard?"

And I heard the reply: "Men find many ways to demonstrate the love they have for their family. You work hard to have a peaceful, beautiful place for your friends and family to gather."

I said: "I thought that money was the root of all evil."

And the reply was: "No, the LOVE of money is the root of all evil. Money is a tool; it can be used for good or bad".

I was starting to feel better, but I still had that one burning question, so I asked it. "Jesus," I said, " what is the meaning of life? Why am I here?"

He replied: "That is a question many men ask. The answer is in your heart and is different for everyone. I would love to chat with you some more, Senor , but for now, I have to finish your lawn."

getting back into this thread. sorry if discussion has changed far from this still have a few more pages to go.

this post was what i was getting at earlier asking whether if things didn't work out, whether it would have been seen as her time.

while it has a small chance of happening, it does not mean it can not or will not happen. in fact, the law of large numbers says (summarized) that things like this WILL happen as long as you repeat the experiment long enough. something with a .00001% chance (1 in a billion) to us seems pretty unlikely in a medical situation and can be seen as impossible. something that can only happen with gods interverntion. sometimes that's just rounded down to 0. we have 6 billion + current people in the world, with many more billions through out the thousands of years. well now its not so unlikely is it?

But actually it does... about 1 in every hundred million times a 7 number lottery draw from 1 to 50 will come up 1234567...

Close, it's 1 in 503 billion times* (but who's counting).

*assuming the ball is not dropped back into the pack after it's picked. If it's dropped back in it's 1 in 781 billion times.

Here is a quote from Einstein:

Albert Einstein
There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.

Those who see miracles, see something so complex, so improbable by random chance that they conclude there must be intelligent design behind it. For instance, look at any animal or plant, or even rock or water... the sheer number of things that have to exist and exist in a certain way boggle the mind... how does a cell know what to do to grow a rabbit? They have no intelligence they just roam around doing some simple task, yet the cells they split into may do a completely different task... all turning into a rabbit... mess up any of the tiny building blocks even a tiny bit, and it could all fall apart... that just doesn't make sense... someone must have made it that way... that makes sense.

I can see how that is an appealing way to think... it simplifies a lot of difficult or even scary questions...

But here is the other way to see it... look at our solar system... 9 planets all with many varying characteristics... 8 of which weren't quite right to support life... as we know it (even that is only right now and doesn't even encompass the possibility that there was life that died out that we haven't detected yet)

Now look at our galaxy... how many solar systems and planets there? I don't even know really, but a lot for sure...

Now look at our universe (what we can see of it and know is there) and how many planets are there out there... each of those was a chance for life as we know it to sprout up...

Now look at how long life as we know it has been on this planet... it's a pretty small spec of time considering how long everything has been around. That means that there have been thousands, maybe millions of time frames long enough for life to develop somewhere in the universe and reach the point we have reached.

So some look out there and see the whole universe that we can see, and say... what a miracle that something so complicated as life could exist... it's proof that someone created us and put us here with divine intelligence.

I look out and say, look at all those possible iterations... all those chances for life to sprout up... it would be a miracle if just by random chance, over billions of years, on all those potential planets... life didn't spring up somewhere....

Law of probabilities: Given enough time and iterations, anything that can happen, will happen.

It's what lies behind the saying "Enough monkeys and typewriters, given enough time, would reproduce the works of Shakespear."

Meaning that just by random chance, after enough tries, the monkeys would happen to hit the right keystrokes in the right order to produce the exact same works that Shakespear did.

Which is another way of saying that just because something is so complex it appears to be intelligently created (the works of Shakespear) it is not evidence that it is...

If the lottery came up 1234567 it would certainly appear something made it happen that way... because it certainly doesn't just randomly happen that way...

But actually it does... about 1 in every hundred million times a 7 number lottery draw from 1 to 50 will come up 1234567...

That's not often... but it is indeed sometimes...

Some people would say the chances are so small it's the same as never... I would certainly bet everything I own that the next lottery draw will not be 1234567.

But the law of probabilities shows that despite the fact that it is highly improbable... given enough draws, it is not only probable, it is a certainty.

I look at the sky, I see the universe spread around us and wonder... how unlikely would it be that over all the time the universe has been around, with all the lottery balls of potential life bouncing around, that life wouldn't have randomly happened by now?

So here is a completely honest question... where did these lottery balls of potential come from? Did they just always exist? How is that possible... doesn't everything we know of have a beginning and an end, with something actually creating it (whether it be our parents or something else?)?

Well yes if you decide they have to pop up in that order... a winning lottery draw of 7123456 is considered the same as 1234567...

So if they can be in any order, it's about 1 in 100 million (that's how lottery draws work) if you want to draw exactly 1234567 in that order... 500 billion...

And of course, given enough draws.. you would draw 1234567 in order...

There is a very simple answer to that from the standpoint of science:

I don't know... yet.

And that's how science works... we don't know until we do... and it's always possible that we will never know... It's possible things were always here... it would defy how we currently think but that's not to say it's not possible... the universe and time may be some kind of mobius strip that goes around and repeats, exploding and imploding over and over again. Maybe we are all just a computer program running somewhere and it was just all created in RAM somewhere and will disapear again when it's all done. Maybe we are all someones dream and will go to wherever dreams go when you wake up...

At this point, there is not enough evidence and fact to say with any certainty where or even if everything came from.

And similarly at you with an honest question... where did God come from? Did someone create him? What did he do before he decided to make our universe? Does he have relatives/coworkers/equals?

Here is a quote from Einstein:
-snip-

The answer to God is more logical and philosophical, I believe.

God always has been.

Everything with a beginning has a creator, right? But my question is, can something form out of nothing? I mean, I think that in order for something to be made, it has to be made from something... but who made that first something? Someone had to set it in motion, right?

Where did the energy come from that put the particles in motion that created the reactions to form more intelligent life? Is energy eternal? No... have we found anything that is eternal here in this physical world, no. But logically it makes no sense that something that is not eternal has created something, because it has a beginning. It came from something.

To me, it only makes logical sense that we had to come from somewhere, something, or someone that has no beginning. It was just always there. That, in my opinion, is God... and the random chances that that God was just an eternal element that has existed for always is pretty slim, if you ask me. To create such detail out of such simplicity is rare, if not impossible... and the evidences of the age of the earth have been disputed and are as well, a bit faulty (check out my husband's post on carbon dating awhile back in the thread).

This one is hard for me to talk about without sounding confusing so I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense.

Is energy eternal? No...