It is of course meant to be taken seriously, yes, but there is a point where that seriousness crosses the border into extremism. People who take their faith too seriously I have no issue with, it's the extremists that are the issue. People who try to force their own faith onto others, for instance, are quite extreme.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say in the first part, but I understand correctly the second. I believe it is up to the individual what they take from their fath. It is a personal matter, one that I have little reason to intrude upon. I cannot judge a person for taking what they will from their religion. They might believe in some aspects and then think others as being complete and utter nonsense. I don't see a problem about that.

I don't think I've ever encountered someone by that description and there is an Anglican church down the road. They all take bits and pieces of the faith that they like and leave the parts that they don't. Not a problem at all. I suppose the vicar of said church would be pretty close to a die-hard.

You've got different experiences than me regarding people who believe in religion and this is interesting stuff to discuss. Are people particularly religious in Lisbon? The religious people I've encountered throughout my life have only ever taken bits and pieces from their faith, not ever actually held themselves to do everything that their faith compels them to do.

I think that there is nothing wrong with religion, but the extremists who do things in the name of said religion are the problem. Religious people have done quite a bit of good, too. It's not the religion that is good or bad, but rather the people behind them. Hence why I am quite neutral to the concept of religion. What Contrary says is the truth.


Wow. It only snowed here for around half an hour and then completely stopped over the last couple of months. As usual in the UK, it's been mostly rain and overcast. At least, that's the way it usually is where I am.

I muddled my words a bit on that statement. What I meant is that the aforementioned couple have sex, which isn't of course isn't necessarily a bad thing, up until you consider that they are devoted Roman catholic, which implies that they accept the fact that, according to their own religion, sex is reserved until after marriage.

I don't judge people for being religious, as I implied before, I judge people who, for a lack of a better wording, pretend to be religious. They accept only what's more convenient to themselves, which goes against the very foundation of religion.




Portugal is mainly a Roman catholic country. As a matter of fact 90% of the countries population is catholic, which means that generation after generation is catholic by default. I was baptised as a baby, made the first communion and attended a private catholic school up until the 9th grade. Which means that for at least 14 years of my life people were trying to persuade me into belief.

I wouldn't really have a problem with that if they weren't all what I consider to be, hypocrites. I see religion as black and white. There is no in-between. You either believe or you don't, but as I mentioned earlier people will only accept what is convenient, which, in my eyes, is pure hypocrisy. By accepting faith you need to accept all the underpinnings without fault, otherwise you're sceptical of your own beliefs, which doesn't make any sense.

I will agree that extremists are quite pushy, however, I respect the fact that in their mind they're trying to save you. That unbreakable will and belief is something that amazes me.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3 ... age&t=8793

tl;dr, what ^he said in about five seconds.

Personally I think as long as you don't hurt anyone else, don't try and force it upon others, and it doesn't have any dumb restrictions, you can believe in whatever religion you want.

who gets to decide what a dumb restriction is tho

I'm fully allowed to believe certain religions are stupid, have stupid fanbases within them, and hold back culture. But this is armchair philosophy and unconstructive.
We could talk more about armchair atheists and how they contribute nothing to anything. It's like they read one Nietzsche quote and think they understand the world. He's rolling in his grave right now.

hm, not reading this entire debate, but as for the roman catholic couple i dont see whats so hypocritical about it unless they themselves are preaching (especially shaming others who dont practice) abstinence and the likes. faith and religion are two different things, religion being the foundation for faith, but your beliefs can be individualized to what you agree and disagree with.

i dont completely agree with religion, but i think everyone should be respected for their faith as long as they return the respect.

I think FoiL's point is that, if you profess to be of a religion, you should actually obey the tenets of that religion. His example of the couple that professes to be Catholic but have sex before marriage (and furthermore, probably without the intention of making children) is hypocritical because the Catholic church states that premarital sex is harmful to the soul and all that jazz.
If they instead said "I'm not Catholic but I believe a lot of things the Catholic church teaches", he would respect that (I think? Lemme know FoiL).

More or less what i'm thinking. I'm a complete atheist, the thought of there being any deity or godlike entity behind anything just doesn't occur to me at all at any times, and frankly, i find it silly that some people do get these thoughts... But for the most part, i don't care. I don't care if you're christian, muslim, buddhist, jewish, hindu, asatruar, agnostic or atheist, what i do care about is whether you're a ♥♥♥♥ or not. Being a ♥♥♥♥ includes a rampant desire to force ones belief down others' throats, and is not restricted to religion, but is rather dependent on the individual.

I have very little faith when it comes to my position officially as a christian, and I've been in and out with believing in a god.


I used to think this exactly, and I still sort of do, but I quite frankly like the idea of someone responsible for the evolution and progress of life on earth. The bible though? It's a nice story, but no.

I mean, the part of the universe we live in is pretty much (at least in most ways) too perfect not to be planned. Life evolves and refines itself over time. I find it a little depressing thinking that everything is a coincidence.

I'm a part of the church, even though I would consider myself as more of an agnostic. I don't pray to god or go to church regularly. I don't want to believe that we're all here for nothing though.

Besides, religion is supposed to teach us about morale and ethics, not be something anyone should fight over.

That's more of a personal thing, mostly if a religion has what I consider 'dumb restrictions' I just disagree with it.

How so? Even if the chance of everything lining up just right is one in one trillion, the universe is ♥♥♥♥ HUGE. You've heard of Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, right? Y'know, that photo where Hubble focused on a patch of space that's less than one tenth of the moons diameter from our viewpoint. NASA has made an even deeper photo; the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. Except those few stars which can be distinguished by their SPIKES OF SHINING, it's claimed that every single dot of light is otherwise a galaxy. The human mind simply cannot comprehend the scale of the universe, since it's hard enough to adequately understand just how large the sun (a fairly insignificant star in its own right) actually is.

Now, Wikipedia claims that it is estimated that the observable universe has around 200 billion galaxies, and that's only the observable part. The Milky Way is also said to have up to 400 billion stars in and of itself. Suppose that the other galaxies in the universe have maybe 50 billion stars each, on average. This gives us 20 quintillion stars to work with, which is more than enough for a place like Earth to happen at least once, even by the slightest of chances.

I don't actually care that my life is the result of an impossibly low chance happening, in fact i'm just glad that it did happen. I'm actually more depressed that it hasn't happened in the rest of our solar system (at least not that we know of, Mars MAY have supported at least bacterial life previously), because i'd be extremely fascinated by complex extraterrestrial life if we ctually found it, and something like Mars or Venus is appreciably close to us when compared to the nearest exoplanets.

If you want to talk about straight probabilities, yeah we are pretty fortunate, we exist as we are, and not otherwise.
But there's not much else to talk about.
If humans went extinct when the population grossed about 100,000, then something else would be shat out from the other animals, eventually.
If life simply didn't exist, there's not much to say on the matter; maybe a meteor actually destroyed our ancestors, the ice ages ♥♥♥♥ us royal, or simply something drastically changed the sea in such a way to destroy all prior life (before plants and fungii got onto land) or the primitive nucleic acids of yore were never able to assemble themselves into self-replicating and evolving forms. What are the chances of that?

This discussion is not really conducive of much; we are pretty much playing Pascal's Wager.

Also shook, Mars supports bacterial life, now.
Something about gases being emitted from mountains giving them off.
Look it up. It's something interesting for other people.


Religion: I prefer Gnosticism, and Buddhism. One is of Change, the other of Balance.

THIS IS FASCINATING TO ME

I wonder how different it is from terrestrial bacterial life. I suppose i could look it up like you say. :v

I have a big problem with the assumption that only earth like planets can support life. Scientists looked at life on earth and what it needs to survive and then brightly came to the conclusion that what life needs to survive is earth like conditions. We've barely begun to explore the galaxy, but already they've made a conclusion about the entire galaxy.

It like looking at 1 square inch of your living room floor, finding life there and then concluding that life needs exactly the same conditions as that 1 square inch of floor to survive. Coming to that conclusion would be insane and yet scientists have no problem doing that when it comes to life in the universe.

And in galactic sizes that 1 square inch of your living room is more like the entire milkyway. So humans as a whole have explored less than 1/400 billionth of 1 square inch of your living room and then drawn a bunch of conclusions about the rest of your living room, based upon what they explored.

Until we've at least explored a couple of planets, hopefully another solar system all together, or beter yet, actually find extraterrestial life, I think it's way too early to make assumptions about what life needs to live.

Yeah and really, I think we make a lot of assumptions when it comes to what we will accept as "life" when maybe that's not we should be looking for at all. In a universe of infinite probabilities, "life" as we know it actually has a very narrow definition, though it may seem like an encompassing term to us. I mean think about how strange it is to view another culture different from you own- in my experience even going up to the northern end of my province (British Columbia) was surreal as hell. Their rough farmer culture was really strange to me. Movies have us brought up on aliens that are essentially brightly coloured humans with weird languages but really, we might not even be able to recognize life as such if we ever see it.

That reminds me, does anyone else think we're being really naive with the way we go about looking for intelligent alien life? I don't know a lot about it but I know that we have radio dishes and ♥♥♥♥ sending out messages for aliens to pick up. Not only is that a huge waste of money as we're not even sure that it's likely any life exists out there, let alone intelligent in a way we can interact with; but also like, how do we not know they won't beat us up? The parallels to Earth cultures contacting each other is obvious- 99% of the time someone is getting ez'd and if the aliens are picking up our signal and coming to our town, we're probably the ones that are going to take the bruising.