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Originally posted by juju
Or two, I can give up and accept that saying you're a Christian means absolutly nothing except that you believe in God.
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Jews, Muslims, and many others believe in God -- arguably the same God. Christian means you believe in Christ as your savior. So your second definition is a little too broad. :)
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How can you associate yourself with such nutjobs? ... In my mind, if you're not completely insane, then you're not really a Christian. I know this isn't the case, but it helps me sort it out in my head.
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I don't associate myself with those nutjobs... that's why I don't want you to lump as all together! Seeing as how you've now defined your definition of Christians as just the nutty ones, that's fine with me -- you just might want to make that known.
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Hmm... a debate on this topic would be in danger of going on forever. :]
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True, I didn't want to debate evolution vs. creation or anything. But I have a hard time believing that most people can accept anything on blind faith for their entire lives. It's just not in human nature to do so. I have personally seen much evidence in my life that God exists, and so I have no problem with believing it.
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My human evolution teacher knew a lot about human anatomy, and he used to bring up all sorts of examples of how the human body is constructed extremely poorly. He claimed that if a concious being did design us, then he/she must have been drunk or incredibly stupid.
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Or maybe that Being intentionally designed us with flaws. Just because some Perfect Being
could have designed us much better and didn't, has nothing to do with whether he
did design us, or whether he exists in the first place. Either way, I'm sure he just loved getting a rise out of all those nutjob Christians when he suggested that God was drunk or stupid.
The whole "why did God design us with fucked-up bodies" issue reminds me of the "if God is all-powerful, why does he allow evil and suffering to exist" issue. It's not black and white -- inefficient bodies vs. efficient ones, good vs. evil. It's a spectrum, and we put things into perspective based on the extremes that we've witnessed in our universe.
If our bodies were designed to be 500% more efficient than they are, we would still say "why are our bodies so inefficient? Why do I have to eat an apple
every week in order to still function?" Or if we had a titanium exoskeleton instead of skin, "why is our skin so weak? Why can't I walk into a nuclear reactor and not be killed?"
If these examples seem far-fetched, it's because we're
used to the extremes as they exist in our universe.