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No, but it can erode it piece by piece. So that of all the things you believed in some coherent system half have been proven wrong and the other half are just plain confusing as to what they mean anymore. The thing is that we have this need to unify our ideas, so a fact that doesn't fit with...

People get attached to things, to ideas. It makes them feel comfortable to think they know something. To use JuveRev's example I used to be attached to this absolute morality idea and I was basically looking for justification as to why and how we can support the idea. As I told JuveRev...

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Well that's a historical discussion, maybe you can ask Alen or Seven who are competent in history :D

see above

No, let me refine that. If you read the bible and you say "oh, this piece of advice is useful for my life" and "this story is cruel and I won't apply it to my life" then you already have a value system and you don't need the bible anyway.

I totally accept that, which is why I think it's an old book, historically interesting, with no value for people's lives today. Basically, if you are intelligent enough to interpret the bible in such a way that it gives you good advice (instead of taking it literally) then you're intelligent...

What you said doesn't really have anything to do with a conflict between religion and science. You just said that some scientists are religious. As long as they are legitimate and ethical scientists, noone cares. It's people who try to smuggle in Creationism into science classes in the US (or...

Well.. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html I mean...

I guess the major selling point is that the stories are so simple that everyone can understand them. But I would stop short of saying it's the best "manual for life" book you could find, for starters because of the fact that some stories are really cruel and if you followed them you'd be in jail.

How do you know which parts you are supposed to follow?

This is true in so far as Christians don't make claims about science (evolution, the big bang etc) But this has never been what Christianity is all about, they've always claimed to know more facts than infidels.

Or atheists. Some Christians are really freaked out by atheists.

That's not how I intended it, I meant torture as an instrument of interrogation. But the electric chair would certainly be equivalent to torture, wouldn't you say?

Say again? So if you are more compassionate you are more supportive of torture? How does that make sense?

Look at the torture poll. Is torture right or wrong? People disagree. Take any event in history and you find people on both sides. Wrong. My beliefs concerning morality have never been connected to god. I used to think more like you, that there should be an objective morality. But the more I...

I have to echo Seven's diagnosis. You really want there to an objective reality. You think that everyone should agree that killing a baby is wrong. But just because you want something doesn't make it true.

Who doesn't have an agenda? This forum began when Tom started that thread where there was a lecture and he had a bunch of questions. I thought that was pure curiosity. But most threads here are either trying to score a point side on one side or the other. I didn't know we had a problem with that.

How is it ego stroking to ask people about their stance on some issue? Are you claiming I knew what they would say and I'm doing it all to amuse myself? I didn't, I was curious. Maybe the religion angle is baseless (which I totally disagree with) but is the torture question itself not valid...

Would you for once stick to the conclusions that have been reached. Did we or did we not decide that in some cases it's impossible to discover what the objectively moral choice is? Is that's the case, how the hell is it objective??