Stupid is as stupid does.  How endearing the humanists are, stuck in the solipsistic subjectivity of a permanent state of skepticism that NEEDS the transcendalist as a straw man for their feelings…that they call rational…because they say they are. I am reminded of the Ann Rand Objectiviist who maintains that everything is relative–since she maintained that contradictions do not exist –that is therefore a declarative statement and contradicts itself… Painful to think…. But then what Babe calls a cult…we call LOVE. That is an attribute that absorbs all contradictions and collapses all dialetical materialisitic thinking.   And it makes you smile.

BJ you’re just kidding around aren’t you?  You don’t really believe what you’ve written?  If so, then YES, you are delusional and an idiot.
Your bible has plenty of examples on the power of prayer, and yet in 2011 there is not one verifiable example of any prayer being answered.  Oh yes, there are plenty of anecdotal stories but no proof. Rick Perry prayed for rain in Texas and that didn’t work.  Texas is in a drought.
You really think I don’t have hope?  Here’s what I hope for …. all disease to be eradicated, more schools built so that every child can have an education, more hospitals built and every person on this planet provided health care, I hope that men will stop believing in their mythical books and then they might stop beating women, I hope all women are given access to reproduction education, BC and abortions, I hope all wars will stop and I hope all people will learn to be accountable for themselves instead of praying for answers.  I hope every person has all the food and shelter they need.  Tell me one of the major religions that isn’t oppressive to women?  I’d like that to stop! When you and I die, we both end up  exactly the same … star dust.  If there is something else out there, I don’t need to worry about it now because whatever it is, it’s not as it was written in the bible which if you’ve read it, you know it is more about control than love.  You do realize BJ, that your bible was written by uneducated bronze age tribesmen who were likely doing a few hallucinagenic drugs and they had no access to science or technology?  Would you take advice from those people sitting around a campfire, drinking their wine/beer and smoking maryjane’s today?  I don’t think so.  In AD and BC surgeries were performed by exactly the same sorts of people who wrote the bible and those didn’t work out too well.  Would you want any surgery performed the same as it was done 2000 years ago?  Why is it that everything has advanced except religion?  There’s no proof of Adam and Eve, no proof of Moses, no proof of jesus, no proof of Noah’s Ark.  Every culture developed their own ideas of gods and most grew to give them up, but not you.   Why not?  Why do you BJ need a crutch when that crutch has been rotting at a very quick pace for the past two centuries?
 
You also need to keep in mind the size of the universe.  There are some 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars (give or take a few zero) … 300 sextillion stars.  No, that doesn’t include planets or moons.  So where is your heaven in all of this?  Hubble hasn’t found it, but it has sent us back a few images of what the universe looks like.  No angels and no gods in spite of what you think in your delusional pea brain.
 
This is a world where great benefit could be gained if all religionists would give up their delusions.  There’s a lot that needs to be accomplished.  A lot of lives would be saved, if the $400,000,000 dollars donated to churches in the US last year was instead used to benefit science or technology.  There would be little impact on society today if religion were to totally disappear.  On the other hand, we can’t live as we live today, if science and/or technology were to disappear.  Science doesn’t have all the answers but it does have answers.  When you look to the bible it’s nothing more than wishful thinking full of lots of contradictions and horrific acts.
 
Nothing happens for any reason.  There are things beyond your control and things that aren’t.  More proof of your delusion when you think some god is trying to send you a message that there’s a reason.  Now get up and work in your garden, enjoy your grand children, play some music, go for a walk.  Know that nature is beautiful and enjoy this one life you have to live as best you can.  May the sky fairy bless you.  Babe
 
 

Plasmaphase: I need to ask you why you feel it’s important to read the bible?  I don’t see you or chrisians in general pushing other mythologies.  Whether I’ve read the entire book or not is totally irrelevant when existence is explained by the Theory of Evolution.  That’s important to understand the bible has no answers. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the there’s something a little fishy with the opening sentence of the bible “In the beginning a god created the heavens and earth”.  I’d need to have some verification of that statement before going forward to read anymore. If you can provide it, it would be awesome!  Do you read the newspaper or listen to NPR?  If so you would have heard or read that Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University (a leading evangelical on YOUR team) refers to the mapping of the human genome as one piece of Bible defying evidence.  Quoting from the article on NPR, “it’s clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago.  And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can’t get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.“* That means the whole Adam and Eve story is crap!  So is the Moses story and Noah’s Ark.  Not to forget the story of Abraham, and the giants and the men who lived to be 900 yrs old … was it Enoch?  Got that wrong it was Methuselah.  Jesus may or may not have existed, we don’t know for sure.  If he did exist he was a problem and I’m sorry PP didn’t choose to rid the world of him earlier.  Paul no doubt in writing about him 30-60 yrs later embellished the story.  And, anthropologists are certain that there were plenty of resurrections at the time Paul started writing, just as during the celebration of the Day of the Dead in Mexico when families conjure up their dead for a couple of nights of playing cards, music and dance.  We also know many women claimed to be virgins when they learned they were pregnant (BC & AD).  Hormones cause young people to participate in risky behavior and there are consequences.  Shame has always caused young people to lie.  So Plasmaphase I think the real question is have you really READ the bible.  Most who do want nothing to do with religion.  You on the other hand likely stick with a few verses you use to rationalize your position.  Grow up, there is no sky fairy and you won’t have to dance in heaven with all those criminals who are now stellar born-again christians.
 
* If you want to learn more, do a search on population genetics.  Babe

Mike, your god is “Love” and that’s all of it. That’s great! That’s great because that god doesn’t have an opinion on abortion, or science, or the women’s place in society. If everyone believed in that god, there would be no reason for Atheists to come together to form communities to protect themselves from the righteous religious folks. Have your self delusional JOY and Peace but keep it to yourself or at least don’t use beliefs as a weapon against those that don’t agree with you.