and i'll be damned if i buy into that crackpot theory, cloud.

'xactly. It's Poseidon Earth Shaker!

It was weird, because you could tell the professors believed in it, but they weren't allowed to teach it as accepted scientific fact; they had to teach it along with --- whatever the hell the theory was before then--magma displacement?

. . . No, that's Hunt for Red October, darn.

Agreed.

Where the hell did you go to school, Cloud? Pangea?

Science and faith are mutually exclusive. Some people are just so frightened that they put blinders on themselves and cannot or will not see anything outside of their own narrowly based view of things. When I was in junior high, my parents made the mistake of placing me in a school run by a branch of the Luthern church. The pastor blithely told us that God created the fossils. End of discussion.

More recently, I happened to encounter a woman who is a member of the Pentecostal faith. She described with much enthusiasm how God sends unbaptized infants to burn in hell. That brand of "spirituality" makes me sick. I was challenged to explain my own point of view, but I wasn't going to touch that one with a ten foot burning bush. I merely said to her, "I respect your belief, but I do not share it." Even that statement was incendiary. Shereplied angrily, "Its not my belief, its God's own truth."

Whatever.

If you want to stop her in her tracks just ask her to show you the scripture that crap came from. This doesn't invite an argument about the truthfulness of THE faith, it only asks her to support her faith with evidence from the basis of her faith.

there is a lot of "christian" theology that has no basis whatsoever in the Bible. so where does it come from?

Continental drift! that was it!

hey, i vaguely remember that.

From the same place that the stuff that IS in the Bible came from. Somebody thought it, somebody said it, somebody wrote it down.

But I understand your point. I don't think that the Bible says an overwhelming majority of what I hear people describing as the basis for their faith.

OK, point taken Flint. You don't believe in the Bible as the God authored, man written word... yadayadayada. but the people you are having the discussion with DO. If they believe that the Bible is the word of God and they further believe that man's ideas are of no significance next to God's, ask them to show you where their theological points come from - chapter and verse.

Yeah, I understand. I diverged from your point, but it's a good point. And that is how you should do it. If someone is speaking with something as their specific basis, then they should be able to answer in those terms. If they can't do that then the problem isn't the book or the religion, it's that the person is a sloppy thinker.

But it isn't just an innocent mistake--where did these ideas come from? Which was your question.

It's funny, I'm pretty open about being an atheist, even fact to face.

People will ask me (usually rather loudly and shrilly), "Why do you hate God?"

I tell them, "I don't have a problem with God, it's you I don't like."

It's an easy mistake for them to make.

They've so wrapped themselves up in dogma that they forget that faith is an internal revelatory event. Faith isn't up for debate, everything else is though.

Not true, it depends on what your faith is in. I might go along with, Science and the church leadership are mutually exclusive, though.

I would think that the religious community's negative knee-jerk reaction to scientific ideas stems from way back when those type of ideas seriously threatened the 'Church's' power...for instance, when Galileo proposed that the earth revolved around the sun. The Church didnt play around...threats like these were handled.

It is mind-blowing to me, that, people who are now so thoroughly exposed to science, can still discount it in favor religious dogma.

I've finally come to the realization that the human race isnt really all that evolved yet. And may never be.

Pico, the reaction to Galileo by "The Church", although I think you're right, refers to one religious community.

Just a point of order, but the church's reason for the Injunction against Galileo was that he was teaching and gathering evidence (with his shiny new telescope) for Copernicus' heliocentric theory, not that he proposed it himself.
:)