Biological Predisposition To Faith?

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diamond said:
All you non believers and hold outs as agnostics, as a believer and friend, I would tell you to continue to be good to your fellowman, be honest, thoughtful kind and just. If you follow these attributes which come from God not only will you have more genuine joy here, but in the hereafter as well.

That's my promise, take it to the bank, and then you will be privy to even greater joy and the rest of the story.
:hug:

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Irvine511 said:

chances are, i won't have a biological child. does this mean i'm a total dead end?

You're framing it that way.

It's natural selection at it's finest, really.

Whatever the reason be, ie your choice, circumstances beyond your control, whatever, no, your line can't continue unless you procreate. It's not a judgement of you, it just is what it is.

All I'm saying is that most of what religion taught us is bullshit, and the only way we can possibly realize any sort of 'eternal life' and know that we have done so is through procreation. Our genes, our 'soul', our mental and emotional makeup, it all lives on in our children. And the memory of our legacy lives on through our descendants based on what type of life we lead. Lead a life of good, and you live forever in their minds as such and bring them (and, inherently, you as the part of them still carried on) great happiness. This to me is what eventually became 'going to heaven' in many faiths. Lead a life of hurt and bad, and usually people have no other choice but to banish you from memory or push you so far back that you are largely forgotten or are always associated with that hurt. That became 'hell'.

If we believe that the bible and other 'holy books' were indeed not written by a god but by ancient men, we have to get to the core of what things that already naturally existed and occured on earth, what affected them to write the things they did and come up with these wild theories. At the very core of the human experience is procreation. So of course it is logical that this phenomenon that is so mind blowing - childbirth - would go on to become romanticized and many myths founded upon.
 
diamond said:

So basically, a belief in a God isn't really all that necessary, is it? If you're right we'll still meet up in the 'hereafter' and if I'm right you'll still have that 'heaven' that I speak of through your children and good living...

Sounds win-win to me :up:
 
Irvine511 said:





chances are, i won't have a biological child. does this mean i'm a total dead end?

Irvine-

Actually your mission in life could be to continuing tutoring the children that you're working with or will be working with in the future.

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:hug:
 
acrobatique said:


So basically, a belief in a God isn't really all that necessary, is it? If you're right we'll still meet up in the 'hereafter' and if I'm right you'll still have that 'heaven' that I speak of through your children and good living...

Sounds win-win to me :up:

Nope.

Not exactly, I'm pointing out that some ppl are at different spiritual places and shouldn't be scared into accepting God and Christ on our finite clock, because God is outside of our realm and has lived forever and knows us personally, our struggles, proclivities even down to knowing every hair on our heads-that theyre numbered. Christ said that.

The larger point is that the better they treat their fellowman here, the closer the will be to accepting God in the hereafter.

I believe if ppl are misled in this life and they're open to learning that God will be merciful to them in the next life.

That's where my belief system departs from Orthodox Christianity into Unorthodox Christianity.

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acrobatique said:
Barring all that, you're going to live, and then you're going to die. And that is the end of you. Afterlife is realized through children. You have children, you live on. Otherwise, your line ceases to exist.

And noone has been there and back to prove any differently.

It's not where you're from, it's where you're at.

This is pretty much a poorly constructed argument:

1) "Children" are, at most, a symbolic form of immortality, as we are certainly not clones of our ancestors and, within five generations or more, we're just as forgotten as our earlier ancestors.

2) This completely ignores the fact that a form "immortality" has been classically defined just the way Irvine described in his "Dolly Parton" metaphor. What I'd call "Germanic immortality" was wholly about "immortality through accomplishment." For them, it was about heroism. If you did something especially heroic in battle, you would likely get included in an epic saga, and you would thus be "immortalized" through legend. In fact, it is argued that the Norse gods probably started out as dead war heroes from the 1st millennium B.C., who were gradually worshiped (as ancestor worship was common at the time) then deified.

Dolly Parton's music will probably be remembered much longer than five generations after our own deaths, so, in that sense, she'll end up being more worldly "immortal" than any mere child bearer.
 
I appreciate your thoughts, but you are overlooking that I do believe that any concept of 'immortality' is largely, if not wholly, symbolic and any beliefs we have around it now are largely a product of someone before us striving to understand the circle of life. I'm applying the symbolism to an inarguable fact of nature: that we carry on our line through our children. There's nothing poorly constructed about it, it's just life.

As for Dolly parton, it's a poor metaphor. Her music is not what will be remembered about her 500 years from now, if anything at all. As for comparing her 'immortal' status - if you want to call it that - to the 'mere' child bearer, I think it's irrelevant because as I clarified the memory is carried on through the offspring and has little to do with achievements, recognition or accolades given the person outside that line.

I sense a bit of disdain in the term 'mere child bearer'. If I've misread, my bad. Make no mistake, the single most important being on this planet is the parent and by extension the child. Each and every one of them. Without them you and I do not exist to type these words, and without them our species dies.
 
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INDY500 said:


Please don't be so naïve as to think that ideologies don't use science to advance themselves.

If science has the "absolute truth" about the origin of life then let's recreate that moment in the laboratory because that would be game-over for thinking we need supernatural intervention.
Are you serious? Because Craig Venter is cracking that very problem. Creating an artificial life form.

Why is it that people need supernatural intervention to accomplish something that had millions of years across the surface areas of one or more planets and only needed to happen once. While the formation of the first self-replicating molecule may be highly unlikely sheer force of numbers may make it inevitable.
 
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