No matter how open-minded...

[Mad World]

Statements such as "You'll go to Hell if you don't believe in God", are particularly aggravating - they even bother me, even though I'm a theist. Strangely though, the Bible prohibits such acts; just another fact that proves most Christians are diluted ,and have no little idea of their faith(No offence intended).

May I ask: what do you think happens to people who die not accepting/believing in Jesus?

I definitely can't stand it when people say things like, "He/she is going to Hell for sure." They don't know that; they're judging (Bible speaks against judging). That person could radically change their life around at some point, and accept Jesus. But, hypothetically speaking, let's say someone dies. When they die, they die not having ever accepted Jesus as their saviour. What do you think most likely happens to them?

 

[Tips_of_Fingers]

I think someone should make a parody of 'Summer of 69' based on your username. = D

Hey neat! My brother and his friend play a game where they find the number "69" hidden throughout the world. I can send them that song.

You've...never...heard...that...song?

You, my crazy, pony-loving friend, are lucky.

Oh-so-fucking-lucky.

 

[Jadak]

http://news.yahoo.com/remains-274-us-troops-dumped-landfill-report-081234306.html

This. I cannot wrap my head around this. There are no words in the English language that are viscerally strong enough to convey how vile and inhuman this is.

What is there to wrap your head around? What they had was ash, what else would they do with it? Load bullets with it to shoot back at the enemy? Yeah, it kind of insulting to the family when they were told the remains would be discarded in a respectful fashion, but honestly, forgoing respect for the sake of convenience isn't really that hard to grasp, particularly when you don't intend to tell anyone, thus offending nobody.

Too bad it leaked really, the only negative consequences are a result of people hearing about it. If it was kept quiet, then it was merely taking something that needed to be discarded and doing so in an efficient manner, exactly what they should be doing in that situation.

 

[Sinclair Solutions]

I'll start with the last part... Tradition pretty much pointless. Helped them through bad times, God doesn't help you through that only you can fix that shit. I Judged them because it was completely annoying to listen to their shit for hours when I didn't want to be there at all.

I come off a bit pissed off when it comes to religion because my mom was heavily into the shit to the point where she would blast gospel music in 2 in the fucking morning to help her faith and all that led to was us getting evicted from our home. So seeing how faith bring about nothing as a young child pretty made sure that I can't believe in it at all.

Then I was forced to go to a church go to a church and deal with people I didn't care this was after I got put on the street and was forced to live with my brother's idiot girlfriend. She was such a hypocrite when it came to religion and overall I just couldn't stand how smug she was toward me because I didn't want to go to church.

You're situation is complicated (to say the least), and the way your life has shaped it, I understand your feelings towards religion. I would never know the emotions you have felt, so I could never truly convince you of otherwise. I was merely stating how I felt.

For the ideas of tradition, I just sort of meant was it the sort of set religion of the family? Yes, it seems pointless to you, but we don't know how they feel about it. Perhaps they feel the same. Maybe they wonder about what religions they could choose for themselves what they want to believe. I don't really know.

As for "bad times," that comes back to the idea of comfort. God doesn't do anything for them, but religion acts as a sort of a comfort and a maybe motivator for them.

I appreciate your honesty, however. And I salute you, wish you the best of luck in the future, and hope that you learn from your experiences and grow from them.

 

[Tselis]

http://news.yahoo.com/remains-274-us-troops-dumped-landfill-report-081234306.html

This. I cannot wrap my head around this. There are no words in the English language that are viscerally strong enough to convey how vile and inhuman this is.

What is there to wrap your head around? What they had was ash, what else would they do with it? Load bullets with it to shoot back at the enemy? Yeah, it kind of insulting to the family when they were told the remains would be discarded in a respectful fashion, but honestly, forgoing respect for the sake of convenience isn't really that hard to grasp, particularly when you don't intend to tell anyone, thus offending nobody.

Too bad it leaked really, the only negative consequences are a result of people hearing about it. If it was kept quiet, then it was merely taking something that needed to be discarded and doing so in an efficient manner, exactly what they should be doing in that situation.

These people died to give you the freedom to disrespect them in this manner. Honestly, you should end up in a landfill, at least you deserve it. BTW, burial at sea is a time honored military tradition, ...jackass.

 

[Anthony Abney]

Racism. If you were blind, you wouldn't know whether or not the person you're talking to was black so why should it matter?

Sexism. You need both sexes to have children, you need children to keep the human race going, why put people down over their gender? You need each other, so there's no point hating on them.

Homophobia. I have heard 2 arguments for it: gay couples can't have children, and it is morally wrong. There are cases where gay couples find an outside source for the missing chromosome, and morals are relative so what you think is wrong may be acceptable to someone else, so morally wrong is not an acceptable reason.

 

[Wintermute_]

Why people are religious. Despite the fact that for the majority of my life I was Catholic.

Also American Politics...are things really that bad over there?

Honestly? No... The thing about American politics is that thanks to endless media coverage and bias news organizations with agendas, the USA is the most alarmist country ever.

And that is my pick for the thread: alarmism.
I cannot freakin' stand it! Every news organization or pundit or random family member/friend/relation/teacher/acquaintance/stranger who will talk about a recent political or societal happening as though it will cause the end of days! WHy can no one just calmly consider the implications of a political decision, without rallying an outcry that it will somehow end the why of life as you know it?

Calm. the hell. down. whatever it is you are worried about in all likelihood isn't that freaking important and you won't bother with it a weak down the road before a new end to the world is revealed. If your going to pick a hill to stand and die on, take a moment to calmly consider which.

 

[Jadak]

These people died to give you the freedom to disrespect them in this manner. Honestly, you should end up in a landfill, at least you deserve it. BTW, burial at sea is a time honored military tradition, ...jackass.

It's not like they were taking the bodies and running off to toss them in the stash without anyone taking any note of the soldiers loss.

The soldiers would still have had whatever memorials were appropriate, and will be remembered in whatever ways such things are remembered by those who care. What you have here is partial remains that the family members gave the military permission to be disposed of. Is it disrespectful? Maybe. But it's fucking ashes. Respecting the solider is not dependant on the method of disposal of some incinerated remains.

But hey, if you need your traditions and respectful gestures to feel appropriate, feel free. But practically, respecting a man for who he was and what he did does not require respecting some ash.

 

[Unesh52]

stop it.

Seriously stop it because somehow, SOMEHOW, people think that Pascals' wager is legit.

It is a LOGICAL FALLACY and is not at all a decent way to make a decision. I will go into detail if requested, or you could google why and hopefully get some comprehensive result.

Actually, it's not a logical fallacy in the usual formulation used by people nowadays. The original formulation actually is a fallacy, but that's neither here nor there. The usual argument is as follows:

1. If God exists, then belief in him will result in eternal happiness.
2. If God doesn't exist, then belief in him will result in nothing gained or lost.
3. If God exists, then not believing in him will result in eternal Hell.
4. If God doesn't exist, then not believing in him will result in nothing gained or lost.
TF,
5. Assuming we can't know for certain whether God exists, the best option when choosing whether to believe is to decide that He does.
6. We should choose the best option.
TF,
7. We should decide that God exists.

Note that the argument doesn't claim that God must exist, only that we should choose to believe He does. Both conclusions exactly follow from the truth of the premises - it is a valid deductive argument. (Premise 5 follows from game theory, which you should look up if that wasn't obvious to anyone reading this.) The problem is that it's at least really hard to justify the first 4 premises without first showing that God exists (which would make the wager redundant). And even if you could do that, they still wouldn't be right because they assume there's no penalty or benefit to faith or non-belief if God doesn't exist, which is highly dubious for various reasons that aren't important here. It's still a horrible argument that needs to die in a fire because it's really annoying, naive, and condescending - but it's not a logical fallacy.

 

[Tselis]

These people died to give you the freedom to disrespect them in this manner. Honestly, you should end up in a landfill, at least you deserve it. BTW, burial at sea is a time honored military tradition, ...jackass.

It's not like they were taking the bodies and running off to toss them in the stash without anyone taking any note of the soldiers loss.

The soldiers would still have had whatever memorials were appropriate, and will be remembered in whatever ways such things are remembered by those who care. What you have here is partial remains that the family members gave the military permission to be disposed of. Is it disrespectful? Maybe. But it's fucking ashes. Respecting the solider is not dependant on the method of disposal of some incinerated remains.

But hey, if you need your traditions and respectful gestures to feel appropriate, feel free. But practically, respecting a man for who he was and what he did does not require respecting some ash.

No, they were mixing the remains with medical waste and then shipping them off to a landfill without making a memorial, and without bothering to tell the families. This is just about the ultimate disrespect to someone who has served, to be thrown away with the trash, by the very people you died to protect. This is inhuman, and to even remotely think this is acceptable, is also inhuman. Honestly, a mass grave would have been more forgivable than this. We bring our people home, we ALWAYS bring our people home. It's part of the culture, part of the promise we make to our soldiers; that they will not be forgotten, that thier deaths will mean something. This makes a mockery of their sacrifices. To defend it makes a mockery a humanity and only gives validation to any misanthropes perception that humanity is shit and deserves to die. If we cannot even bury our dead with respect then we have failed, failed at an epic level. There are no words to describe the level to which we have failed. Also, yes, respecting the remains of a person does denote respect for the individual. But perhaps a nonhuman like you wouldn't understand what respect is, or sacrifice apparently.

Also, if this have been even remotely acceptable, they would have been open about it, instead of trying to hide it. People don't try to hide things unless they know what they are doing is wrong. It's kind of a key element in the human nature.

 

[Dorian6]

Anyone who still votes.

I can't understand how people still support any politicians, despite how they continue to screw us over.

"We're going to take a vote to decide if we should raise our own pay."

"Maaaaaybe, I'll run for president if you make a generous donation to me"

"Lets waste hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars deciding that "In God We Trust" should still be our nation's motto."

"Asking the wealthiest Americans to pay the same percentage of taxes as the poorest? What sort of socialist bullshit is that?"

"We can't give fags equal rights! Letting them be equal to me infringes on my god-given rights to oppress people who don't believe like I do. Besides, then, who will be our scapegoat when we need to distract the public from our obvious corruption?"

 

[Robert632]

...you try to be, there's always that one thing you can't wrap your head around.

For me, it's people who aren't moved by music, people who are fine with listening to the radio or club music because it's easy to dance to or it's simple, people who don't go looking for music that inspires them or brings out all manner of emotion/feeling to the surface (be it joy, excitement, anger, passion etc). These are the things I can't accept/understand, no matter how wide I open my mind.

So what's your one thing that you can't grasp?

Huh. I guess I'm sorta the opposite of you, as I quite literally can't grasp why people feel the need to be emotionally moved by something to enjoy it.

 

[[email protected]]

First of all i'd like to say that i try to be open minded with everything around me, that being said i personally believe that i would find more enjoyment in being strung up by my balls than in watching bloodly twlight, also the fascination with the creature known as Justin Beiber, ehhh yuck. Now that were past that, my veiw on being open minded isn't so much excepting everything as your own, idea's/belief's/feelings towards music, whatever, but more just excepting the fact that you are different to everyone else, no matter how minor or major and just dealing with that fact, not getting into wars over religion or what not

 

[Logiclul]

stop it.

Seriously stop it because somehow, SOMEHOW, people think that Pascals' wager is legit.

It is a LOGICAL FALLACY and is not at all a decent way to make a decision. I will go into detail if requested, or you could google why and hopefully get some comprehensive result.

Actually, it's not a logical fallacy in the usual formulation used by people nowadays. The original formulation actually is a fallacy, but that's neither here nor there. The usual argument is as follows:

1. If God exists, then belief in him will result in eternal happiness.
2. If God doesn't exist, then belief in him will result in nothing gained or lost.
3. If God exists, then not believing in him will result in eternal Hell.
4. If God doesn't exist, then not believing in him will result in nothing gained or lost.
TF,
5. Assuming we can't know for certain whether God exists, the best option when choosing whether to believe is to decide that He does.
6. We should choose the best option.
TF,
7. We should decide that God exists.

Note that the argument doesn't claim that God must exist, only that we should choose to believe He does. Both conclusions exactly follow from the truth of the premises - it is a valid deductive argument. (Premise 5 follows from game theory, which you should look up if that wasn't obvious to anyone reading this.) The problem is that it's at least really hard to justify the first 4 premises without first showing that God exists (which would make the wager redundant). And even if you could do that, they still wouldn't be right because they assume there's no penalty or benefit to faith or non-belief if God doesn't exist, which is highly dubious for various reasons that aren't important here. It's still a horrible argument that needs to die in a fire because it's really annoying, naive, and condescending - but it's not a logical fallacy.

You are falling victim to the misrepresented class. You must remember that there are thousands of religions, many of which directly contradict each other such that belief in another wherein the former is truth would result in damnation. The easy correlation is Islam to Christianity. It is not "is god real, or isn't god real", it is "is god 1 real, or is god 2 real... or is god n real, or isn't there any god?".

edit: by the way, what you presented isn't wrong for the reasons you described. You see, by making a decision matrix, we would find that believing God exists is the best option (IN THE SET YOU DESCRIBED, WHICH IS INACCURATE).

 

[TheTurtleMan]

I hate to be the Christian guy that tries to hold up a shield for all religion because that's definitely not who I am in day to day life. Believe me I get pissed all the time at people that are how would you say, a LOT more religious than I am. It's just a little unsettling to hear every other person talk about how people with faith are just too mentally weak to live with the comfort of religion.

I suppose that I would agree if we're talking about the strict fundamentalist people out there, although not every one is that way. I mean how crazy is it to believe in a higher power or something after death? So what if there's no scientific evidence to back it up, which there never will be for that matter, to me there's a fine line between scientific ideas and ideas of faith.

Whatever I've already said waaay too much. Like I already said I don't want to come across as the grand champion of Jesus.

 

[Jadak]

.
No, they were mixing the remains with medical waste and then shipping them off to a landfill without making a memorial, and without bothering to tell the families. This is just about the ultimate disrespect to someone who has served, to be thrown away with the trash, by the very people you died to protect. This is inhuman, and to even remotely think this is acceptable, is also inhuman. Honestly, a mass grave would have been more forgivable than this. We bring our people home, we ALWAYS bring our people home. It's part of the culture, part of the promise we make to our soldiers; that they will not be forgotten, that thier deaths will mean something. This makes a mockery of their sacrifices. To defend it makes a mockery a humanity and only gives validation to any misanthropes perception that humanity is shit and deserves to die. If we cannot even bury our dead with respect then we have failed, failed at an epic level. There are no words to describe the level to which we have failed. Also, yes, respecting the remains of a person does denote respect for the individual. But perhaps a nonhuman like you wouldn't understand what respect is, or sacrifice apparently.

Also, if this have been even remotely acceptable, they would have been open about it, instead of trying to hide it. People don't try to hide things unless they know what they are doing is wrong. It's kind of a key element in the human nature.

Should have picked that up from your last post, this is why you can't wrap your head around it. "Wrapping your head" around anything that doesn't fit your own viewpoint on something requires exactly that, being willing to consider things from perspectives other than your own. Everything you just posted is based purely in sentimental attachments to your personal ideals. Nothing wrong with that, but it makes arguing you with completely pointless as you're more concerned with how it makes you feel than the practical aspects of the situation.

So, good day. Enjoy your beliefs and being offended by things that don't comply.

 

[Unesh52]

they were mixing the remains with medical waste and then shipping them off to a landfill without making a memorial...

I don't really agree with the way Jadak presented his argument, but I agree with him. The tradition of honoring the bodies of the dead by parading them around and giving them special care seems wildly pointless when you don't associate the self with the body in an significant way. Lots of people believe that who a person is is in their mind and their personality alone (so a zombie of your mom is not in any way your mom, but a robot with your mom's brain is just as much her as she was when she breast fed you). Thus, giving human remains special protections or rights is weird - from that viewpoint. It's the honor of the memory that's important, not the honor of the body. If I were some kind of ghost and that had been done to me, I don't think it would bother me one bit. The only part that seems morally dubious is the part where they didn't get any kind of memorial, but I'm not sure that was disrespectful, because I was not aware that all KIA soldiers were given actual, tangible memorials. I thought the government just occasionally commissioned a monument to honor them en masse.

Now, as for why they didn't (and I think, shouldn't) tell the family: the fact that it makes no logical sense to honor the remains of the dead doesn't mean it doesn't have psychological implications for people. Honoring the body with rituals and such can be instrumental in the mourning process for the loved ones of the deceased, and finding out that the body has been desecrated in some manner can be traumatic. But when a grieving widow finds out her husband's corpse has been tossed in a dumpster, the evil (again, from a particular viewpoint) is not the method of disposal, but merely the fact that the widow was caused to grieve. Do you at least understand how some might draw the distinction and thus validate this type of action without meaning any disrespect to anyone's person or anyone's memory?

snip

Did I do justice to your viewpoint?

 

[viking97]

(also, newton was kind of nuts. jus sayin)

Fair enough, Newton was kind of a fruit. Brilliant fruit, but not really someone I'd want to share a drink with. But my point is that there are otherwise very intelligent people, even scientists, who study the natural world using rigorous methodology all the time, and theologians, who are formally trained in critical thought in some of the best schools in the world and think about their religion as part of their job, are religious. There are even some that believe in traditional, Western monotheism - take John Hick for example. I just studied his theodicy for my class this semester. These are not ignorant people, regardless of whether they are wrong or not. There are compelling psychological and logical reasons for believing in religious concepts. The fact that you see through them doesn't change that, and it's grossly inaccurate to assume that those who don't just haven't thought about it, or are woefully ignorant of the world.

perhaps, perhaps, although i don't really see an alternative.

but i'd never in a million years try to tell anyone else what to believe, as long as their beliefs don't affect me in any way.

as for psychological reasons, yeah i concede there. religion can be very comforting to anyone, although more so for some people. and if it isn't hurting anyone, i figure why try and take it away?

 

[L9OBL]

people with emotional thinking patterns or emotions for that matter. It makes no logical sense what so ever. how can you come to conclusions based on 1 fact or facts that are obviously flawed/inaccurate, who take sides and aren't willing to see the other's point of view. Those who use emotional responses to everything instead of thinking things through. How people can not perceive their environment (I'm not talking being unatentive and not noticing I'm left handed or catches what I'm saying mid-sentence. I'm talking how can you not see that I'm reading or hear what they want to hear not what I said), People who lack common sense, well i guess what I'm saying is I don't understand other people.

 

[Badassassin]

Religion. I can't wrap my head around willful delusions like that. Yes, I know it's not the popular stance to take, nor politically correct, but I just can't look at any of the religions I know and figure out why people believe in it. It's got the same factual weight as santa claus and makes about as much sense from any logical perspective and yet these religions are not only widespread beliefs but it's political and at times even social suicide to speak against them.

It's mindboggling to me. There's no scientifically backed indication of any of it having even a nugget of truth to it and yet it's 'narrowminded' or 'hateful' to point out the ridiculousness of it all.

I'll of course respect anyone's right to believe in these things, but the most aneurysm inducing part of it all is that there's no respect given to those who believe religion holds about as much water as a sieve.

There weren't enough italics in that post. You might need to add in some more