anne~

you can't know that you are going to heaven. you might hope, but until you cash in, it's only a hope. nobody has come back with a tally of what percentage of self-assured christians actually got in. maybe it's 100%, but that seems unlikely. it's much easier to know that you aren't going. in my case, i'm a well-known scumbag so i know exactly where i'm going. the problem is, there's not a thing i can do about it. all the well-meaning christians will wring their hands and tell me how god loves me blah, blah, blah, but at the end of the day, that just doesn't cut it. knowing that, i'm automatically exluded from heaven. so here's the bottom line: you CAN be assured that you're right when you think you're going off to eternal torture, but it's not at all clear whether any person is good enough to be ASSURED they are going to heaven. but, if you can convince yourself of that, it must be very comforting. Now, to answer the question about whether i consider myself to be a good person.... that should be obvious from the above

Why do christians even bother discussing this? You all believe you know the truth and not a word of what you say will convince a non-christian that what you say is true. The whole point of most religions is to put together a set of presumptions that cannot be tested, and therefore not disproven. For example...this question of authorship of the bible is set up to be completely untestable. There is no way to demonstrate whether it was god-inspired or if it was written as a chain story over many years by a bunch of lunatics. The point is...if you want to believe this you will and nothing anyone can say will shake your belief. Faith exists to provide a framework of comfort based on assumptions and base statements that are designed to be immune from inquiry. This makes a system of faith "infallable." None of that will ever make a single person who has an open mind "come to faith." Claims such as those made here probably drive more people away from christianity than are attracted to it because anyone can see what is going on here....a priori assumptions without any basis that can be tested or examined. How would anyone outside the faith ever come to accept this?

yes, this is the district where 18,000 votes went missing in the most heavily democratic part of the district....the FBI has launched an investigation into this. republicans are still up to their voter fraud tricks that won the white house for the shrub twice...too bad the dems can now hold hearing for the first time in 6 years and start issuing supenas and getting the cockroaches out from under the rocks....i can't wait for january. watch this story as it unfolds....and what more fitting district than in katherine harris' old district.

This is hilarious. Clearly the bible is not a science text, nor was it intended to be, but people keep mining it, finding psuedo-science statements which they then try to bend to try to make them seem consistent with everyday knowledge. The same thinking that nearly got Galileo burned at the stake for saying the earth wasn't the center of the universe still persists today. We see it as a whole generations of christians who think that their faith is incompatible with measurable facts. They contest radioactive dating data without even being able to give a coherent description of how the techniques work. They essentially are reducing god to a magician or some sort of mischief-maker who has scrambled up the laws of physics just to test our faith. A simpler explanation is that faith and science can coexist, and that science is uncovering the handiwork of god. However, you have to give up the strict literal interpretations then...the flat earth, earth at the center of the universe, day and night being created before the sun (see gen 1), and so on. The resolution can be had by accepting that the bible wasn't written to be a science text, and doesn't concern itself with such things (it's hard to find quantum mechanics in the bible, for example), and science isn't studied to understand what god intends in our lives and how he guides us. Bottom line: read the right book to learn about what you are interested in. Don't read a manual on how to rebuild the transmission of your car if you want to find out how to bake cookies. Why is this SO hard to grasp??

As is often the case with Christians trying to talk science, this note is all garbled up...first atoms are NOT made of more and more atoms, and the fundemental particles that do comprise atoms are not anything like atoms, and don't go on forever. Second, going outward to larger scales is nothing at all like going inward to smaller scales. The strong and weak interactions that bind quarks together to build things like protons and neutrons are nothing like the forces that control things on the larger scale. Even the electromagnetic forces aren't felt over long distances because the existence of both positive and negative charges causes those forces to be screened by appropriately charged particles. So, on the large scale, things certainly aren't atoms...and the dominant force is gravity. On the smallest scales, things certainly aren't atoms, and the strong (or nuclear) interaction dominates everything. The writer obviously misunderstood what the science teacher was saying as no one, even before discovering the components of the atom, ever thought things like that. I'm sorry, but you won't find evidence for god being infinite in subatomic physics, as the analogy that is being applied can't be, since atoms don't "keep goin that way and never stops." A junior high level science book will present a far more accurate understanding. You're going to have to look for god somewhere else, broodmaster5.