best outcome from space exploration:

[kappa]

Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
How bout this restate your basic position on religion in one post - use bullet points and be very clear.  Because frankly I dont belive that you have been honest with me so far, your statemts of intent have cahnged too many times and thats why I chosen to be so abrasive and literal in my interpretions of your statements.

LoL Grun...  Not been honest? We'll its easy to check cause its all right here in the thread..

I've changed nothing and actually said very little.. most post have been trying to correct my cause when others would misread me.. Im sure I have fault in that... I am not a professional writter as I'm sure it's easy to tell..

Ok, I did change one thing.. I started with imagine no religion, I then (a few post later) requalified that the evil in religion is the segragation of religion.. That even in the bible, religion was the original segragationist.. Also that more had died in religious wars or in the name of a god than had died to land grabbing wars.. (due to the segragation of religion) Thats pretty much all.. The rest of this some odd hundred post thread was in defense of my position from peps calling me stupid and ignorant.. I'm sure you know these folks..

[kappa]

Originally posted by Animal
heh, check out the thread title.

And hes right.. had nothing to do with the title it seems... Guess I was sidetrack by folks asking me why.. After calling me ignorant of course...

[GRUNHERZ]

LoL Grun... Not been honest? We'll its easy to check cause its all right here in the thread..


Dont LOL that one, I honestly told you I felt you were being disingenous.

[AKIron]

Originally posted by kappa
Once again Grun.. read the thread dude...

I said more had died in the name of god than anything else... <-- not verbatum...

(gawd I cant believe im doing this)

Iron said, more had died in WW2 than ever died in the name of a god. He told me to post numbers to prove my point.. Hence I did..

I didn't say that, are you intentionallly distorting what I said? You said more have been killed in the name of religion than all else. I told you to prove it and gave you some numbers to start with. So far I'm still way ahead.


Here's a few more, I'm just getting started. Care to admit you were wrong?

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm

[AKIron]

Some more:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1288230.stm

few more million here:

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/haq/200001/0001a009.htm

Don't forget a few million vicitims of politicide in North Korea. Oh, isn't that one of your religionless utopias? Imagine that why don't ya.

[Nakhui]

Originally posted by AKIron
kappa, I'll agree that many have died for their religion but that is vastly different from killing for your religion. No way you can say that if there had been no religion those people would not have been killed for some other cause by the nonreligious murderers.

Which is morally more correct
1. Killing for your religion?
2. Killing for your country?

One is for God... and the other is for hire.

[mrblack]

Originally posted by Nakhui
Which is morally more correct
1. Killing for your religion?
2. Killing for your country?

One is for God... and the other is for hire.

As a retired soldier I can tell you that there is no more a moral thing than to die for your country.

[kappa]

I did not mean to distort what you said and the distortion is quite small... Thanks for holding true to your argumentative self..

No, Im not wrong.. Its easy to pull figures from ww1 and 2 as they were not that long ago (relatively) and the actions well documented..

Iron, your basically comparing 40 (if that much)  years of war to 4000yrs of religious persecution... The links I posted more than equal WW2 death tolls.. Those not including many religions around the world. Nothing of many religious struggles around the world such as India/Pakastan. People were fighting over religion long before they fought major wars over land..

How many races of humans in the americas were lost to Europes desire to spread christianity around the world? How could you find numbers on this? How many were the Aztecs? How many were the Mayan? How many of each other had they killed over the centuries of their existence over different religions..  As I stated before, impossible to tell..

How about the Turks? They have been religiously killing or being killed since their entry into world history..

Modern war has been around for less than 100 years.. In that 100 years less than half of that actually experienced modern war.. When compared with the known history of civilization, thats a very short time.. Religion has been around since people learned to write on cave walls.. People have since been compelled to convince the other their god is more powerful...

[AKIron]

Originally posted by kappa
I did not mean to distort what you said and the distortion is quite small... Thanks for holding true to your argumentative self..

No, Im not wrong.. Its easy to pull figures from ww1 and 2 as they were not that long ago (relatively) and the actions well documented..

Iron, your basically comparing 40 (if that much)  years of war to 4000yrs of religious persecution... The links I posted more than equal WW2 death tolls.. Those not including many religions around the world. Nothing of many religious struggles around the world such as India/Pakastan. People were fighting over religion long before they fought major wars over land..

How many races of humans in the americas were lost to Europes desire to spread christianity around the world? How could you find numbers on this? How many were the Aztecs? How many were the Mayan? How many of each other had they killed over the centuries of their existence over different religions..  As I stated before, impossible to tell..

How about the Turks? They have been religiously killing or being killed since their entry into world history..

Modern war has been around for less than 100 years.. In that 100 years less than half of that actually experienced modern war.. When compared with the known history of civilization, thats a very short time.. Religion has been around since people learned to write on cave walls.. People have since been compelled to convince the other their god is more powerful...

I can see that you will never admit the truth, even to yourself. I've shown you 70 - 80 million killed not in the name of God or religion in modern times alone. What makes you think these proportionately large numbers are lower in the past? Are you suggesting the only reason for war in the past was religion? If so, I can see there is no point in trying to convince you of your error.

[Nakhui]

Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
imagining a world without religion and wishing athe the space program would somehow disparove the existance of god and thus lead to the abandonment of religion.

Here's a thought...

Space is extremely hazardous to life...

Radiation, which is abundant in outer space, can sterialize multicelled organism and even mutate cell structure and DNA.
No amount of metal can protect from this.

The earth is 12 minutes away from total destruction... one huge solar flair from the sun and the protective ozone layer around the earth is gone... like a candle blown out in the wind.... and all life on the surface of the planet will die in a matter of a few months.

What if there really is no other life out there...

then...perhaps... there is a God.... but is that god a christian god, or a Muslim god... perhaps... the Aztecs were right!

In many ways scientists use what we know about earth to understand the rest of the universe... geology.. the formation of rocks... properties of light... heat... radiation.. on and on....

If the Earths ecosystem is also a microcosm of the universe... then we better be worried....

Sea turtle's are born by the thousands and die just as many...

Fish... spides... all species... some spawn millions and only a few thousand survive... Even the Earth is hostile to life... if it's not the environment... it's the preditors.. death is often instantious...

There's the quick... and there's the dead.

Is the Earth one giant egg.... incubating our species... protecting us while we develop.... as we multiply and consume we heat up the planet like a corpse heats up as it decays from a bazillion micro organism digest it... and eventually... we burst out into the universe to find another planetn and spawn another generation....

If the Earth is a microcosm... and the Universal is a macrocosm... then in the Universal Ecosystem... that means there are other species...

Does a catepillar realize how big the world is before it develops wings and flies?

Do humans realize how big the universe is?

What if our goal is to learn how to work together - like a colony of ants... and what if we don't... we die... Extinction... what if we are the only of our kind left... driven to the out skirts of the milky way...

this is our last chance to survive....

Any way... it's time for the simpson... can save the universe and all mankind another day...

cheers

[Nakhui]

Originally posted by mrblack
As a retired soldier I can tell you that there is no more a moral thing than to die for your country.

Wasn't it Patton that said...

"A soldier's duty is not to die for his country but make the other poor bastard die for his."

[kappa]

Originally posted by AKIron
I can see that you will never admit the truth, even to yourself. I've shown you 70 - 80 million killed not in the name of God or religion in modern times alone. What makes you think these proportionately large numbers are lower in the past? Are you suggesting the only reason for war in the past was religion? If so, I can see there is no point in trying to convince you of your error.

70-80 million? are you counting WW2 twice? I dont see it..

[AKIron]

Originally posted by kappa
70-80 million? are you counting WW2 twice? I dont see it..

50 million WWII, 20 million "purged" by Stalin. I listed more later, I could probably find another 10-20 million since 1900 pretty easily.

[kappa]

Originally posted by AKIron
50 million WWII, 20 million "purged" by Stalin. I listed more later, I could probably find another 10-20 million since 1900 pretty easily.

Your link attributes 19million to WW2...

[AKIron]

Originally posted by kappa
Your link attributes 19million to WW2...

Huh? Which link? I don't think I ever intended to offer a link for the 50 mil of WWII, that number is widely accepted. If you want one I can provide it.

Here's one, there are many more.

http://www.geocities.com/dtmcbride/hist/ww2.html