The bible - fact or fiction???

[*censored*]

Karma defined.

[habsheaven]

Hmmmm ...... maybe there is a God afterall and He got tired of hearing this guy's rant?

[gatorboymike]

Maybe he somehow developed a conscience and couldn't live with himself. That would be a first among bigwig preachers.

[theonedru]

maybe in a way he was correct, but it wasn't the whole world coming to an end, maybe jut his world.

[mrveggieman]

I haven't heard anything from this group in a while and just wanted to raise it from the dead. Pun intended. Seriously though are there any controversial religious issues that anyone wants to discuss? Or does anyone have any questions regarding any of the holy books?

[matt_curren]

I think part of the confusion about evolution comes from our classification systems.

The reason all of this is so confusing is that the basic system of taxonomy, which was set up prior to evolution, is static and primarily built to classify existing, modern species. But the history of life is much bigger than just the present day, and the classifications have a branching unity that simple static names cannot capture.

Think of a human being. We are not only still apes, 100% ape, but we are also "still" 100% primate. And 100% mammal. And 100% amniote. And 100% tetrapod. And 100% eukaryote! This can sound crazy to anyone who thinks of evolution as one thing changing into another, but the key is that all of these categories are not simply larger and larger categories: they are our history as well.

This is why, when creationists insist that we never see fruit flies or dogs becoming something "else" they don't know how right they are. All the descendants of fruit flies will be fruit flies. All the descendants of dogs will be dogs. Not because they won't change into new species as well, but because they will still group together under those terms against all other living things. The unique history that was the lineage of fruit flies will ALWAYS be their lineage. "Fruit fly" will still describe what they are, how they are all like each other and unlike anything else.

Hopefully this is all making sense: it's a weird concept for some people to grasp. Our taxonomic way of naming things is like only being able to see 2d in a 3d world.

Even long extinct creatures like dinosaurs are given species names. But in a way, this is like saying that dinosaurs, and everything else we name in this manner, all exists in one time period, & nothing is the descendant of anything else. In reality, there is a "species" of now extinct dinosaur that is the ancestor of all birds. That's an entire CLASS (made up of many species of many genuses or many families, of many orders) of animals all tucked away beneath and inside that single "species" of dinosaur that is the ancestor of all of them.

[mrveggieman]

Interesting....