[ExI] atheists declare religions as scams.

[Samantha Atkins]

On Jan 6, 2011, at 7:34 AM, John Clark wrote:

> On Jan 4, 2011, at 4:32 PM, spike wrote:
> 
>> A christian evolutionist is not necessarily a contradiction
> 
> 
> There are christian evolutionists but it is a contradiction, they just live with it the same way all religious people deal with the absurdity of their beliefs, by putting their ideas in little air tight compartments with no way for them to interact with each other. Christians believe in a benevolent God who can do anything, so He could have produced the complexity of our world by just snapping his metaphorical fingers but instead he used Evolution, a hideously cruel process. That is FAR more evil than anything Satan did in the Bible.

There are many many flavors of Christian - some are actually pretty sane.  :)   Mainstream Christianity for a while was denatured of all that biblical literalism and thought many things were mostly symbolic, for instance.  Then we got the fundamentalist resurgence - in my opinion partially as reaction to Future Shock.  

If you hold that it is possible within the laws of physics of this universe to run multiple virtual universes then you believe in principle that it is possible for an entire universe to have a creator.   You also believe in principle that things that apparently violate the physics of such a virtual universe can be done by those controlling the simulating machinery.  And of course you believe that genetic algorithms could be used to develop beings of all kinds tuned to parts of this virtual universe.    So yeah,  a Christian that understands and affirms evolution is not that far fetched.

- samantha

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