Neon Genesis

http://techie-buzz.com/science/dark-energy-confirmed.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techiebuzz+%28Techie+buzz%29

My mother is a fundamentalist Christian and like me she was always raised to believe homosexuality was a sin. She used to always rail against the evils of homosexuality and how gay marriage will destroy society. But this morning I came downstairs and my mother was watching Lady Gaga being interviewed on the View who my mother is a fan of. They were talking about Elton John's baby and my mother was talking about how cute the baby was and then just out of the blue she said gays and lesbians are the best parents in the world and there's nothing wrong with them wanting to get married and raise children. I still plan on waiting until I move out on my own to come out to my family as there's still my dad to deal with, but first my sister shifted her views to support gay rights and now my mother randomly seems to be supporting gays. I'm still not coming out to her yet but this is wonderful news for me and it's a testimony that proves that the more people are exposed to gays and realize we're just like everyone else, the more they become accepting of it. In this case, it seems to be thanks to Lady Gaga and Elton John.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13286241

If matter cannot be created nor destroyed, how does God create matter?

But then there's no concept of hell in the OT and yet Judaism is still around. I've watched some of the interviews with Rob Bell on youtube and he doesn't seem to be a universalist in the Spong sense of the word where they think everyone just automatically goes to heaven when they die. Bell seems to have this belief that hell is real but hell is only temporary and that you can repent of your sins whenever you want to in the afterlife and God will let you in. Isn't this like the Catholic doctrine of purgatory?

Rob Bell is a pretty popular Christian author with the younger Christians at my parents' church and they've previously had a lot of respect for him, but now that Rob Bell has a new book out where he apparently argues there is no hell, suddenly they treat him like a heretic who's fallen away and leading people astray. Like this morning during bible class when they were asking for prayers, one of them suggested we should all pray for Rob Bell and for God to help him see the light and error of his ways. Then they started ranting about how sinful it was for him to preach that non-Christians can go to heaven too and how Jesus' death is meaningless if everyone gets into heaven. Of course nobody presented any actual proof that hell is real and didn't bother to refute any of Rob Bell's arguments. They just attacked his character instead and mocked how he was supposedly "dodging" questions in interviews and complaining about how he was shattering many young Christians' faith for challenging their belief in hell. One of them also tried to claim Rob Bell must have gone through a personal tragedy to arrive at this conclusion because nobody could have possibly arrived at this conclusion through thoughtful consideration or logical thinking. It obviously had to have been an emotional decision. It just irritates me that for years they sang praises to Rob Bell about how wonderful he is and now that he says something they don't agree with, suddenly he's treated like a traitor who's leading people to hellfire with his evil heresy even though none of them have any actual proof that hell is real. I also find their "let's pray for Rob Bell to change his mind" attitude to be rather patronizing and obnoxiously self-righteous. Besides, doesn't praying for Rob Bell to change his mind contradict the Christian belief in free will? If Rob Bell magically changes his mind because of his prayer, then how can he have changed his mind with freewill? It just annoys me with how these Christians are just fair weather friends who only like you when you say what they want to hear but if anyone challenges their beliefs by daring to disagree, they just toss them aside and brand them as heretics and traitors.

I'm trying to decide between listening to this episode out of morbid curiosity or skipping that week's podcast to save my sanity.

My point is that there is no objective definition of what the soul is and until the soul can be objectively defined and proven to exist, any discussion on whether or not it's compatible with something that does exist like evolution is meaningless whether arguing for or against it. Likewise, any discussion about God is meaningless until we can arrive at an objective definition of what God is.

The problem with debating whether or not the soul is compatible with evolution is that if all religion is human-made, then the religious believers can make the soul be anything they want and explain how it works however they want. So as long as they come up with a convincing enough sounding word game, they can make the soul be compatible with almost whatever scientific theory they want. Trying to argue whether the soul is comptabible with science is like arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Again, simply plugging your fingers in your ears and going "They're comptabible, lalalalalaIcan'thearyou!" isn't an argument.

It was one of my Catholic friends who mentioned this to me that it's happened before. She's a big believer in the paranormal and the supernatural and she even believes in Mothman. I linked her to this story and she was unimpressed. Her reaction was "again?" and she mentioned to me this has already happened before and she found it unconvincing even though she's a believer in this stuff herself.

Didn't someone claim to have found bacteria in Mars meteorites back in the 90s and that got debunked too?

Here's NASA's response to the alien microbe claim: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110307/sc_afp/usspacebiologyastrobiologynasa_20110307213247;_ylt=Ai65eMY3VTwp_uvAp_Sb11Ks0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFla2gwdjlsBHBvcwMxMTQEc2VjA2FjY29yZGlvbl9zY2llbmNlBHNsawNuYXNhc2F5czM5bm8-