Your Opinion On Christianity?

[Ashley Huddleston]

I am a HUGE Jesus freak. I live for the Lord, and I know I'll die for him too. He is my savior, and as I've suffered from Bipolar Disorder my whole life, I'll willingly admit if it weren't for him I probably wouldn't be here right now.

I don't mean to offend anyone, and I want your honest opinion, please. I love debates, and I believe it's a good way to make friends. So let's see if we can make some new friends through this. :]

[Vertigo_One [Ops Mod]]

I think the point about evolution is a little bit of a myth. There are some crazies out there who really do deny the mechanisms of evolution, but most Christians have a problem with the idea of life spontaneously arising, which while technically is abiogenesis, is often in popular discourse phrased in terms along with evolution. Most Christians take objection to the idea that life is a spontaneous accident, without meaning or purpose, which is what abiogenesis implies. Most will accept the possibility of abiogenesis, but they will not accept that it just "happened".

[Abreo]

Someone has the luxury of not living in America. I live in Texas, which is part of The Bible Belt, and while I can not offer any information that I can actually use to prove anything I can say from personal experience that evolution is not exactly loved here.

Well I can to SOME extent http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/22/us-creationism-texas-idUS...

That's an article about how the Texas School Board agreed to continue teaching the theory of evolution. Now when I was in school we did learn about evolution but it wasn't called evolution. I don't know why this was but we were instead instructed on mutations and DNA and all that junk [jokes for nerds] without using the word evolution. It was weird now that I think of it, but it actually took me about have a class to realize what it was.

That may seem small but in science class one year I had to work with these two girls on a project and they were being useless and annoying and instead of helping me do the project they were just asking questions. One of the questions they asked me was if I was a Christian. I told them I was agnostic [at the time I used the word agnostic and not atheist] and one of the girls asked me what that meant. The other one told her it meant I believed in evolution and she reacted with shock. This was not uncommon. I had a friend who was far more open about his beliefs than I was (and also WAAAAAAAAAAAAY more sociable) and he had a ton of experiences like this. Sometimes people he didn't even know would stop him in the hall and harass him about being an atheist. It didn't always happen, but sometimes the silliness of evolution was brought up. I know about this because he would go on and on for hours about how stupid these people were and I was nice enough to listen. 

America is far more religiously insane than the U.K. I don't know if we're more religious than you guys but we are more religiously insane. 

I wouldn't argue that there isn't some misunderstandings about what evolution actually is but if there are misunderstandings that simple then I have to say I highly doubt someone believes in it. You can't truly believe in something without knowing anything about it. 

[Vertigo_One [Ops Mod]]

I wouldn't argue that there isn't some misunderstandings about what evolution actually is but if there are misunderstandings that simple then I have to say I highly doubt someone believes in it. You can't truly believe in something without knowing anything about it.

 

I think if you were to ask someone "do you believe that animals change over time so as to better fit into their environment" then of course, people would answer yes. If you then expanded that argument to "do you believe that this process began with the accidental creation of a single celled lifeform, which then through millions of years of this process became us?" the answer would be less certain.

The fundimental objection to evolution of Christians isn't the science as much as it is the implication. People don't like the implication, and so bring up objections to the science (some of which are legitimate) but it is the implication that is most bothersome. Scientists so often assume that because they have explained the physical processes behind something, the lack of meaning in their discoveries means there is no meaning behind the process. But most Christians would point out that they're not looking for meaning, so why would they expect to find any.

[Hutch Hogan]

I think if you were to ask someone "do you believe that animals change over time so as to better fit into their environment" then of course, people would answer yes. If you then expanded that argument to "do you believe that this process began with the accidental creation of a single celled lifeform, which then through millions of years of this process became us?" the answer would be less certain.

That is mostly true.  

Though there are particularly dedicated YEC's will say that the god created everything in its present form. 

But I'll agree that most argument with evolution comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about what the theory actually teaches as opposed to what people presume it teaches. 

Much of the skepticism about science comes from this overarching misunderstanding.