I never said we need to repent for the things that happened in the past that we had no control over. I've never said we need to repent for anything at all.
Shoop said that the suffering experienced by people and animals is proof of God's inexistence. What I meant by my response was that God has nothing to do with the good or evil that happens in the world.
and to Malak,
at what point do you believe we'll have understood everything there is to know about the Universe? Once we've traversed and mapped every inch of it? Thoroughly understood things such as what Nero pointed (black holes), where the laws of physics break down? I mean, there has to come a point when observing ancient light just won't be enough (though that isn't to say is hasn't brought us far already).
I guess I can't entirely disagree with you when you say that it may be possible for man to understand these sorts of things some day. We have 4 billion years until the Sun explodes and annihilates the earth. We've come pretty far in the past century alone, and if we can refrain from wasting the planet before the Sun does, I think it’ll be pretty interesting to see how far we'll advance in the just the next millennium (granted you and I won't be alive then... unless we reincarnate into a new life
)And I don't mean to ignore your previous points, but as you noticed, my thought process works in terms of “what if”. As I said before, I really don’t believe it’s possible for us to attain “the truth”, so I prefer to withhold from settling on a resolute answer, and instead I think of all types of possibilities for what we and our existence could be. I know, it seems kind of pointless, but in the end I feel that’s all we ever do; we settle on beliefs that will possibly never be proven, regardless of whether they’re theistic or atheistic. We won’t know what the truth is, unless we die and find out there is an afterlife, and God (or Satan) reveals himself to us, in which case there’d be no way to reveal the knowledge to mankind. However, if there isn’t an afterlife and nothing really does happen upon our death, we still won’t know because, obviously, we’re dead. All the rebuttal I can offer for this subject will be hypothetical, and I could tell you all about my ideas on what I think the universe could be, but they'd sound pretty ridiculous, so I'll just leave it at that.
Also, I do not reject the concepts of natural selection, evolution, entropy, etc., and neither do I believe that God waved his hand and we appeared, I think it’s much more complex than we think it is.
I’m also open to the possibility of there being more than one God. However, to what extent they care about us I can’t say. For all we know they might give as much thought to our existence as we give to that of a dust mite.
On a related note, isn’t the reason we see the Earth (and the Universe, for that matter) as it is, because of how we’re anatomically built? We share the same world with insects and other animals who see the same things we do, but in different ways? Say I’m looking at a lava lamp. Instantly, I know what it is, it’s purpose, how it works, it’s parts, and pretty much anything there is to know about it. Now if an ant comes along and sees the same lamp, not only is it going to perceive a completely different image, but it won’t have the slightest idea of what it’s looking at, right?
You can take whatever you want out of that comparison, or just wait for Annex to rip apart my logic lol.
