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Discussion with Pastor

I recently moved in with a really Christian family and they want to convert me. We debate all the time and always ending up agreeing to disagree. They say they pray and cry for me, which makes me sad, but it's not going to change anything.

Overall they want me to talk to their pastor, because he can answer all the questions they can't(which is a lot). I'm really thinking about doing this.

I want to gather a giant load of completely amazing evidence, real explanations of evolution, history of religion, statistics of Atheist to Christians, ect. I want to print off lots of information and/or have a PowerPoint set up to further explain my ideals. I also want to ward off some negative stereotypes, and give further definitions of what I am and why I plan to stay the way I am.

Technically I consider my self to be a Humanist.

I have looked up lots and lots of information, but I quit for a while because technically I reached the point that religion does not and will never make any sense to me.

If you would kindly send some really good rundowns of information with anything from, charts, graphs to articles and history lessons that would amazing!!

Can someone say Boss Battle?

Edit: My Grandfather(who is living with us) says that evolution shouldn't be taught in school, and if it is taught he wants Creationism taught as well. His argument is: It's separation of church and state, not and state and church. I know this is wrong, but he doesn't. I need a way to tell him that it is in fact wrong.

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Permalink Reply by Digger on November 3, 2009 at 8:20pm

My older brother has been a Methodist Minister for some 30 odd years and we often get into discussions on a variety of topics, and it's cool because I can raz him a little (and I get it back) about the Bible and his interpretations of it, what I'm getting from our conversations is that the religious want you to believe in order to reaffirm their own convictions, The "I'll pray for you, or, I cry for you," are just endearments, sort of a friendly guilt trip to keep them on your mind, and in your conversations with others, as a way to grab at any doubt you may have against Gods existence, sort of a "Please believe in what we believe in so we won't feel a fool believing in it ourselves."
A good place to start would be "godisimaginary dot com", and I've found that the FFRF (Freedom From Religion Foundation) and the AHA (American Humanist Association) have a lot of good resource information, and I've found that a simple question on a search engine will give you loads of info to sort through. Happy Hunting : )

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Permalink Reply by Mike Liddy on November 3, 2009 at 10:06pm

Epic stuff here.

//The "I'll pray for you, or, I cry for you," are just endearments, sort of a friendly guilt trip to keep them on your mind, and in your conversations with others//

That is what they seem like.

//I've found that a simple question on a search engine will give you loads of info to sort through.//

What is it??

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Permalink Reply by Mike Santos on November 3, 2009 at 11:04pm

How come, no one recorded the supposed son of God's death, for at least 35 years?

There's no evidence of any recording til well after the fact, why would this happen?
Maybe there was no Jesus of the bible at all, maybe he only did a small fraction of the work claimed, maybe other things too.

But, what would make the least sense, is that the son of God died and no one bothered to record it for three and a half decades.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Rogers on November 3, 2009 at 11:18pm

On top of this, not a single word in the New Testament was written by an eyewitness. After Saul-to-Paul wrote his 6 to 13 letters to various groups, the gospels were written decades/a century after that. It's all based on hallucinations Paul had. He even admits he had visions of Jesus. The Book of Revalation was written 6+ generations after the supposed crucifixion. Think about writing a story now on something that happened in the 1830's with no evidence. It could be nothing but fiction.

It's not the Word of God - it's the word of ancient, superstitious, and relatively ignorant men.

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Permalink Reply by Digger on November 3, 2009 at 11:30pm

I copied your line "statistics of Atheist to Christians" and pasted it into the address bar and hit GO, and came up with 17 sites the first one has a pie chart goto>> www.atheistpoint.com/resources/atheist-facts-statistics/ If it doesn't do an auto search go to ASK .com (Is this info useful?)

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Permalink Reply by Mike Santos on November 3, 2009 at 11:41pm

Me and probably Dave, we came up with those ourselves, off the top of our heads. Don't just memorize arguments, learn the ideas surrounding them

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Permalink Reply by Mike Liddy on November 4, 2009 at 12:12pm

Well I fail. lol

Thanks, I really appreciate this info.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Liddy on November 4, 2009 at 12:53pm

I found some really good questions on Yahoo Answers for Christians, but I can't seem to find them ATM. If you guys could help me that'd be great.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Rogers on November 4, 2009 at 1:03pm

Digger and I referred to this website previously. It has 50+ questions for Christians to try to answer. Poke around the whole site. There's lots of info.

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Permalink Reply by FreeThinker on November 4, 2009 at 8:06pm

www.ironchariots.org is a good resources as well. It is run by the Atheist Community of Austin, who host The Atheist Experience TV show.

Iron Chariots also has a section in which they respond to a book that details 50 reasons to believe in God. http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=50_reasons_to_believe_...