Niko, have you read The God Delusion (it's sold as "Jumalharha" in Finnish, if Wikipedia is correct)? Regardless of your outlook on religion, it is an excellent book which I heartily encourage people to read .
Yes, "Jumalharha" would be a fine piece of reading...
I'm actually kind of surprized to hear you (other finns) talk about religion classes since I can't remember being thaught any of that god crap in junior or now in senior high (=yläaste ja lukio, am.) We just concentrated on real issues, such as religion as a science, ethics etc. But even if you had to study them the lutheran view isn't that awful. It could be worse.
What comes to the actual outlook of life, I consider myself an agnostic. I believe God could exist, even though it's unlikely since science hasn't been able to prove that.
Providing proofs of the existence of God is just funny. Religion is not science. If you believe you don't need any proofs.
Even atheists may admit it's possible that our whole universe is just one of the simulations run by some civilization much more advanced than ours. We may be just characters (the dumb AI ) in a computer game used be some kid. If this is true then for any practical purpose (if any) this kid is our god.
Actually, the length of a day has not remained constant, and was longer, in Earth's past (while it has continued to cool, and contract). In fact, the tsunami in Indonesia, a year or so ago, reportedly involved a decrease, in the length of a day, by a few microseconds (presumably, this was a result of conservation of angular momentum, following a subduction of a tectonic plate).
The tsunami was caused by an earthquake (in this case, undersea), which represents a sudden release, by movement, of built-up stress where tectonic plates had been forced together (cause of force: uncertain, but generally thought to be convection currents, deep below the surface). A "subduction" is a type of tectonic movement wherein the edge of one plate slides under the edge of another. The result may be a change of distribution of Earth's mass, such that more mass becomes closer to Earth's rotational axis (since a subduction generally represents a denser, oceanic plate's sliding under a less dense, continental plate); this represents a decrease in Earth's moment of inertia, and a consequent increase in Earth's angular speed, since the product of these, is constant. So, faster rotation of Earth -> shorter day.
Lacking in charm as may be - but God by his definition is just - and, therefore, cannot let sin go unpunished - hence flooding. To be just is a part of being righteous.
I'm sure you wouldn't call the police unfair for locking up a criminal, would you? Same story, really. At the end of the day, there's no point in having laws if there aren't consequences for breaking them - there may as well be no laws, otherwise.
I find this far more hilarious. Well worth the listen.
I'm reading the Bible. And boy is it dull! The boat catalog in Iliad was nothing compared to this lenghty boredom.
Take the ten commandments part. It's like:
"Here areth teh commandments! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10."
And that's all.
Then it goes at lenght about what kind of materials and how the ark must be made and the hut where it's kept.
There is page after page about the bleeding hut! Compared to the one paragraph of the actual commandments.
Here I am, laughing at the US for making moves towards teaching creationism in state schools, and all the while it's been happening in Finland? Oh dear!
I believe those classes are meant to be about all religions. Christianity, Islam, Budism, Hinduism, etc. Atleast that´s how the goverment wanted to implement those classes here but it didn´t go down very well with the public so I haven´t heard about that law anymore in recent times. The other thing is that I´m sure those classes would turn into Lutherian propaganda because only religious people would be interested in teaching those classes. And since the most common religion here is Lutherism then I´d guess most of teachers would be Lutherans. Maybe that´s what happened to Niko. I find it hard to believe that the Finns would implement mandatory Christian-learning or whatever you´d call it. I had a class about religion in the third grade. It wasn´t mandatory but I was young and stupid and thought it was so I took it. It was all about Christianity.
We still suffer from state-sponsored religious schools in the UK, and religious indoctrination is common in many of those christian "madrasahs". If religion had been preached at the school I attended, there would have been hell to pay. I took religious education but my teacher never suggested that god did exist, or said that god didn't exist. We were just taught different ideologies and their implications/historical ramifications. If we were taught anything, we were taught to question everything we were told and make up our own minds.. and that was fine by me. I'm agnostic, btw.. I don't believe it's possible to know if god exists or not.. I believe equally that god may exist and god may not exist, and that extremists in any respect are intellectual morons by definition.
Although R.E. was mandatory in my previous school/s, they never actually taught us christianity in high school at all while I was there. The main religions they taught us were Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. I'm not in any way religious, and as a post yesterday says the truth on how I feel, that humans make up religions for when we run out of knowledge, it gives us something to lean on when we don't know what's going on, that's how I feel about religion tbh.
I must state though I did attend the "lighthouse club" at the local Evangelical church, not because I thought God was real or anything like that, but because it gave me something to do on the most boring day of the week. I've never stepped into a proper church, and I never want to.
In essence it is brainwashing, no doubts about it. It starts right from the 1st grade and lasts until you finish school. Of course it all depends on the teacher but mostly it is (from my personal experience) about lutherism and on later years it is about other religions as well but the teaching is still idealistic (=the teacher wants you to believe). The disgusting fact is that it starts when the pupils are 6 or 7 years-old and all that religion stuff is taught as it was all fact and real. Sad but hopefully it will change on some point...
in my opinion, as crazy as it may sound to you guys..... lol
I believe that our existence and the existence of life on this planet has something to do with the existence of life elsewhere in the universe... or in some 'higher plane'. I mean, look at it this way... the universe is estimated to be 15-20 billion years old, however our Sun is only about 4.5 billion years old. There are an enormous amount of other stars and galaxies out there that are much, much older then ours.. many of which have planets and the like just like us.... I don't see how it's possible that we are alone in the universe... especially considering how young our solar system is... Think of the movie Men in Black... the cat had a charm on its collar that had a 'galaxy' inside of it. Hey.. you never know... i know this is quite askew from religion so to speak, but still.
That's not how it's supposed to be! You should be learning, ethics, outlook of life etc. 'Ethics' (if that's the right word for the subject?) more than religion. Your suffering from a too enthusiastic teacher.
I had Religion in school since 1st grade, but it was never like Noob experienced it, more like a history lesson based on the different religions and turned later in a kind of Ethic subject (we discussed "Matrix" for two weeks and even wrote a test about it) And I went to a school managed by the lutheran church. Some of my friends are Hindu, and they never complained about anything