I suppose you don't know how the Kashmir conflict started. Allow me illuminate the issue for you.

There were two major parties involved in the declaration of independence of India: the All India Muslim League and the Indian National Congress.
Both parties wanted to become independent but under different circumstances.

The British screwed India over in the first world war by offering independence if they provide soldiers. They didn't keep their promise.
In the second world war the British asked for India's help once again.
The INC refused, the Muslim League wanted to support the British under the condition that with the declaration of independence a new nation for Muslim Indians gets created.
The question whether or not India should support the Brits didn't last long, however, because in 1945 the British Labour party won the elections and granted India its independence almost immediately.
The two Indian parties started having disputes and whatnot. The Brits were in favour of keeping the country whole so the Muslims were pretty much on their own.
In 1946 a the so called Direct Action Day, initiated by the Muslim League, happened in Calcutta. Several thousand Hindus and Sikhs got killed. That led to a civil war. A very, very, very violent one.
Ontop of that there were many Indians fighting for or against Japan (the second world war was still going on in Asia, incase you didn't know that), leading to a major clusterfuck of violence.

Before shit broke lose both parties agreed to the partition of India.
The obvious problem was the question how the country could be divided.

Muslims fixed that problem by occupying two big regions in the north and south east of India (today known as Pakistan and Bangladesh), causing millions of people to flee from or to those regions, depending on their religion. Hindus fleeing from the north started killing Muslims fleeing to the north and vice versa.
Unknown but great numbers of people got slaughtered in the process, which enflamed an even to these days present hatred between Pakistan and India.

Muslim extremists formed independent military groups in Pakistan and are said to be supported by the security agencies of Pakistan.
Mumbai, for example, has been the target of such terrorist attacks many times.


The disputes over the Kashmir region are just a symptom of the whole conflict that got caused by said civil war. It led to a bunch of more wars, an ongoing cold war between India and Pakistan and many terrorist attacks.


I wrote this down off the top of my head so some data might a little inaccurate. Don't pin me down on that.


edit:

Oh, and China is involved in the Kashmir conflict as well. They just recently settled their disputes with India and pulled their troops out of that region.
Yay for progress.

Civil war was averted, not engaged in.


Neither Pakistan or Bangladesh are in the southern half of India, although you are correct, many refugees fled both provinces.

No, the tensions today are a result of the Kashmir debacle and the repeated wars between the two entities over the territory.

Kashmir is the focal point of the entire conflict. It was a Muslim dominant province with a Hindu government that officially allied itself with India, desperate for military protection from Pakistani-funded militant groups. THAT ignited the first official wars between Pakistan and India. All following wars between the two parties have been fought over Kashmir, cultivating in a very dark standoff, both sides with nuclear arms at their back.

It's an ethnic and political issue dressed up as a religious one. It stems, like many conflicts in the middle east, from Britain drawing random boundaries across territories and forcing different ethnic groups into the same nation, creating a powder keg of nationalist tension.


The Holocaust was not a war, and it was not caused by religion.



You can draw many pictures of God from the Bible, because the Bible contradicts and overrules itself in many different places. One of the core premises of the Bible is that God loves every man, and he is saddened when they don't follow his creed. For example, whose to say the Egyptian first born children were not welcomed into Heaven, an eternal paradise?

Your personal attack on a metaphysical being is kind of funny in an angst-filled teenage sort of way though.

Are you aware that homosexuality occurs throughout nature?


Penn is an obnoxious loudmouth that also undermines the legitimacy of serious discussion of religion and atheism.

I find your way of debating rather annoying, quoting and commenting on every single line rather than writing your own argumentation so I won't engage in a deeper discussion.
Just posting to point out that you basically speak against your own initial statement that religion has literally almost nothing to do with it. ^_^
When it's dressed up as one, as you say, it obviously does play a big role.
Denying that would be like desputing that religion played a big role in the crusades, even if they were just territorial interests dressed up in religous ones.
The motives of the masses are just as relevant as of those in charge.

I'd never dispute myself that there aren't other factors. Religion is a big one, not the only one.

i am an atheist, dumbshit

i just think you folk need to look at yourselves every once in a while

What exactly is the point of this discussion?

Looks like everyone ran out of contributions so they're attacking eachother.

Ah, if there is no GOD then how are we living? Evolution?

... I never thought I'd find a person so appropriate for this meme.

If you take an infinite amount of opportunities and an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of environments, anything is possible. You don't need some guiding hand to make things happen because eventually, through pure brute force of random occurrence, something will happen that at one point never happened before. It's basic logic with probability. If the number of times tested is infinite, and the percent chance of occurrence during the given test is greater than zero, then the chance of occurrence is 100%.

In addition, basic forms of life constitute only a few different types of chemicals. It's not uncommon, nor unheard of, for life to spontaneously be created out of the proper injection of chemicals into each other, especially if given the situation dictated above (which is true for our own universe). And once the first step of life is created, every generation in life is weeding out the weaker forms and proliferating stronger and more adaptive forms of life. It only takes a couple billion years with basic organisms to arise more complex organisms, and from there life can mutate out into all branches of the modern day animal kingdom.

I hate religion, but fine, it has mostly good teachings, so whatever.

Creationism on the other hand is fucking retarded, and should not be brought into an argument about evolution, since creationism = idiocy, and evolution = scientific reality.

Oracle won the thread by typing what I was too lazy to type, so can we all please end the discussion now? All can imagine will happen is the creationist mongoloids will say things like "Evolution is retarded! I don't remember being a monkey!!!" and we all know what will happen after that.

Oracle wins the thread, gg.

But in order for there to be anything, something has to be created. And if there isn't anything to create it, there wouldn't be anything there would there? Oracle, where did those few chemicals that created life come from? In fact, any matter at all? Too lazy to explain everything, in school anyways.

Your own response is comical in an arrogant, age-elitist, sort of way.

You're just assuming things without being able to back them up. There is an existing argument about whether or not people even went to heaven before Jesus' death. Because, like you said, the bible constantly contradicts itself.

Would it even matter? By God's law, murder is still the ultimate attack against his image. If I were to shoot up a mall full of innocent people but they were welcomed into heaven, should my act be forgiven?

If your response is to say that God is exempt from his own law, then you and I both know that there is no fairness or compassion in God.

On a related note, what kind of God kills off the entire world populace (Noah's flood) and then comes to the conclusion that perhaps it wasn't the best thing to do? Wouldn't an "all-knowing" God consider the consequences?

I appologize if I come off as "angst-filled" but this is a subject I've pondered and questioned much of my life. Mind you, a short life, but I find it better to question what I've been taught rather than to live in blind ignorance.


Of course, but in the species that exhibit such behavior it is a rarity. The "relationships" that result are not long lasting. Perhaps "unnatural" is the incorrect term for homosexuality does occur in nature but observed as a rarity.

Obviously we know that in the animals that have been know to exhibit homosexual tendencies, without male-female sex, that species would not exist. Therefor, it should be fair to say that homosexuality is unproductive and somewhat illogical.


This would all be subjective, as well as my own opinion in Penn. So I really don't see a point in debating it. We'd get just as far debating which kind of Doritos taste better.

But, I feel like you're just generalizing Penn's reactions to religion. True, in many cases, he can very "to the point" and condescending. But, in other cases, he is sincere and understanding. You have to remember, Penn is a public figure and alot of the times, what he says or does is to attract attention. So, any of those video's from his Bullshit T.V. show, are going to biased and condescending.
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Apparently you didn't bother to read the rest of my post and just resort to Ad hominems. Sorry but I don't concern myself with figuring what your religious stance is.There's no need to be an ass hole, I think I came to a reasonable conclusion based off what you said.

I agreed that atheists can come off as arrogant but does that mean creationists are any better? I don't feel so. I don't feel like I need to re-explain what I said either, so I urge you to go back and read my original post. Perhaps closer this time.
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Perhaps you should pay more attention in school.

Like I've said before, our bassic understanding of physics doesn't apply before the big bang. Therefor, Newton's 3rd law of motion doesn't apply. The law states: "For any action, there is an equal but opposite reaction". In laymen terms, for any cause, there must have been an effect. So it would be fair to say for any exsistance of matter, it must have been created. However, time and space did not exist before the big bang, so we can't existing laws and theories to try to explain it. For all we know, there was no cause. It may have always been. There may have been only an effect with no cause. Meaning, no God or creator.