OK, I’ll take your word that it was an honest mistake.
Mmm, mmm. A few questions:
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My parents were atheists and raised me that way. I went to college at one of America’s best science and engineering schools and grad school at a top-twenty university. I converted to Christianity during my last year of graduate school. Does this make me crazy?
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In the post after the one I quoted you bashed Republicans who were questioning Obama’s birth certificate. I’m sure you’re aware that Obama is a Christian. You may or may not be aware that like me, he had an atheist father and was an atheist early on. (Read his two books if you doubt it.) Given his education, ignorance doesn’t seem terribly likely, so does that make Obama crazy? Are you concerned about having a crazy President? Did you vote for him? (And how did America get this far since all of our Presidents and Vice Presidents and at least the great majority of Congresscritters and Supreme court Justices and governors and so forth were crazy? Obviously this line of questioning could go on for a long time.)
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As I’ve said before, prominent atheists are always urging that I believe in non-existent things, far more so than any other group I know of. Are they crazy?
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Professional research has established at great length that religious belief is not caused by or associated with either mental illness or “indoctrination”. (Cite, cite) What’s your response to this?
No, they’re not. What you’re describing is various hypotheses about the nature of the universe based on observation. Some of these hypotheses might be true (or possibly none of them are), but we don’t yet have the means to test them and I seriously doubt anyone is “urging” you to believe in things unproven, on pure faith.
That’s religion’s tactic.
[QUOTE=ITR champion ]
As I’ve said before, prominent atheists are always urging that I believe in non-existent things, far more so than any other group I know of. Are they crazy?
[/QUOTE]
By the way, the post you linked to is utterly puerile. I can’t believe you would link to that when it shows you to be pretending ignorance and ignoring the central point.
In any case, no one is asking you to believe in something that has no evidence for it, aside from whoever fooled you into taking Christianity seriously.
You’re simply retreating into tautology. What you’re doing is defining religion as being “crazy,” and then asking the question if religion is crazy, a question already answered because you’ve defined it as such.
Logically, it is equivalent to me saying “Are dogs sociopaths?” and when you ask what I mean by sociopath, I describe a dog.
For the OP to mean a thing you have to be able to demonstrate religious belief fits an independent meaning of “crazy” - I’d argue, a definition that a reasonable person would agree to witout previously knowing the argument to be presented.
The difference between this and religion is that in the case of religion, I likely wouldn’t be telling my daughter the monster wasn’t real. I and a billion other people would be telling her it WAS real.
Are children insane for believing in Santa Claus when adults tell them Santa exists?
The test of insanity is whether or not people can remain reasonably rational and aware of reality given the information with which they are provided. People simply cannot form perfect pictures of reality based on every iota of extant evidence; in many areas they need to rely on models, often ones they don’t fully understand, because our brains are only so capable. In the case of religion it’s something that for most adherents is just easier assumed than challenged.
I mean, not to hojacvk but to use another example, on this board we have scores of posters who go on and on about how international trade is terrible. This is something believed by - to a nearest approximation - zero percent of all the people in the world who are educated in economics. Economists on both sides of the political spectrum consider the idea flatly ridiculous. The idea that isolationism is good for an economy is wrong beyond any reasonable doubt and flies in the face of both logic and evidence… and yet millions believe it and will argue passionately for it.
Are they all CRAZY? Of course not. They’re ignorant, or emotionally worked up about it, or perhaps in some cases allowing self-serving truths to blind them to general truths.
If you classified as crazy everyone who holds on to a belief that does not stand up to the evidence, most people are crazy.
Sorry, fella, but you’re not winning this one. Your cite says that it was “at least remotely based on a historical conflict of the 12th century BC.” That’s a far, far cry from saying that it was meant to be a serious historical account. In contrast, significant portions of the Bible are treated as historical sources, even though scholars may disagree regarding the extent of their reliability.
So no, the Iliad is not comparable to the Bible in that regard, even without considering the Bible to be God’s Word.
First of all, I’d like to ask you for a citation for your claim that the ancient Greeks regarded it as a direct historical account. Cite, please?
Second, to say that it has been vindicated in EXACTLY the same way as the Bible is tremendously ignorant. And what is your evidence for this claim? The mere fact that the Iliad guided Schlieman in locating Troy. That is a far, far cry from saying that it is generally regarded as an historical account.
If the Bible’s only claim to accuracy was that it had been used to locate Jerusalem, then your claim would have validity. The fact is that historians, even skeptical ones, give it considerably more weight than that. It’s generally accepted that Jesus and the Apostles existed, among many other characters. Skeptical scholars may dispute certain details in the gospels, but they generally accept others – the claim that Jesus’ brothers rejected him during his lifetime, for example. It was also our primary source material regarding Pontius Pilate, whose existed was largely disputed until recently. And so forth, and so on.
Again, I acknowledge that scholars disagree regarding the extent to which the Biblical accounts should be trusted. The point remains, however, that it is regarded as an historical source in ways that simply cannot be said regarding the Iliad.
When atheists have presented claims like multiple universes, negative energy, and genes that control my thoughts to me, they have, in the great majority of cases, presented them not as hypotheses but rather as established facts. (As for the claim that they’re “based on observation”, how can that be true if we simultaneously “don’t have the means to test them”?) However, the point here is merely to see whether Brock and those who agree with him apply their definition consistently. Would you agree that if a person believes in something such as negative energy, then they believe in something for which no evidence exists, and thus by Brock’s definition are crazy?
(Oh, and Lobohan: keep lobbing as many childish insults as you want; I don’t care.)
I fully agree with JThunder’s comments regarding the quite significant distinctions between a work like the Bible and a work like Harry Potter, but I think the OP’s analogy falls apart even if we ignore that salient point. The majority of Christians are not Biblical literalists, nor does the Bible represent the totality of their religious belief. Furthermore, most do not believe that non-Christians are necessarily doomed. So, the scenario described in the OP is pretty far off-base.
Step 1. Observe that the universe and human beings have certain properties.
Step 2. Form hypotheses to explain these properties, be it multiple dimensions or genetic inclinations or whatever.
Step 3. Test the hypotheses, if you can. If not, they forever remain mere hypotheses.
Step 3a. Humans being humans, if someone forms or believes a hypothesis, there is a tendency to promote it as though it has been established.
I do not believe you when you say atheists do this more than the religious, I do not believe you understand the difference between a suggested hypothesis and a claimed fact.
But some evidence for negative energy does exist, in the sense that it’s one possible explanation for the observed behaviour of exotic particles and whatnot. The religious analogue, I guess, would be “explaining” things by saying “God did it”, but at least negative energy can conceivably be tested and God, so far, remains elusive.
The conversation might as well have ended right here. Religious belief has been part of the human condition since there have been humans. There’s no way something that ingrained within us fits the definition of “crazy.”
You know, why don’t we have a big sticky thread: “Why religion sucks”? Because don’t we have like ten of these threads going on right now?
[quote=“JThunder, post:10, topic:589739”]
Questions like this demonstrate how some people can pride themselves on being “intellectual” atheists while remaining profoundly ignorant of the things they criticize.
Not so fast, Skippy. You’d be hard-pressed to find any historian – indeed, any scholar of repute – who claims that the Bible is nothing but fiction.
I’ll give you that it may have some historical basis to it, but it is also filled with crazy contradictions. It also in many ways conflicts with the religious right wing. so sure there may have been an adam, a deborah, or even a mary who got knocked up while knocking boots, but in 2000 years people who read a harry potter book might also wonder if there was a person he who must not be named was based on, and was there really a harry potter
But if you believe in ‘crazy’ things, doesn’t that make you at least a little crazy. I don;t know if that is true, but it does sound plausible. It seems there are quite a few people who say believing in a God isn’t crazy because it’s normal, but what would they think if the met someone who believes Santa Claus is real? The only difference between that and believing in God is the numbers of people who believe it.
There’s evidence for it, and it doesn’t violate physical law, nor is it internally contradictory, nor is it based on the myths of ignorant barbarians. Which pretty much makes it the opposite of religion.
About as arrogant as someone who thinks that everyone who thinks different than they do is going to hell, or that their own beliefs are so important that they should ring peoples’ doorbells on Saturday mornings to tell them the “truth”, or that they should go to another country and convert people, or think “our God is more powerful than their God”, or that it’s OK to drone on about their religious beliefs at public events like graduation.
Haha just finished reading to the end of the thread. My personal feeling about religious folks is that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Why else do they need forgiveness from their invisible yet omnipotent friend who sometimes wants to make their lives difficult as tests of faith (abusive much).
Also the bible wich is the supreme word of your invisable yet omnipotent friend contradicts itself many many times, if it were the word of a true god wouldn’t he get the facts straight?
also to any conservative folks out there if you don’t believe things like:
rape is a crime on the woman unless she marries her rapist
non virgin brides should be stoned on their father’s doorstep
you should be put to death for eating shellfish
or if you go after your nighbor’s wife to hurt her and beat a pregnancy out of her you owe the father a fine. If the woman should suffer damage in that instance the jewish law of an eye for an eye still applies, so god does not consider fetuses people.
if you don’t believe these laws because they are old testamint than there is no law against homosexuality or murder
Yes ignornance, and just ignoring evidence is a common trait when it comes to things like economics, or evolution belief in evolution. But I’m not sure ignorance is enough of an excuse when it comes to religion. I know well educated people with maths degrees who display excellent logic in most parts of their life. But mention religion and that logic gets thrown away, it’s an amazing thing to see.
I once met a muslim who studied maths at a good UK university and he told me that it was proved the Koran could not have been written by a human and was therefore the word of God. Now it doesn’t take a lot of logic, and I’m sure much less than is learned in a maths degree, to know that can’t be true, it would be impossible to prove a book wasn’t written by humans, because humans can write anything that can be written.
I’m sure we humans are preprogrammed for belief for a variety of reasons, but it’s somewhat shocking what otherwise intelligent people can and do believe.
I find it somewhat amazing that people don’t want to or can’t understand the scientific method and compare it to religion in a meaningful way.
Science is a tool used by humans. These scientists are free as humans to believe anything they like, and at the edge of science they are expected to come up with new and sometimes radical ideas. 99 times out of 100 these ideas are wrong, but that’s fine if you get 1 out of 100 right. What makes this different from religion is that all ideas must end up having some test to prove if they are true or not, if there can’t be a test then those ideas are ignored either forever or until a test comes along. Not only that but other scientists are free to critique those ideas, the test, and come up with tests of their own. An idea is nor accepted as fact (or a theory in scientific terms, quite annoying) until the is sufficient evidence and that evidence has been checked by others. Religion does not posit tests for the ideas, it relies only on belief. That makes science and religion very different things.
I’m not sure why people can’t understand that very simple idea. Perhaps it’s not well taught at school.
Well to be fair quite a few people feel strongly about this on both sides, and we probably won’t come up with the Ultimate Solution ™ without at least 100 threads 