My question then becomes how can a study become a supreme being? Is your definition of supreme being solely something you go to for answers?
because you defined supreme being as : “A intelligent being that is made up of every living being on the worlds and in the heavens, the spirit of everything that is also a single being in total knowledge and power. One in Spirit with all.”
Your definition of these two can not be related. Your definitions need to be changed for this to be true (which isnt a bad thing..). This is why I dont understand how you can relate science to a God or supreme being.
Opiate of the masses may be true, but supreme being or God isnt, and I dont see how worship could be either. Feel free to clarify for me.
You don’t have to know you are being lead to be lead. You don’t have to believe in God for God to use you.
I would have guessed that the engineers and the like do get ample credit for the computers and God really does not, at least how I see it. And considering that, is it not great that God is so willing to still guide us in these inventions.
It’s actually very discouraging and saddening, as I have seen people healed by God through man, just how Jesus has been reported to do and how He is reported to send out the 12. The church today is not what Jesus taught from what I see.
Though I would like those healing and the like to help people, not to ‘win souls’, and to point out that the miracles that Jesus did were ineffective at winning souls.
Except religion does not necessitate God, nor are moralities necessarily dictated by God. You have the obvious example Buddhism, of which some flavors don’t believe in God, but I can give you another example from my own beliefs, where I am more or less a Christian.
That would be that I don’t think God defines morals any more than, say, parents define what is right and wrong when disciplining their children. The moral authority of the parents derives from their own experiences and their goals for their children and that is what determines what they teach their child and how they discipline them. In the same way, I think looking at God as essentially arbitrarily determining a set of rules makes as much sense as implying that when my parents set a bedtime, that because as a 7yo I could only see the immediacy of the bedtime and it appeared arbitrary, I missed that it was based in solid reasoning towards furthering a goal of maintaining my health and happiness.
We can extrapolate this same sort of concept out to God who, if not omnscient and omnipotent, is at least certainly much more knowledgable and powerful than we are, which is analagous to our parents’ relative knowledge and experience, and all he simply does is see a desirable end state and create a set of rules that will help us reach them.
To give another analogy, consider a game like chess. In this game, we have an obvious goal of achieving victory, but the state-space is sufficiently complex so as finding the optimal move is exceedingly difficult. And so, while if we could explore the entire space we may be able to definitely say a particular move is good or bad, but instead we’re left with a set of heuristics to estimate how good or bad moves may be toward furthering this goal. These heuristics are equivalent to moral rules. In some cases, it’s pretty obvious that a move is almost certainly bad to even the most novice of players, like giving up the queen early in the game for no benefit, and this sort of rule would be like how quickly societies understand that murder is immoral. But in more advanced versions, it becomes much more difficult to determine the value of a move, just as there are muddied moral situations.
And so, I would argue that the only real difference between a religious based moral system and a non-religious based moral system is the goal end-state. And these goal states are derived from tradition and culture in a religious based moral framework whereas they’re derived from some other methodology or philosophy for a non-religious framework. But there is no scientific way to argue that any particular goal is objectively better than any other goal, as it’s all a matter of preference, but a lot of that goes toward giving ourselves a privileged place and setting our own prosperity as goals as a matter of self-interest.
Thus, we can examine moral frameworks, whether religious or not, not based upon good or evil, as good and evil are relative to whatever framework we’re working within, but rather with the consistency of the rules toward furthering the claimed goal.
No, you’re wrong. Everything in science is subject to verification - that’s the definition of science. I can choose any claim made by science and test it for myself. Science does not require faith.
That’s not true about religion. Religious claims can’t be tested. It’s not a matter of practical difficulty, it’s that that’s they’re fundamentally untestable. Religion requires faith.
You’ve just proved that people gather in a building. You haven’t proven that their religion are true. And I think most of them would dispute your claim that their religion is nothing more than a social gathering.
And a relationship with God is not like a relationship with a person. I can have two-way communication with a person. I have never received any communication from God.
The goal of Science is to find the truth, and then when possible use it for the good of mankind, and all the earth. Science is responsible for a lot of healing; much of advanced Science has made the life of many people better, Many people died years ago from illinesses that today are easily cured. Our houses are heated, our transportation better and many things that Science has done so we can sit here and argue the points we do!
It is my understanding that Jesus didn’t ask people to convert any one, he died a Jew and the apostles were Jews and followed many Jewish principles. Jesus is quoted as telling his followers to spread the good news that the kingdom of God was within them and at hand. Coversion idea came from Paul,when he went to the Gentiles. Alot depends on what was truth and what was fable,many writings were thrown out when the Bishops of the early church decided what they wanted to be the word of God, what was inspired or not.
Then you missed my point, religion does not have to do with spirituality nor God. It is nothing but a simulation of the real thing. So yes it is a gathering inside a building, not much more, though sometimes you get a sip of wine and piece of bread.
You can have 2 way conservations with God, or spirits. Sometimes very clearly.
But at first we are like new born infants, unable to understand or distinguish the strange sounds that our parents make, and assume there is no such thing. But as a infant starts to distinguish those sounds, perhaps just subconsciously at first - maybe providing a feeling of comfort, the infant realizes that yes the parents do communicate with him/her.
This is how 2 way communication works with God, God needs us to lean as a infant child of God learns, which is separate and distinct from the way you have learned as a human infant.
The above is exactly why religion is allowed to exist. We hear about God, but we must see it in the physical, so (our human) family and religious structures are allowed to show us the ultimate pattern in the flesh so we can recognize them in the spirit.
This was also the moment of enlightenment of the Buddha, when Buddha was starving himself trying to achieve some answers a girl (or woman) brought him a bowl of rice, Buddha realized a greater ‘spirit’ exists. One he could not see directly but perceive it’s reality.
In Buddha also called the earth as witness for him knowing that this spirit would stand by him, which it supposedly did.
The poster here ‘leKatt’ <sp> made a claim one time which I believe is true, though with a slight modification IMHO. IIRC he stated if you talk to a tree for 20-30 minutes each day for a month you will hear that tree talk back. The modification I would make is for some it may take longer then a month. But the point is the same, learning to hear in a new way, as a infant leaning to use a new sense. In that you can test spirituality 100% verifiable if you are willing to try.
Now as for your claim, just think of verifying 100% the claims of global warming - without using anyone’s else’s data, for you to obtain global temperatures personally, and design a computer model. I would claim it is impossible to personally verify that claim, unlike spirituality.
I know this has been said before but your religious views are not the ones held by most people. Most people feel their religion is something more than a social event. They feel that something is happening at a religious service than isn’t happening at a secular gathering.
I can accept, in theory, the idea that we need to grow to a certain point to reach God. But if we are creations of God, he should know the specs. He should make it possible for us to grow to the necessary point within a human lifetime. I’m fifty and I haven’t yet reached a point where God is communicating to me. If he has a message for me, he should have made it more accessible.
That’s pretty disingenuous. I can walk into a library and see the tens of thousands of books there. Could I read every book in the library? No, not in one human lifetime. But that doesn’t mean I can’t read. I can choose any book I wish off the shelf and read it and when I’m done I can choose and read another one.
Same thing with science. Like a library, science is the products of many people and one individual cannot single-handedly reproduce it. But I can choose any piece of evidence that science is based on and reproduce it if I want to. And every piece of evidence, like every book in the library, is accessible to me to choose if I wish.
I meant God based religions, and in fact those which have morality based from God - which I don’t think was true for many pagan religions.
But God, it is said, doesn’t arbitrarily define rules, but defines rules based on some greater good we don’t see, or just through his power as creator. This has problems, as Russell noted, and which I alluded to. God’s rules, however, don’t seem to be very good at optimizing health, happiness, or much of anything else.We have grown morally, and God’s rules don’t look better, they look worse.
Ethics is philosophy, not science. The god-based view of morality is like having a computer be able to tell you the right chess move at any point, and assuming a 32 x 32 board just to make things more interesting. God supposedly tells us the right moves to make, secular ethics gives us heuristics. If God can’t tell us the right things to do, he isn’t much of a god. Some religions have different end points, like getting into heaven as opposed to doing good here. And if there is a God who is the absolute source of morality, then there is absolute good and evil.
I’ve said many times that all morality is basically atheistic, as we choose our morality based on our genes, environment, and upbringing, and then choose a god to enforce whatever morality we choose. Your post is an excellent example of this, since you seem to think morals are basically secular.
Yes and I think it’s pretty disingenuous to say science is verifiable therefore you should accept it when it simply is not verifiable beyond very simple ‘high school lab’ things like F sort of seems to correlate with ma if I just fudge some data points.
I am not saying science is useless, just it’s really not verifiable for any person. It is a lie to think otherwise and there is really no real world example of science being personally verifiable.
This is unlike spirituality as it is only verifiable to someone personally.
This is all well and good, but I believe the same corporate spirit that people feel coming together for religious events is duplicated in sporting teams, co-workers, soldiers, etc. It is a group dynamic that synergisticly increases energy.
What makes you so sure God is limited to your life span for you to learn to hear Him. Many faiths have the concept of reincarnation and a learning path of the soul.
I do believe He knows the specs of everyone, and there is a moment for everyone to know God, though some may not in their current lifetime.
Lots (almost all) of scientific theory is based on math. If we could program our own computer to verify the equations and test them that way and simply output a “true/false” result, would that not be verifying? You personally wouldnt have to know much other than copying formulas down and give variables values.
When you say science, what specific part of science are you referring to? Since this is (somewhat) a debate on religion/science and their ability to be tested, I think it is important to maybe narrow “science” down to specific parts which you feel are unverifiable. Science is a large field and vague descriptor for this purpose.. It seems there are specific areas which are targetted from such a quote as in the OP. What are they?
The fact that you can go and choose any piece of evidence at random and verify it means that every piece of evidence must be capable of standing up to verification.
