# Dinosaurs, and non-Christian religions. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 1, 2009, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970 "2009-11-01T19:54:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/41 "2009-11-04T22:34:04Z")
> [@Euphonious\_Polemic](#): > > That’s simple enough for a YEC to answer: > > “God did it”. And yet, for some reason, YECs seem to feel obliged to come up with things like alternative geological-formation theories to explain the Grand Canyon. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/42 "2009-11-04T22:37:58Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > Are the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism “religious claims”? If so, are they provably wrong, or nonsense? > > [Four Noble Truths - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths) \< looks \> > [@](#): > > The Nature of Suffering (Dukkha): > “This is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.” Looks like a statement of the obvious, except for the “[clinging](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upadana)” part. Plenty of suffering is involuntary. > [@](#): > > Suffering’s Origin (Samudaya): > “This is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.” Another statement of the obvious. > [@](#): > > Suffering’s Cessation (Nirodha): > “This is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonreliance on it.” Rather and pointless, since someone who actually gave up all desire would just drop dead when they stopped breathing. The need for air is a craving, and suffocation suffering after all. And even then there’s food, water, and so on. Might as well just shoot yourself; if you want nonexistance, that’ll work. > [@](#): > > The Way (Magga) Leading to the Cessation of Suffering: > “This is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is the Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.” [From the looks of things](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path), full of matters of opinion and unproven mystical nonsense. Nor do I see any reason to think it actually works. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/43 "2009-11-04T22:48:29Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Might as well just shoot yourself; if you want nonexistance, that’ll work. Not if you believe in personal reincarnation. (Whether Buddhists do has never been entirely clear to me; I think some sects simply do, and in others it’s a whole lot more complicated, or at any rate harder to explain.) ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/44 "2009-11-04T22:50:25Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Not if you believe in personal reincarnation. Which is exactly the kind of unsubstantiated religious claim I’m talking about. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2009, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/45 "2009-11-04T23:07:36Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Which is exactly the kind of unsubstantiated religious claim I’m talking about. I read in one of Carl Sagan’s books about a discussion he had with the Dalai Lama – who is purportedly a reincarnation of the first Dalai Lama and all later ones. Tibetan Buddhists, at least, do believe in reincarnation. Pushed into a rhetorical corner, the Lama was forced to admit that if reincarnation were ever scientifically disproven, Tibetan Buddhism would have to change. “‘But,’ he chuckled, ‘it will be very difficult to disprove reincarnation.’” ---
**Author:** ![ToeJam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dfb087/32.png) [@ToeJam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ToeJam)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/46 "2009-11-05T03:19:52Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Niptick: By definition science cannot be disproven, though any particular scientific theory or hypothesis can be. (In fact, a hypothesis is not considered scientific at all unless it is possible to at least imagine some observed data that would falsify it.) Yeah, I knew that. :smack: I’ve got a BS in Biology, and it’s my fav. subject in school and I’m still currently heavily IN the sciences. Sorry if I was sloppy in my commentary, but I understand the nitpick- though not needed in the future. That’s like one of the givens. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/47 "2009-11-05T03:36:05Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Tibetan Buddhists, at least, do believe in reincarnation. Pushed into a rhetorical corner, the Lama was forced to admit that if reincarnation were ever scientifically disproven, Tibetan Buddhism would have to change. “‘But,’ he chuckled, ‘it will be very difficult to disprove reincarnation.’” Actually, there’s a way it could be done theoretically. If, for example, souls were proven to exist and an afterlife discovered you could rule out reincarnation. Along with a lot of religions, most likely, since a real afterlife almost certainly wouldn’t resemble the imaginary ones thought of by religions. Interesting to contemplate how Christians would react to the discovery of an afterlife that didn’t resemble Heaven or Hell. ---
**Author:** ![ToeJam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dfb087/32.png) [@ToeJam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ToeJam)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/48 "2009-11-05T04:43:20Z")
Total agreement there, **DT.** Though amusingly enough, even with reincarnation there is Nirvana. So if there was an afterlife, you couldn’t rule out reincarnation per se, unless you could track the souls and check if they ended up going where they did. But if that happened, t’would be amusing. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/49 "2009-11-05T08:54:33Z")
[QUOTE=Der Trihs] Actually, there’s a way it could be done theoretically. If, for example, souls were proven to exist and an afterlife discovered you could rule out reincarnation. Along with a lot of religions, most likely, since a real afterlife almost certainly wouldn’t resemble the imaginary ones thought of by religions. [/QUOTE] Just to play devil’s advocate…in an infinite universe with (possibly) infinite parallel universes, just about anything is possible. Even probable. Including that after you die, ‘you’ would continue to exist in any number of alternative worlds. IIRC, Carl Sagan mentions this in one of his books (Demon Haunted World?), and goes into an interesting digression about meeting loved ones who have died. My understanding of the current trends in cosmology seem to suggest that the parallel universes theory (M Theory I guess) is not exactly fringe, though it’s not exactly universally accepted either. Also, someone mentioned earlier in the thread that the laws of physics don’t change. I’m no expert, but my understanding is that this isn’t true…at one point all 4 forces were unified, for instance (prior to the Big Bang), but today they are separate. Also, our current model of physics breaks down in a singularity (like a black hole). This suggests that it’s at least possible that even the fundamental nature of the universe can change. Mind, I don’t think that it DID change, at least not wrt radio active decay…and I DO think that the preponderance of evidence suggests that the world is billions of years old (4 and a half, give or take), and the universe is many more billions of years older still. Anyway, to briefly address the OP, the answer is (as someone else above said)…it depends. There are various factions and sects in all of the major religions, and there are conservative elements in each. I know several Muslims, for instance, who believe that Allah created the world, and who tend to simply ignore things like fossils, because they don’t fit into their world view. There are several Jewish factions who are solidly YEC types as well. I can’t really say I know many Hindu or Buddhist’s, but my guess is that there are factions in each of them as well who don’t believe in dinosaurs (or evolution). Christian’s don’t have a monopoly on self delusion. Hell, religious people don’t have such a monopoly…there are atheists who are blinded by their own supposed knowledge. -XT ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/50 "2009-11-05T15:05:07Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > \< looks \> > > Looks like a statement of the obvious, except for the “[clinging](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upadana)” part. Plenty of suffering is involuntary. > > Another statement of the obvious. > > Rather and pointless, since someone who actually gave up all desire would just drop dead when they stopped breathing. The need for air is a craving, and suffocation suffering after all. And even then there’s food, water, and so on. Might as well just shoot yourself; if you want nonexistance, that’ll work. > > [From the looks of things](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path), full of matters of opinion and unproven mystical nonsense. Nor do I see any reason to think it actually works. See, here we have a disagreement; I’m no Buddhist, I don’t think for a second that it is “obvious” that life is suffering that comes from desire. What I do think, is that decisions on these matters - whether or not life is suffering, for example - is _not the sort of thing that one can disprove_. It isn’t subject to a scientific critique at all, since a reasonable person, armed with all the facts, can very well come to totally opposite conclusions as to whether life is or is not suffering. Thus, while I’m not myself a Buddhist, I’m quite willing to believe that for those who are - those who find some measure of truth in the “obvious” fact that life is suffering that comes from desire, and less obviously that the path to relief is the eightfold path, etc. - Buddhism works _for them_. I’m unwilling to label them crazy mystics filled with nonsense, although undoubtedly _some_ people who practice Buddhism are. Seems to me that religion as a topic is filled with issues like this. One can disagree on central points, even though they are undisprovable, without falling into the black and white thinking that it is either obviously true, or obviously nonsense. That being said, on matters that are disprovable - go to town. Creationism is nothing more than obscurantism, but it is by no means universal in judeo-christianity and it is certainly not universal in all religions - the Buddha himself (according to Theravada writings) deliberately dismissed any commentary on creation mythology as being of no interest to him. ---
**Author:** ![tagos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@tagos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tagos)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/51 "2009-11-05T16:29:03Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Seems like semantic quibble to me. > > Both science and revealed religion are also incomplete descriptions of the universe. Fail. Or half fail anyway. ---
**Author:** ![pan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e495f1/32.png) [@pan1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pan1)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/52 "2009-11-05T17:12:35Z")
> [@ivan\_astikov](#): > > The principles of science are also man-made and therefore fallible. Just saying, like. The principles of science are the cold hard facts of existence. They are not man-made. Man is striving to understand them. The methodologies are sometimes flawed, but in today’s age when everyone is of the open-source-internet mindset and looking to upstage their peers, flawed science rarely takes hold as accepted scientific law. The problem is that people who don’t understand science, who haven’t taken the years it takes to understand science, have their own “scientific theories” that are nothing more than philosophy and they expect that all other science is established the same way as theirs and is thus, equally flimsy. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/53 "2009-11-05T17:57:29Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Not if you believe in personal reincarnation. As the joke goes, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Except for Buddhists, for whom it’s a temporary solution to a permanent problem 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![monavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e0b2c6/32.png) [@monavis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monavis)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2009, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/54 "2009-11-10T13:43:02Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > I’m saying that judging by history, religious claims tend to be systematically wrong. It’s not unscientific to assume that the Sun will probably rise tomorrow when it has a history of doing so many times in the past. By the same token, it’s not unscientific to assume that something that has been shown to be wrong again and again will continue to be wrong. > > It’s not like religion has no record as to its reliability; it does. It has a record of abysmal failure. Why should it be assumed that it suddenly becomes far more accurate where it conveniently can’t be tested? That’s classic scam right there; the psychic or ghost that suddenly vanishes when the skeptic shows up. I thought the sun was said to rise and set because it appears that way to us, when it is really the turning of the earth. If the earth didn’t turn then one part would always be light and one side dark. Our seasons wouldn’t be the same either. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2009, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/55 "2009-11-10T15:45:43Z")
Religious leaders and believers who insist on sticking with a young earth do no service to their religion. Many of their youngsters will eventually see the contradictions and start questioning a lot more than just the young earth idea. It opens a door they don’t want opened. Dogmatically insisting on absurd concepts like young earth will pare away believers. ---
**Author:** ![heatmiserfl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/df705f/32.png) [@heatmiserfl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/heatmiserfl)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2009, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970/56 "2009-11-10T19:18:10Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > \< looks \> > > Looks like a statement of the obvious, except for the “[clinging](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upadana)” part. Plenty of suffering is involuntary. > > Another statement of the obvious. > > Rather and pointless, since someone who actually gave up all desire would just drop dead when they stopped breathing. The need for air is a craving, and suffocation suffering after all. And even then there’s food, water, and so on. Might as well just shoot yourself; if you want nonexistance, that’ll work. > > [From the looks of things](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path), full of matters of opinion and unproven mystical nonsense. Nor do I see any reason to think it actually works. Just a nitpick here but Buddhist concepts like Dukkha, Anatta, Sunnata don’t translate well into English. They’re much more complicated than what you’re saying. They also strongly debate amongst Buddhists. Beyond these, the most debated is the concepts of rebirth and karma which are generally interpreted pretty differently from the Hindu concepts. Many Western Buddhists (and Zen Buddhists from Japan) interpret the religion only as a practice and way of thinking that helps remove barriers to ‘enlightenment’ (whatever that is). They reject any supernatural claims that conflict with what we know from science. Also, as the Dalai Lama states, Buddhism (at least modern Buddhism) promotes experiential approaches and skepticism. If something is disproven or doesn’t really work for someone, they are supposed to reject it. Of course, even Buddhists have fundamentalists who screw up the religion. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dinosaurs-and-non-christian-religions/515970.md?page=2)