Damn murdering Buddhists.
They can be quite nasty in places where they are powerful. Here they tend to be pleasant, because they are weak and therefore can’t get away with much.
Pretend I wrote fucking baby-eating Quakers, then. Or filthy pigfucking Confucians. There are Christians here in positions of power who are quite nice and pleasant; there are Muslims here, obviously in the minority, who are murderers; and the reverse in both cases. And so on.
The point is that any given religion affects different followers in various ways. Some people given only lip service to its precepts; some take those precepts to heart and kill themselves trying to follow them. Some religions have peace and love at the center of their philosophies; some encourage hatred and bloodshed.
My problem with your posts in this thread, DT, is not your atheism. It’s your painting all religions with the same brush and all religious persons with that brush.
Some Xtians are kind and honorable people whom I am happy to call friend. Some are assholes I would not piss on if they were on fire. The same is true of atheists and agnostics.
Australopithecine are all scum, though. Likewise Apollo-worshippers.
Philosophy is the study of problems. Religion and natural science address those problems differently now, but the basic mode of inquiry is still there.
I just hate it when atheists are like, “Religious people are SO stupid. They have NO concepts of logical thinking.”
:dubious:
**
I also think that its pretty suggestive of people when they lump all religious people as being monotheistic, Christian, anti-evolutionists, etc.**
While I’ve mostly been on the “be nice to Xtians, damn it!” side in this discussion, I feel obliged to say that many Xtians do not in fact have any grasp of logical thinking. (Not that most people do; it’s not commonly thought, and people who get all proud of themselves for understanding logical fallacies might instead want to be grateful for receiving proper instruction.) For instance, I am forever being told by certain Pentecostals of my acquaintance that I should believe in God, Christ, Heaven, & Hell because if I do not I will end up in Hell, and rarely do they grasp that they are arguing in a circle; even if one grants that they have a genuine insight into the true nature of the world I lack, they’d still need to prove the existence of Hell to persuade me I should fear it.
You are, of course, correct in your last paragraph.
No one can prove the metaphysical. Christians who believe in Hell may very well have logical reasoning. So do you. But scientific methods do not always trump logical thinking when scientific methods do not disprove something [by proving something else].
How can you prove there is no hell?
I think when scientists can explain exactly how we got here, then you’ll have some winners.
My son is six. His reasoning for believing in God?
“You can’t make something out of nothing.”
To a six year old, that’s pretty logical. To a sixty year old, that’s pretty logical. I think that most Christians are beyond evolution denial at this point. It’s a matter of the original question that religion tries to discover: What are we doing here? How did we get here? How does this mystery work?
Scientists do the same thing.
Religions aren’t set in stone. They change over time and adapt to their environments. Go ask a Methodist how they feel about evolution. (:
Add the concept of time and you have a real headache.
P.S. Christians have largely addressed the issue of time in the same way physicists have: we can’t comprehend it the idea of infinite time, so anything before the beginning of time is moot. To Christians, God is infinite.
The something must have created the universe argument is the absolute worst one for the existence of God; it is even more trival to answer than Pascal’s Wager. All it does is push the question back a step. If God can be uncreated, then why not the universe?
Sure, it seems like a good reason to a six-year-old. So does Santa Claus. Hell, when my baby sister was that age she thought our dad was Batman.
But it’s not logic in any sense.
—Skald, continuing his long tradtion of arguing both sides of every point
All logic that attempts to address the absolute unknown is nonsensical.
Again, while the Christian God is largely set as a guy who created the world in seven days, that’s not taken as fact by most deists.
So what if Christian understanding of God is just a little off? What if this universe is the reaction of another universe?
What if ‘aliens’ are angels?
What if life on earth once projected itself outward?
What if God was someone from the future?
The idea that the Earth was flat wasn’t so stupid. If you still think so, then you may have a problem. This whole “Christians were wrong” about xyz is silly. So Ptolemy was a moron? Did atheists know what was up 5,000 years ago?
The idea of god/God is to find a purpose in life. Science can’t answer that. It is very human to want a god.
What if I really am the super-villain I sometimes pretend to be in CS & MPSIMS? Hadn’t you all better send me all your money to be sure?
I would really like it if Athena, Thor, or Aslan were real. It’d be a more palatable world for me if they (by which I mean my conception of them) had some basis in reality. But they aren’t.
You’re correct that science doesn’t help much in finding a purpose in life, but so what? I rather like the notion that my life is purposeless–that my only duty and destiny are what I choose and make for my ownself.
Good point. In fact, excellent point. But do you and your wife think yourselves any less Jews because you don’t believe in a literal God? Does thinking that God really didn’t appear to the Israelites as a pillar of fire or turn Moses’ staff into a snake lessen the beauty of the Passover story?
The reason I got into this debate was to challenge the assertion that the core of all religion is the denial of reality. That’s an illogical (which is to say, unfalsifiable) statement that can neither be proven nor disproven.
I maintain that the core of religion (which word encompasses noncreedal and even nontheistic faiths such as Unitarian-Universalism, Shintoism, Baha’i, and the Society of Friends), is the universal human need to tell stories. No culture has ever been found that didn’t have storytellers. We are mytheopoiec beings.
So is religion a fiction? Well, I think it is - that’s why I am no longer a Christian. But is fiction nonsense or gibberish? Does fiction have value? Should we cast off the bonds of fiction and enter into a clear world of pure logic and reason? Not me, bubba.
Let’s try a test. Logically determine the truth or falsity of this statement: “Had the protagonists of Hamlet and Othello been switched, neither play would have been a tragedy. Hamlet would have seen through Iago, and Othello would not have hesitated to kill Claudius.”
So humor is a disease? Fiction? Ethics? Everything that doesn’t follow logic is a disease?
How is saying “This is how it seems to me to be, but I may be wrong” a lie? How is it lying to admit that you may not have drawn the complete or correct conclusion from the data you’ve examined, or that you may not have all the relevant data? Isn’t that exactly what a scientist is thinking when she advances a hypothesis - “I think this is right, but let me test it and see.”
Not to hijack the thread, but didn’t Word of God (sorry!) say that he was? I honestly don’t have an opinion - I just thought I had read that Ridley Scott said he was.
Because religion is the original source of moral philosophy.
Hell, figuring out the best way to get home from work some days must be philosophy also. I think that definition is so broad as to be useless. Science has gone to an area philosophy cannot go now, which is testing hypotheses by experiment.
This isn’t to knock philosophy, because there are some problems (like good and evil) which are hard to test. But if you read ancient writing about the atom, you’ll see even when they got it right they got it right for the wrong reasons.
As an aside, if there were a god theology could be just like science. If you have a hypothesis about good and evil, or what god would want us to do in a given situation, you could ask him. But in our universe, theology is kind of like the study of ghosts. No matter how often you shout “Casper, what is the afterlife like bubbie?” you get no answer.
Why haven’t they ever shared it with the rest of us then? I’ve read tons about it. I’ve never seen a logical argument for it. It’s actually logically incompatible with an omnimax God.
Of course, not all Christians believe in Hell. It’s not in the Bible, after all.
What is the sentence suposed to mean?
A lot of religious beliefs can be dismantled without regard to scientific method. It’s trivial to demonstrate that some Christian beliefs are in conflict with each other - for instance, The Problem of Evil.
How can you prove there are no Keebler elves? This is a fallacious defense. Non-existence is the null hypothesis.
This is called “God of the gaps.” If I don’t understand how something happened, that means a wizard must have done it.
In point of fact, we do have a pretty good understanding of the natural processes which led to the emergence of our particular species.
My son is six. His reasoning for believing in God?
It happens all the time, actually, and who said the universe came out of “nothing.”
The difference is that scientists don’t just make shit up and then insist that it must be the truth in spite of a complete lack of evidence and often in spite of completely contradictory evidence. Religion has no method, no system for correction and no room for challenge. It just asserts that storms are caused by a giant man throwing lighting bolts from a magic kingdom in the sky, then gets butthurt and tries to burn you at the stake if you use scientific method to show them what really happens.
This isn’t to say that religion hasn’t a a great sociological and social function for a lot of people, but discovering information about the universe isn’t one of them, and looking at the universe does not logically lead to god beliefs.
Sums up belief in God quite nicely.
Scientific methods never prove or disprove anything. They only provide information about whether a certain hypothesis is reasonable to accept given the data, and to some extent the level of confidence we have in accepting or rejecting it.
That’s the wrong question. The right question is how do you demonstrate there is a hell. You’d begin that by defining what hell is what where it is, and what we’d expect to see in our world if hell existed. If hell involved being able to wander into it halfway through your life’s journey, that would be one thing. If hell implied that demons would come up here to torment us, we could look for them. If, however, hell existing is indistinguishable from hell not existing in this world, we’re in Invisible Pink Unicorn territory.
Now, that the story theists tell about hell keeps changing doesn’t give us a lot of confidence in its existence, does it?
You basically wind up with a Maxwell Smart “Would you believe” joke.
How exactly does this have to be? As the evidence piles up, and, more importantly, as each new piece of evidence supports the general picture, at some point you need to stop asking for the nth “missing link.”
I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to run for school board on the platform that Bacon actually wrote Shakespeare.
At least we should teach the controversy.
The point: when theology becomes equivalent to literary criticism we’ll all be better off.
What makes you think most of those things don’t follow logic? And fiction & humor get a pass because they don’t claim to be factual. And there’s more reasons than illogic for me to call religion a disease; it is infectious and destructive as well.
Because we are talking about beliefs that are ridiculously stupid. Beliefs that are baseless, incoherent, worthless, destructive. Beliefs that deserve nothing but mockery and contempt. My skin is more likely to spontaneously turn into butterflies than religion - any religion - is to be true. That level of utter wrongness is part of what makes religion what it is. Only garbage is religion.
No it isn’t, any more than it is the source of marriage or any other of the things it tries to steal credit for. The original source of moral philosophy is evolution, the origin of our moral instincts. It’s older than we are, much less older than religion.
Can we start by defining atheism? I’ve seen plenty of folks on this board who will say things like “Theists think God exists, but we know better, and know they’re wrong”, but then turn around and say in another thread that atheism is just a lack of belief. No, a lack of belief means uncertainty about whether God exists, which is agnosticism. Once you say “I know that God does not exist”, you’re asserting a religious belief.
No, you are denying that a religious belief is true, which isn’t the same thing. Just like how pointing out that the events of Exodus didn’t happen as described isn’t a religious belief either; it’s just what the evidence shows.
Who have you seen saying this? Cite?
No it isn’t. That’s not what agnosticism means.
Is it a religious belief to say that tooth fairies don’t exist?