I typed up a long reply and decided it’s my fault for not realizing this is in GD. So, I’m bowing out, as doing pointless things is not on my ‘to do’ list today. Y’all enjoy.
It seems endless the amounts of ways we use to start " there is no god " threads. I always enjoy as I have in this thread the various ways folks on boths sides will express thier views. I still see touches or profoundness pop up now and then that are so difficult to come by in such a redudant topic. This speaks highly of the clientele here.
The one thing that is glaring us right in the face but rarely approached in this issue and many other issues is the significance of nuero chemistry and how powerful it is. I am not qualified to talk about it and have many times tried to stimulate the conversation this direction with no luck. I have no delusions that I tap into y brains pharmacy when I delve into a sprititual mode. I use images and symbols that I can easily comprehend and relate to in order to take me where I want t go. Mans understanding and comprehension are getting more advanced, his spititual concept will evolve as his comprehension does. This is very natural to humans,Exactly. When it’s so abstract as to be nothing more than a matter of faith…it’s okay with me. What harm? As I keep saying, it becomes just another personal preference. I like cilantro. He likes Jesus. Well, fine!
I was listening to a Bible radio show today, and the host was desperately clinging to the “God’s image” deal. He was flinging verses around to try to prove that God literally (!) had fingers and lips.
That’s the kind of religious person I have a hard time respecting. Deists? I’d be perfectly happy for my sister to marry one! (As a matter of fact…)
Maybe you aren’t aware that the majority of the religions practiced among humans don’t recognize the Bible any more than you do.
Good - you’ve given several other reasons why we don’t need a god. Krauss is obviously addressing the cosmological argument for God. The ancients assumed the universe needed a cause, so there must be a god. We’ve got lots of alternatives. I’m not qualified to evaluate them.
I see. We have a few guys who write books from time to time, and show up on talk shows during book tours, and have blogs no doubt. On the other side we have entire radio and TV networks flogging various varieties of religion, churches non nearly every corner (more than Starbucks?). Go to your local library and count the books singing the praises of just Christianity and then the books about atheism (if you can find any.)
And Dawkins is proselytizing too much? The nerve of him to come out of the closet.
As for evidence of God, got any of a god interacting with humans? When I used to go to services one of the poems we sang involved the concept that God has no form, so I’m well aware that we’ve all moved past the Bearded God. But the Bible does show people looking up God - or some parts of him. (He doesn’t look like Alanis Morisette either.)
Like I said, the deist god who does not interact with us by definition is fine. Any God who does, on the other hand, should leave some traces. Beyond the face of Jesus on an English muffin, I mean. They mostly vanish, and when they show up they turn out not to be hieroglyphics talking about God but rather Egyptian laundry lists.
And really, worshiping science as a god? That’s the kind of crap creationists spout.
Personally I’m a theist, and one of those liberal Christians the OP has no respect for. I do see common threads in that post and the words of fundamentalists. Either it’s the word of God, dictated to his chosen via celestial dictaphone, or it should all be discarded. I ain’t got no quarrel with atheists. I’m not going to try to convince anyone that my concept of God should make sense to them. It probably wouldn’t make any sense to evangelical Christians, or to many atheists. The bottom line for me is how you treat your fellow human beings and the planet we all live on.
Obviously I don’t know the OP, and he/she may be a salt of the earth type person. The post, however, makes me think of a person who only sees the world in black/white, either/or.
Not having to pay taxes, laws being enacted against gays, against women…,. All on a made up fairytale.
Yeah, that totally fucking rocks!
Go religion!
Non-falsifiable gods tend to fall to Occam’s Razor. If a god isn’t falsifiable, then the universe with or without that god is indistinguishable–and if they’re indistinguishable, on what basis do I postulate a god?
I don’t actually know what this means. It sounds like a talking point designed to get the religious angry, but I don’t think it actually conveys any meaning except outrage. In what way do they “worship” science? In what way is science a “god”? And, do you acknowledge that the “miracles” of science (nuclear power, penicillin, cars) have much better documentation and much more profound effects on life than any alleged miracles of any religion?
Rasta Man said something about this too.
I think the word “miracle” originally meant “something to be marveled at.” I don’t take the biblical miracles literally, so the ones you mentioned, along with the Web (developed by a fellow Unitarian Universalist, by the way) have the advantage of having actually occurred. It doesn’t matter to me if anyone believes in God or not, as long as they don’t tell folks who don’t agree that they’re immoral, lacking intelligence, ect.
There are very intelligent people who are religious, of course. Newton was smarter than anyone on this board, but he believed. But being religious is inherently an irrational act.
Asserting something is real with no evidence isn’t a good thing. I can easily assert that Thallzak the Scotulizer will butt-ram for eternity, anyone who doesn’t make offerings at a slot machine, in his name, at least every 14 months.
*And that has exactly as much evidence for it as the Abrahamic God.
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Believing in a God doesn’t make you bad, but it still is pretty silly. Just as silly as astrology, homeopathy, or Reiki.
I’m not sure why you’re referring to “moderately religious” instead of “moderately Christian” since most of this doesn’t apply to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or countless other religions.
But many who identify as Christians don’t believe in the Abrahamic God either. Many Christian theologians (Paul Tillich, for one) did not think of God as a Supreme Being, or even a being at all. If you find that silly, it’s ok by me. As long as you don’t use it as license to torture bunnies and throw rocks at orphans, because any good fundamentalist know that if there’s no god, then anything goes.
So do I when I cook in the nude.
I don’t have time to read the whole thread, but I completely agree with the OP.
It doesn’t make any sense to be a religious moderate. That’s like saying you only “sort of” believe in it. If your holy book is really holy, how can any of it be wrong; and, if any of it is wrong, doesn’t that invalidate the whole thing? Would you jump in a pool that had just one piece of excrement?
Fundamentalists are the true believers. They’re the ones who have the courage of their convictions. Cherry-picking, and making up your beliefs to suit yourself (or the consensus of your community) is acting in bad faith. It’s dishonest. Someone has to be right, and someone has to be wrong, and most religions out there contradict one another.
People sometimes say that people like me are just as fundamentalist/dogmatic/whatever as our religious opponents. Yes! That’s not a bad thing! Put up or shut up, believers!
Also, why are people supposed to respect religious faith? It’s not race, or gender, or sexual orientation. It’s a decision, and I don’t feel compelled to respect your taste in music or architecture, so why does religion get a free pass? Why are religious convictions protected, but equally strong beliefs stemming from logic and reason are not? It’s like when I tell people that I don’t drink alcohol. My reasons need to be explained, apparently, but if my reasons were that I was afraid of being punished by an invisible man in the sky, that would be beyond questioning and beyond reproach.
Simple:
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Talking snakes and talking donkeys are myths because they are “obviously” a made up part of the bible.
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Other parts of the bible are the complete truth.
What’s the problem?
I don’t have time to read your whole post, but I completely disagree with it. :rolleyes:
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It has not been established that religion has done damage to the world on net over the past 100 years. I take a long view to average out day to day events.
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It might be shown that certain religions encourage poor habits of thought. That’s a separate argument. But there are many paths to cognition dysfunction. So many that at this stage of history I argue that it would be better to advance applied rationality than to spend one’s resources undermining but one path of non-optimal thinking.
In the social sciences, only economics has a central organizing paradigm. Political science has many approaches as does sociology. In law, there are multiple ways of reading the constitution and there is no general theory of the law. Theology majors often go on to law school.
When I learn of new facts, I modify my opinions. What do you do?
He might have chosen to generalize and say that, for instance, a moderate Hindu – one who accepts the existence of Vishnu, say, as an abstract idea but not an actual “person” – or a moderate Muslim, or a moderate Jew, are all “difficult to respect” for the same reason.
Anyone who accepts part of the overall doctrine of their faith, while neglecting other parts, might fall under his same odium.
But, of course, it isn’t even materially possible to accept “all” of the doctrines of a major faith, as they fall almost immediately into contradiction.
Within Christianity, one pretty much cannot be both a Catholic and a Protestant. One cannot be a Trinitarian and an anti-Trinitarian. So, right off the bat, every Christian is compelled to do some picking and choosing. The same is certainly true for all the major religions.
Is it impossible to be an Olympian worshiper, because there are contradictions between the text of Hesiod and of Homer? Is it impossible to worship the Aesir, because the stories of Odin contradict the stories of Wotan?
The OP insists on an impossible level of hyper-fundamentalism, which, in the real world, no one follows.
Most of the rest of us actually admire the faithful who have worked to customize their faith, to plane off the roughest surfaces and patch up the ugliest holes. Most of us like Christian Universalists, who accept the Bible and believe there is a Hell…and believe that Hell is quite, quite empty.
I used to be a liberal Christian. I am now a fairly militant atheist. There are a couple of things people seem to have trouble getting.
First of all, I was never a “moderate” Christian. When I considered myself a Christian, I based my life around it. I went to graduate school to become a minister. I prayed regularly. I read the Bible and tried my best to understand it seriously without taking it literally. The fact that I didn’t think the stories (any of the stories, in fact) were necessarily historically accurate in every detail, didn’t mean that I didn’t take them seriously and try to learn whatever lesson I thought was intended for me.
Second, I didn’t believe in God because the Bible said God was real. I didn’t believe in Jesus’s resurrection because of the Bible, or that I was saved by his redeeming power because of the Bible. In fact, I’d say there was hardly anything I believed simply because it was said in the Bible. I believed in God and in Jesus’s resurrection and that I was saved by his redemptive power because I had personal spiritual experiences that convinced me it was worth provisionally accepting the proposition that something outside me caused those experiences, and that that something was identical with what Christians called God, and because I felt additional spiritual experiences that confirmed that belief when I participated in the activities of being a Christian (praying, going to church, reading the Bible, taking communion, etc.), and because other people reported similar experiences that also seemed to derive from Christian practice and seemed to confirm that there was something “behind” those experiences that was identified as “God” or “Jesus” (or “the Holy Spirit”).
Now since then, I’ve re-evaluated those claims and found that the evidence simply doesn’t bear the epistemological load required to support them, even when the claims are interpreted in the epistemologically “lightest” way possible. (I never understood the resurrection as necessarily physical or literal, just as some causative event that led to the historical disciples feeling Jesus’s presence and led to my feeling inspired and hopeful in the face of despair. Some of my friends interpreted it as a purely naturalistic psychological phenomenon nevertheless directed by God; I was undecided at the time.) None of that changes the fact that I believed what I believed then prior to my reading of the Bible.
The purpose of the Bible to me as a Christian was not primarily informational. When I read the Bible, I sometimes felt the sort of spiritual presence (which I’ve since identified as a common psychological phenomenon devoid of epistemological or moral significance) that had initially drawn me to Christianity. I also found there the record of many previous spiritual experiences similar to mine, and saw how people through history had interpreted and reinterpreted those experiences. One of the most appealing aspects of Christianity for me was that the spiritual experiences I had, some of the people in the community I shared them with, and some parts of the Bible I read all worked together to inspire me to try to become a more moral and better person. Looking back now as an atheist, I still think they inspired me that way. Some parts of the Bible taught moral lessons that I agreed with. Some parts of the Bible taught moral lessons that I disagreed with. Since they often contradicted one another, I never thought that I was supposed to believe all of the morals, or even that I could, but since everyone else in the community of believers I was in agreed that they had been inspired to become better and more moral people by Christianity, and I presumed that at least some of the authors of the Bible had written it because they too were so inspired, I tried to take their arguments seriously. Sorting through what parts of the Bible’s moral teaching I agreed with and what parts I disagreed with helped me to understand my own morality and to become a better person, so I assumed that that was what the Bible was for. Only a small minority of people in my church thought that something should be believed to be right or wrong simply because the Bible said so, but they all believed that the people who wrote it had been inspired by God to be moral, and that they were people of good conscience honestly trying to work out what God would want them to do. Parts of Paul’s writing explicitly state that this is the case. When the Bible seemed to teach something morally abhorrent, I tried to understand why, but I didn’t presume that it was really saying something good. The idea that every part of the Bible was the literal word of God was foreign to the liberal Christianity I practiced seriously.