What has provided you with this information? Especially the Zeus and Isis part.
I find this very interesting and relevant. I realized some time ago that it’s easy to emotionally attach a spiritual experience to the particular religion we’re around when it happens. Then people attach all the doctrine, mythology, and tradition of that religion to that experience when the two aren’t actually connected until we connect them.
It makes sense to me that someone on a spiritual path would have experiences with the images they relate to. We have to be willing to surrender , to let down our mental and emotional barriers, to progress. It’s a choice, an act of will. If those barriers won’t allow a person to see beyond their particular religion then they won’t. It can happen though that the desire to know the truth is stronger than the emotional attachment to a certain doctrine. Then barriers will fall until we realize that religions are man made constructs that only provide some vehicle for spirituality, and within spirituality, there are no religions.
I object. Isn’t it true that even though experiences *similar *to described religious experiences have been duplicated it can’t accurately be described as *proof * that spiritual experiences are completely physiological.
In my own case the question is, if the spiritual experience is merely a chemical reaction then where does the profound life changing insight come from? A chemical reaction might cause a feeling of peace and euphoria and I might have some sort of vision but where does the knowledge come from?
The term soul is an expression of an unsolved mystery about our true nature. In that sense it is not illogical. Sure there are lots of questions, few of which can even be addressed by science. That only hints at the limits of our knowledge. It certainly isn’t conclusive.
I think these are fair assessments and I also think that how progress is made. The mythological details of the religion become less important and hopefully people focus on the spiritual principles. How do we live together? How do we grow as individuals and in doing so contribute to our society?
As I’ve said more than once, Der Trihs is the Jimmy Swaggart, and/or Jerry Falwell of atheism. I thank God for folks like Diogenes the Cynic and SentientMeat who are able to have a rational discussion and even help educate me in the process
Because there no evidence anything else exists, therefore there is no scientific reason to believe anything else does. That is science “addressing the issue”.
Well Atwood is wrong; genetics is as deep as it gets. Also, the story makes no sense; without religious impulses why would they bother with rituals in front of an effigy ? What would be the point ?
Another standard religious tactic; claim the atheist is religious, because the religious just can’t bear the thought of someone who isn’t religious.
Ridiculous. Dismissing claims because they are irrational and have no evidence isn’t at all the same as making claims that contradict massive amounts of evidence.
There’s no proof they aren’t, and it’s the logical burden of believers to do so, not unbelievers to disprove it.
Your own mind.
No it isn’t, it’s the claim that we have a non-material essence.
There are no spiritual princples to religion, only the mythology and hatred. That’s why the more tolerant churches stagnate at best, and the fundies keep gaining members. It’s the people like Pat Robertson, Osama bin Laden and Fred Phelps who represent the basic principles of religion, not liberal priests sermonizing shrinking groups of followers.
Yes, because having a strong opinion is the same as wanting your opponents silenced and tossed into prison or executed. The religious double standard at work again.
Faith based belief systems in the supernature, how redundant is that?, will last the same way any other institution lasts. It will adapt to the needs of people or it will die and be replaced by something else. Christianity has undergone some radical changes in the last thousand years or so and I don’t see why it’s not possible for it to change even more. Or it might go the way of the Greek Pantheon and become a dead religion but I bet it would be replaced by something else.
People still believe all sorts of irrational things. Whether it’s the pyramids being built by aliens, angels helping people in their day to day lives, or, what the hell, what about L. Ron Hubbard? I’m sure myth based wacky belief systems are going to be around for a while.
No, it isn’t. Even if your premise (“there’s no evidence anything else exists”) were demonstrably correct, your argument is not a scientific one. It is philosophical, not scientific (not to mention sloppy and fallacious, but that’s another matter).
I think it’s fair to say that science HAS eroded the grip of religion on society. We are demonstrably less religious now than we were several hundred years ago. Sure, lots of people call themselves ‘Christians’, but the practice of religion in day-to-day life has certainly waned in influence.
Compare that to early non-technological civilizations, where significant energy was expended on a daily basis in prayer, offerings, rituals.
But religion in general won’t go away for a long, long time, if ever, because it apparently fills a human need. ‘Modern’ religions are taking on the trappings of science (Scientology, ‘New Ageism’, etc), but they are still religions.
Scientology is an interesting case in the tenacity of religion to withstand skepticism. Here we have a religion created by a science fiction writer, which has a belief system that reads like a really bad science fiction novel, yet has millions of adherents who believe in it so fervently that they will tithe significant portions of their income to the church. If Scientology can get a foothold from within a highly technological society, then religion isn’t going anywhere for a long, long time. If ever.
That is not what he said and you do your argument no good by creating a straw man. He pointed out that your behavior is indistinguishable from the behavior of various people (of a particular philosophy) among religious people. He made no claim that atheists, in general, were actually “religious” or even that atheists, in general, are guilty of the same behavior that you display.
Your claims are too broad and you have missed the point. There is no physical evidence that things that are not physical exist. There is, indeed, a fairly broad body of testimony that (many) humans appear to have had experiences that lead them to a belief in things that have no physical existence. Now, it is entirely possible that such beliefs and the experiences upon which they are built are the result of misinterpretations of common physical events by people who do not (yet) have the methodology to parse out their origins. However, when you assert that the non-physical does not exist, it becomes your burden to prove that statement, just as believers bear the burden of proof if they assert that the spiritual clearly does exist. Simply declaring that there is no physical evidence of that which is not physical is a mere tautology. You continue to harp that all religious startements are “irrational” (thus displaying your ignorance of the meaning of the word and your ignorance of the matter you condemn) yet you resort to irrational logical fallacies as you bluster through this thread.
And yet, despite the fact that Swaggart is a charaltan and a buffoon and Falwell desires a theocracy, neither of them have actually called for the silencing or imprisonment of those who oppose their views. So you are, again, resorting to a straw man in order to bolster your simplisticly shallow and unsupportable rhetoric.
It would seem that rather than pointing out a double standard, you are trying to demonstrate the point against which you rail.
I don’t want to necessarily say it, but someone will.
How can religion be useful and attend man in the same way that science can? Sure, it may help people live better lives, but I think that the ones that take the mores and teachings of their religion to heart are few and far between.
Science never had an Inquisition or castrated young boys to keep their voices high pitched or suicide bombed people.
FOr the sake of argument, suppose each of four different people has the exact same (seemingly) supernatural expience. One is a Baptist, one is a Moslem, one is a Hindu, and one is an atheist.
Each hears a voice in his head saying, “Give up everything you have, and devote your life to helping the poor.”
Each of them is going to interpret the experience a different way, based in large measure on his pre-existing beliefs.
The Baptist will assume he heard the voice of Jesus.
The Moslem will asume it was the voice of Allah.
The Hindu will assume it was the voice of Rama.
The atheist will decide to go see a neurologist, because he must have a brain tumor or incipient schizophrenia or something.
But it would be wrong to assume that any of the religious persons having this experience is going through something wholly unique to people of his faith.
And doctors will discover a small tumor in the athiest’s brain, excise it, and he will go on to live a happy life. The others will experience increasing levels of confusion, convulsions and eventually death.
This will be described by the faithful as “The will of God.”
I don’t think it can, and I think that’s really a non-issue. Religion serves a social, not a technological purpose.
Even if I take the most cynical view of religion that I can think of, it still serves to give people a sense of community and belonging. As a scientist, I can understand how that can be useful to a highly social animal like Homo sapiens. Much of our behavior is geared towards keeping social cohesion, not just towards solving the next technological problem. Religion may not be the only way for a society to maintain cohesion, but it certain has proven to be one very effective way.
I was pointing out that this is a standard behavior of religious people.
Also there have been witnesses to fairies, unicorns, aliens, Bigfoot, Nessie, goblins, and all sorts of nonsense; without evidence, such claims should be ignored as meaningless.
As I’ve said several times, science has proved it as far as it can be proven. It is impossible for me or anyone to do better, and there’s no point in demanding it.
So do street gangs, excpet gangs do less damage and are more rational ( hard not to be ). Should we encourage them ?
Which is a false statement as delivered. This was not a general reference to the behavior of “religious” people (in which case it would have been a gross overgeneralization and inaccurate to the extent that there are religious people who do not engage in that behavior), it was a direct (false) reply to a specific poster in this thread.
It is a behavior in which some people engage, religious or otherwise, and you were using it to make a false claim about a specific poster. In other words, you are behaving in exactly the dishonest manner of those, such as Falwell and Swaggart, to whom you have been accurately compared.
If that is the best you can do, then, perhaps, you should stop making insupportable statements as though they were fact. It is perfectly rational to point out an error in the claims of other people for which they do not have evidentiary support. It is irrational (your favored term) to assert as fact something for which you admit there is a limit beyond which you are unable to proceed.
It seems to me Der Trihs was simply stating (correctly or not) that science had disproved the existence of the supernatural to roughly the same degree that it had proved the inverse square law of gravity, or evolution by means of natural selection. The ‘limit beyond which he is unable to proceed’ is simply the limit at which we raise skepticism to Cartesian levels.
If someone comes along asserting as fact, the idea that the entropy of the universe always increases, would you harangue them for not continually prefacing their every sentence with ‘to the best of current knowledge, and assuming there are real things, and that I exist, and that it’s not all Brahman’s dream’ etc etc?
At some point we have to ‘make statements of fact’ even though we could all be brains in a vat. If you’re going to ‘turn the skepticism dial up to Descartes level’ for the assertion that ‘there is no evidence for the supernatural’, why are you even posting on a message board? Maybe your computer isn’t real!
Sure. But then time passes, and things change. Presumably, that’s what the OP is asking: will religions based around primitive mythologies survive, or will they mutate into something else. I would point to Christianity as something that has largely been in the process of doing the latter. While the stories can be resolved and rethought in some rather tortured ways to fit the new message, the question is: why? Why not look to different, less ambiguous stories, which less to massage and ignore?
