That’s one definition. But Buddhism is a religion, and they dont always hold beliefs in a deity, in the supernatural.
But another is KNOWING that you hold the right beliefs about the afterlife.
No one can *know. *
But hard core atheists preach their beliefs. They try to convert others. They hold their belief in the absence of any proof.
Because they refuse to keep that shit to themselves. If they had not been trying to fling their feces in our faces all this time and try to force us to slog through the drippings, we would almost certainly be happy to ignore them.
But, it is so very absurd, it is rewarding to mock it.
To the OP, I don’t think religion will ever be wiped out… even if all the religions practiced today were to disappear, it’s human nature to search for a explanation or purpose for things to be the way they are. I know that sounds generic, but that is on purpose.
I keep going back to this study on how children of a certain age range believe in purpose-driven explanations for why things are the way they are. For example, a pond exists to give animals a place to drink water. A tree exists to provide a home for squirrels. Eventually, around the age of 7-8, children start to give more non-purpose driven explanations. A pond exists because the landscape’s shape, or a tree exists because it grew from a seed. The search for a purpose is human behavior and I doubt it’ll ever change in any appreciable timespan. Some of us just don’t quite get past the purpose-driven explanations.
My goodness. The exact same thing could be said about this thread- whose purpose is to mock religion.
I don’t think you can be reached, but I’ve gradually become a ‘hard core’ atheist. Specifically, while I don’t know the true nature of reality, I do know the evidence that has been presented to me. I know that given this evidence, the most probable truth is that all religions invented by humans are wrong.
Let me try to give you an idea of my way of thinking. Imagine you’ve been playing a game with unknown rules. You know what actions you took and what outcomes happened that you could directly observe. You discover that outcomes reported by other players without objective records (videotapes, experimental logs compiled by credentialed scientists) are not very trustworthy.
You don’t know the rules to the game, but give a certain set of credible evidence, you can infer the most probable set of rules you can.
As new evidence comes in, you update - you change your inferences.
Right now, the overwhelming majority of all credible, scientific evidence says that all religions are bullshit and the laws of physics are a set of relative simple and inviolate principles.
Based upon that set of data, you can only arrive at this one reasonable conclusion, and you’re a moron if you don’t. (yes, I think all religious people are at least stupid about this. I do not care what credentials society has awarded them, they are still stupid.)
I have no “faith” I’m right, I don’t have to. If tomorrow, objective, credible data starts being produced that says a specific religion is true, I’ll update my beliefs. Not all at once - a little at a time as each miracle is reported on and measured and verified legitimate by trustworthy people and hard to fake data is collected.
So in essence I don’t “believe” in anything but a process - of determining the most probable truth based on the available evidence. As the evidence changes, the most probable truth changes. I think religious people are stupid not because they are wrong (they could be right), but because they are reaching their conclusions despite all the facts saying something different.
I think you are being very loose with your terms. The number of atheists who preach or try to convert others in the same sense that Christians do is very small. If you consider an internet debate to be preaching or an attempt at conversion, then the number is admittedly higher, but I wouldn’t call that preaching or proselytizing.
It would be more accurate to say they lack belief because of the absence of any proof. There are not many atheists willing to put their name to the belief that there is no god or supernatural power of any kind in the universe, because it’s self-evident that we have next to no knowledge about all but an infinitesimal fraction of the universe.
Atheists are much more confident about denying the existence of a particular deity, e.g. Jesus, because the scriptures attesting to his existence are full of errors, contradictions, and unfulfilled promises and predictions. That belief is not based on absence of evidence; it is based on excellent evidence: if virtually every verifiable claim that the Bible makes is wrong, then it would be irrational to believe its unverifiable claims.
As for the OP, I think the question is very badly formed. IMO every field of knowledge is ignorant about god and the afterlife, if either exists, and so the only thing special about religion is that it claims to have knowledge it doesn’t. That makes it irrational, and maybe even stupid, but no more ignorant than physics, at least as far as god is concerned.
As for the practitioners of religion, they are by definition irrational too, although some are highly intelligent. But there is something about religion that bypasses the rationality switch in their brain, so that they can’t see how almost every argument they make for their religion can be made by other religions, and almost every argument they make against other religions can be made against theirs.
What is really distressing is how ignorant some religious people are about their own religion. The classic example shows up on TV every few years, where some Congressman proposing a bill to get the Ten Commandments enshrined in public buildings, when asked what they are, can only name two or three. Or more recently, when anti-Muslim bigots rail against various examples of Sharia Law, blissfully ignorant that the Bible they believe in contains the same barbaric laws.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus
Read it carefully, it’s a good answer.
A couple of different ways to come at the OP:
Firstly, yes religion is an incredibly daft set of beliefs, in many ways less plausible than werewolves or the tooth fairy or whatever, because at least those things are self-consistent and don’t suffer things like the problem of evil. The fact that we afford it so much respect is part of the reason that it’s persisted so long: if we were free to just call BS and openly question it, it would fall apart pretty fast.
On the other hand, “ignorance” is not inherently a bad thing: we’re all ignorant of many things. If it was deserving of scorn then we should spend all our time super-scorning ourselves. What’s important is that we fight our ignorance, not revel in it.
So in the past, when there were so many things that science couldn’t explain, it was somewhat understandable that people found religious hypotheses plausible. And even now, a child growing up in a religious family, I can see the cognitive weaknesses that lead them to take on their parents’ religion and try to avoid questioning it. But as adults, they *should *question those beliefs, and I think anyone who evaluates religion as a hypothesis, from a objective starting position, must come to the conclusion it’s illogical and there’s zero empirical evidence.
You are making a logical error. Attacking a single instance of this concern, which is not even consistent within any of the major religions, is not a valid way to declare that religion itself is therefore at fault.
Again,your reasoning is faulty, and your facts are made up. Your claim that the ONLY response to contradictory information was denial or “moving the goal posts,” is wrong.
All you are doing here, is repeating poorly expressed insults. You are yourself, denying factual information as a part of your insult attack. That is, there are voluminous examples of religious people adding to the insights of science, but you pretend that non exist.
Enough of this.
Many religious people would agree with this enthusiastically. They’d just add that not all religions were invented by humans.
One big difference between religion on the one hand and both science and philosophy on the other is that the latter two are based entirely on what human beings can figure out for themselves. Religion claims to be based at least in part on revelation and/or unrepeatable special experiences.
So if you reject religion in general or a specific religion (call it wrong, or BS, or ignorance) because you couldn’t have figured it out for yourself, you’re asking it to be something it never claimed to be, and doing a certain amount of question-begging.
If you reject it because you think the experiences or revelations it is based on either never happened or were misinterpreted, that’s more appropriate, but also harder to verify.
Just one instance?
You’ve been here since 2001, and you have answers like this? Could it be, that deep inside you know many of the beliefs are ripe for ridicule, and this is a pre-emptive strike of throwing out a red herring so that you don’t have to argue any of the positions? I see Igor is also going with this too now.
It’s the exception to the rule in this day and age and you know it, or should know it. Leading scientists that don’t believe is higher than ever, 93% of the National Academy Scientists (NAS) that answered in a questionnaire were atheists or agnostics (mostly the former). What great scientific minds that were religious, I think it’s a safe bet they relied on the scientific method instead of finding it in religious tomes.
So?! Is it the hat that does it for you?
It helps to be specific if you think someone got the facts wrong, not just speak generally about it, and like Dr. Deth, act like you’ve been insulted.
As I was saying earlier, it’s the exception to the rule, and you ignore the majority of leading scientists today that are atheists. No need to divide, or take away from their accomplishments if they were/are religious or not.
Cool, so now I know. When Cecil answered that question a hundred years later, that was the letter the reader was referring too. So thanks for that.
Well, obviously you do since religion is basically nothing more than that.
I encountered recently the following distinction between religion and superstition:
igor,
It is against the rules of Great Debates to accuse another poster of lying. ‘facts made up’ certainly meets that criteria. I’m giving you a warning for this. Please don’t do it again.
That’s a good quote. However, almost nothing in the word of religion can be proven as demonstrably true, so it might as well be the same thing as superstition. I’d better be good because the Invisible Man in the Sky is watching, and I’d better not step on a spider because it might make it rain. Those that believe what they choose to believe will brook no denial, despite mountains of evidence that what they believe simply cannot be. I regard Religion as Literature—imaginative morality tales about how things came to be, but obviously not literally true.
Really? There are no churches in your area? :dubious:Try googling one, and walking in. or fly to Italy and visit the Vatican. The Pope is on TV a lot, do you think he’s a fake news thing?