See Post #2 of this thread? 
It’s just that some of your claims about religion (e.g. “all religious people have a key component: Faith.” or “Religion filled certain needs according to certain times. Those times are gone now.”) strike me as, at the very least, worth being skeptical about, if not vague, unscientific, or downright inaccurate. What, exactly, do you mean by them, and what (scientific, not just anecdotal) evidence do you have that they are true?
Well to be honest, I’m not much of a historian on theism, and it’s getting kind of late, so I’ll keep my response short for now. Also, I don’t claim to be a scientist, so I’m not sure how to go about gathering scientific data to support my views. As to post #2, I concede, I could totally be wrong. But I disclaim any post I make by saying I’m using a broad brush to only underline my points, and realize there a many exceptions to such a large segment of humanity.
I have no scientific evidence, yet why invent a religion? There could be many reasons: Greed, control, delusion, power, ignorance, etc. All these are very horrible reasons, yet here we have these ancient fallacies still wielding their influence on a global basis. Am I wrong in believing most religions need faith in order to be viable? For a long time, religion filled roles in “answering” cosmological, humanistic and philosophic conundrums of the time. It attempted to allay our fears of dying, offer false hope when things where rough, and intensify our fears in sinning, lest we be cast away for all eternity. It looks to organize a very gray moral world into simplistic black and white boxes, while spreading misinformation about what we’ve come to learn through observation. I’m speaking of my experience with Christianity, for it’s all I am intimately familiar with. Most of these conundrums are if not completely answerable by science, at least offer some very grounded insight. Religion is left there for those who feel the need, for whatever reason, to delude themselves.
My understanding of Japan is that there is no post Shinto Japan. One is Shinto in one’s daily life and Buddhist at weddings and funerals. I could be getting that wrong, it’s something a Japanese friend of mine said. Anyway, as I understand it the Japanese feudal system is heavily rooted in Shintoism, but I’m not going to pretend that I am any kind of expert in it.
Mmmno. Samurai and Buddhism are fairly well synonymous. The Emperor of Japan is theoretically the descendant of the Shinto deities, but outside of that one snippet of knowledge, there isn’t really anything further to know about that and overall I would imagine that the Emperor has probably been Shinto/Buddhist since who knows when. But Feudal Japan was most certainly governed based on Buddhist and Confucianist principles.
And I didn’t mean to say that Shinto died in the 8th century. I’m just saying that past that point in time, there was a religion with moral strictures that the populace followed. Previous to that time, when there was only Shinto, morality as part of religion wasn’t really a strong point. There is very little Shinto “scripture” and what there is is mostly talking about Japanese history and gods nor are these writings really the basis of the religion. Shinto can fairly well be summed up as that the natural world has spirits, if you perform these ceremonies the spirits won’t harm you, and let’s have four or five song and dance festivals a year for shits and giggles. It’s such a low maintenance and unoffensive religion that there was really no problem with adopting Buddhism at the same time.
If you make science a religion, then you would have to take it out of the schools.
You’ve got me thinking about something like the American constitution, with the ability to add amendments to the established document. And maybe it starts with a version of the Bill of Rights, maybe called the “Bill of Oughts”, ten things you ought to do (rather being commanded to do, so they’re not ten commandments).
Brilliant!
I’m a little dubious about this one. Shouldn’t that be the other way around? “Continue to accept facts only so long as they align with evidence?” As stated it reads as though you’re suggesting we disregard observations that conflict with currently accepted models.
There’s the involuntray organ donor paradox. Suppose you have five patients in a hospital who will die within a week unless they all get an organ transplant (assume they each need a different organ). You medical database finds there’s a guy who has the right gene match to these five patients.
Strict utilarianism would say that the lives of five people is more valuable than the life of one person. So grab that guy off the street and cut out his organs to save the five patients. Sucks to be that guy but the greater good for the greater number and all that.
The problem is that virtually nobody thinks this is moral. Which implies that sometimes the needs of one person can somehow outweigh the needs of several people.
I have to wonder how this would have worked out if such an idea had actually caught on during the Enlightenment. Suppose the scientific truths of the day had become the basis of popular religion.
A hundred years later would Einstein have been burned at the stake for preaching heresy against the Truth of Orthodox Newtonism?
Not if the basis of the “religion” was that change and revision is inevitable. In fact, to downright expect a complete turnover of thinking over time.
Science: The Anti-Religion.™
Well I have what was told to me by someone who is Japanese and what you are telling me. I shall shut my mouth until I learn more.
By setting up science and religion as antipodes it does a disservice to science and shows that you don’t really understand the function of religion. Apples and Wombats.
The whole point of the OP is the assumption that religion is something more than just a set of opinions. You can’t have a dogmatic belief system based on the idea that you should not have dogmatic beliefs. You can’t take “always insist on proof” as an article of faith.
Religion IS more than a set of opinions. It’s a sociopolitical institution. How it acts and who its members are is just as important if not more than what it believes since most people adhere to believe rather imperfectly anyway.
Religion is a lot of different things combined in a single package. But we’re not giving a lot of attention to religion’s social issues in this thread - I don’t think anyone would argue the importance of converting people to the wearing of white lab coats and pocket protectors as a sign of devotion.
The two issues that are being discussed are religion’s role as a mythology - a system of explaining how the universe works - and as a philosophy - a system of directing people on how they should behave.
Science already has largely replaced religion as a mythology. Resisters like creationists are fighting a losing battle - their religious beliefs cannot hold out against scientific truth because science is able to back its theories up with evidence that religions cannot match. As I’ve argued, it would be foolish for science to abandon this great advantage and try to fight religion on its own terms as a contest of competing faiths.
The other issue is philosophy. And essentially you can’t prove one philosophy is better than another one. You might believe one is superior but that is, as I wrote, a matter of opinion not provable fact. I can believe that murder and rape and theft and slavery are all immoral but I can’t prove it.
So science as a philosophy - I still don’t see it working. Cmyk outlined some of the tenets of a philosophy of science in an earlier post. One of the main tenets is people should insist on evidence to support their beliefs.
And why should you believe this tenet?
If you accept the tenet as a religious belief, then you have the paradox of arguing that people should accept, as an article of faith, that they shouldn’t accept things as articles of faith.
But if you follow the tenet, you would insist on examing the evidence that supports it. If the evidence is conclusive then you can accept the tenet. You believe that beliefs should be supported by evidence because the evidence supports that belief. And when you’ve done this, where’s the religion? You’ve used scientific methods to prove science - no religion was involved.
That was a great post Little Nemo. All great points and a convincing argument as not only how science is not a religion or philosophy of sorts, but how it can never (nor should ever) be contrived as one.*
*Despite how much fun it is to think about.
On the other hand, accepting paradoxes about the tenents is stock in trade for a religion - all things require a creator except the creator, free will causes evil except when God has it, the tenet that says to question all must be accepted without question. And is it really even a religion at all if you don’t believe something that’s silly and nonsensical?
(As a side note, even outside a religion I would teach the tenet of requiring evidence as an axiom, because backing it up requies amassing a fair bit of experience and/or sociological data which is better done if you have previously accepted the tenet.)
Little Nemo Religion isn’t a system of knowing in the way science is. So you’re still arguing, “My Corvette does a better quarter mile than your scarf.”
Science has replaced nothing at all that religion provides, nothing whatsoever because they are not at odds.
No matter how eloquently you argue for it, it doesn’t matter, you are still arguing a category error and thus a logical fallacy.
What you are saying falls into the, “not even wrong”, category.
That big elephant you’re ignoring is named “creation myth”.
Religions provide all sorts of things, with different religions providing different things to different people. And becuase science does clash with it on some of those things, notably among them the facts detailing where they came from and as a consequence, what their value is, then religion announces that they’re at odds. Vigorously. Repeatedly. And with seemingly unabating emnity.
Your post denies this. It sufferes from the fallacy of “being utterly and completely divorced from reality”.