I’ve read many of the posts, and would like to come back to the OP. As you’ve already established, the OP is a straw man, but there is a grain of truth here which is quite interesting.
When an atheist says “there are no gods” he means it literally. There are straightforward meanings for these four words, and taken together they mean what you think they mean. And are also, in a literal sense, self-evidently true.*
If you then get into a theological discussion with a theist, you immediately enter a world of linguistic ambiguity where words don’t appear to mean anything. The theist will make complicated arguments that sound plausible, but on closer inspection don’t appear to make any sense at all, and when you try to explain the problems you are confronted with another long-winded explanation which makes even less sense. A shifting mass of words which, though appearing in the dictionary and complying broadly with grammatical principles, don’t appear to follow any logical order or lead to any fixed literal meaning. A world where you will be criticised for literalism if you attempt to identify meaning.
This is because there is no logic, or even meaning. As the theists openly admit, their faith is based on belief, not reason. Of course you come over as hyper-literal. How could it be otherwise?
Sandwich
yes, I know many of you can talk for hours about your beliefs and how your god is obviously real. See above for why that isn’t persuasive, literally. At best, gods fall into the class of real things which never manifest in reality and who are defined to be incapable of being proved unreal. So, not real in the way pencils and anger are real, for instance.
I am not asking you to build policy on it. Heck, I don’t even think the church has sway up here in the Great North. We believe what we believe because it feels right. Yeah, not at all scientific. Faith is not.
Which is the problem in a nutshell. If you feel, in your deepest realms that, say, wearing pink is a horrible abomination and the people who do that are going to end up in a terrible place forever, you are going to try to convince people not to wear pink. When a bunch of people start agreeing, then policies to not wear pink get created. Then people start shooting people who continue to wear pink and ta-da you have an ideological war.
That has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with a large proponent of the Earth’s population being stupid and cattle. Don’t see that changing anytime soon. Get rid of the bible, and they will find something else to base their ideologies on.
Down here a lot of politicians, almost universally Republicans, are definitely building public policy on faith. Our constitution is designed to let people say that pink is ugly, but to prevent the government from implementing policies supporting pink or discouraging the wearing of pink - and of course to prevent pin-non-pink violence.
We recognize that color choice and team choice are nonrational preferences. The law says that religious choice is the same, but lots of people disagree strongly, but they can’t show rationally why their religious choice is the correct one.
You are confusing cause and effect. Religion teaches people to be “stupid cattle”, because stupid cattle are what religion needs to survive and propagate. Which is one reason why social and technological progress so often turns into a battle against religion.
This is a great question for a thread, for anyone who cares enough. Does religion thrive because people are stupid cattle, or are people stupid cattle because they are caught in the grip of religion.
Throw a couple of mosts in there along the way so it doesn’t look like I’m painting with too broad a brush.
In all seriousness, it sounds like a vicious circle. People are, er, untrained in the application of logical thought (perhaps due to being a child), so they accept religion, which actively discourages them from applying rational thought when it would challenge the religion. (And it actively encourages them to indoctrinate their children at a gullible age too, usually.)
I got out of the habit of putting “most” into statements like that because I kept getting accused of using weasel words. Now, I’m accused of painting with too broad a brush. At this point, I usually regard either accusation as nothing more than an attempt to handwave an argument aside without addressing it.
We need a control society to find out what happens when religion isn’t part of childhood indoctrination. Will their sheep like propensities result in their latching on to something else? Will the border collie people just come up with another scheme to herd the sheep like people? Will everyone learn critical thinking skill, go their own way, and society utterly collapse because there will lo longer be an enforced consensus?
Two great posts, IMHO. I know we’re getting away from the OP…but this is an important question. Might it be a psychological fact about human beings that they need to “believe in” something, or otherwise fail to cooperate as a civil society? You know, like the pep rallies that motivate sports teams, or the desire-to-help-our-team-win which motivates business partners, or the feeling of love one has for their child…Obviously, the “belief” doesn’t have to be something so blatantly horse-puckey as theism, but still, at some fundamental level, isn’t most positive human action directed by emotions and desires, rather than cold scientific reasoning?
Perhaps “belief” isn’t quite the right word for all this. And I am NOT saying that the need to preserve motivational emotions can be used to justify beleif in theistic horse-puckey. But it sure seems that the human drive which often has led to theism, etc. arises from more common, everyday emotions and drives which are not harmful or BS per se.
I guess the trick is to teach ourselves to accept inevitable everyday emotions and drives for what they are, and not let them lead us to the next step towards irrational “beliefs”. But the actual line between the former and the latter is, I suspect, very hard to discern.
Really, this is rather akin to training ourselves to disregard other tricks our brains tend to play on us – pattern recognition mistakes, memory mistakes, statistical fallacies, etc., the kinds of things policemen and women learn, as well as professional scientists.
I think that is simplistic. Many religions encourage their adherents to argue and to ask questions - except about the basic assumptions of their religion. Do that and you are toast. Theologians have heated arguments about angels dancing on the heads of pins and salvation by works or faith. Actual arguments about the divinity of Jesus, not so much. Anyone trying, like Bishop Spong, gets ostracized.
Religion isn’t very big here. Most Australians put down a religion when they fill out a census but actual church attendance once a month or more is less than 20% and if you start looking at age profiles you find its mostly old people. It’s dying out here, at least on present trends. I don’t notice any lack of “cattle”, however. The cattle just get herded into materiality and sport.
Most Christians outside the USA would view literalists as completley looney and to be watched like any other radical fundamental sect.
We have YEC trying to infiltrate schools downunder, they don’t have much chance though with an Athiest woman with no kids and living with her boyfriend as our prime minister.
Look believe what you want to believe, if yu are an athiest then great if you are a YEC then great. BUT do not force your view of religion on me.
The whole point isnt that you are going to change what they think. It is just that you make them think. Hopefully they get annoyed enough with you that they actually read the bible and become somewhat informed. At that point they are no longer uninformed. Its about fighting ignorance, no?
Nobody is terribly worried about the non literalists.
