What can you possibly mean by this? When there is evidence, as in your examples, then different people will independently come to the same conclusions. Religion has no such evidence which is why no two people agree on conclusions. My posts have been clear and consistent. The responses, however…
I think I’ve been extremely clear.
You do not discard things as false in wholesale because you observe lots of people disagreeing with each other about the topic.
If it were so, you would have to discard all answers on any debated topic, which is all topics.
You discard them as false individually if they disagree with evidence.
What’s really weird is the ‘no two people agree’ thing wrt religion - I took this to be hyperbole, but you appear to be treating it quite literally.
There are certainly topics within religion where we could find two or more people in agreement.
Actually everyone starts off as atheists and may become a follower of formal religious teaching depending on their family or environment. I can’t see anyone being a believer at the time they’re born.
But for the religious there is supposed to be a god with the answer, a universal god, a god who can make himself known. (Leaving out a deistic god.) One reasonable test for a universal god is that he’s universal. But belief in our gods is strongly correlated to geography.
We can only conclude that god doesn’t care if we believe in him, or that he doesn’t exist.
The pagans with their local gods made a lot more sense.
@Mangetout, we can’t find two people agreeing on the posts on this very page.
I understand each of these words, but when I put them together, I can’t make heads or tails of it. My friends and I do agree. There are plenty of other groups whose members agree also. Why do you think that “no two people agree”?
Agree? Agree on what? A few vague generalities maybe? Religions have thousands of details, presumably covering all situations in life, and a great many after life. Since none of the later exist, perforce no two people agree on the details, each with a different vision in their heads about what it will be and what it means to get there. And yet they show little compunction about instructing other people how to live their lives to achieve this phantom.
You can’t argue your way out of this conundrum. Not that I’m getting any real arguments on any of my other points either. I’m not addressing any more of these sidetracks.
With all due respect, I think you may be using circular reasoning here.
~Max
As is the case in many an SDMB thread, regardless religion, regardless topic. Should we conclude therefore that any such discussion is populated entirely by people making up answers in their heads?
It’s always been my impression that there is a very high level of agreement amongst Jehova’s Witnesses. I’m absolutely certain I’ve met two that agreed wholeheartedly on all of the things they tried to tell me.
Consensus isn’t how people are right. Failure to achieve consensus isn’t a good way to determine that everyone speaking is wrong.
There is, of course, a correlation between cases of consensus existing, and cases of people being right, but there’s a thing about correlation that people like to say here on the SDMB…
Apparently, you have a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics than I do. As a result, you understand how similar the different versions are to each other, how their differences are mere nuances. In contrast, they appear quite fragmented to me, the outsider, who has just barely enough understanding of it to make a fool of myself. (I’m being serious, not sarcastic, really.)
And I dare suggest that our positions are reversed on the topic of religion, where you don’t seem to realize how much agreement there is. Or at least my religion, which I have been studying in depth for many decades. The great majority of the people in my synagogue, and my friends elsewhere, would say that we agree on most of those “thousands of details”, certainly the most important ones. With all due respect, they would laugh at your “A few vague generalities maybe?” Yes, there are things we disagree about, but they pale in comparison to the things that we agree on.
A recurrent communications problem I encounter in these discussions is structured something like this:
a) A atheist wants to discuss assertions of what is real and how one knows that they are real, and how theistic people end up considering things that aren’t real to be real.
What’s real and how one knows… those are highly relevant subtopics within philosophy, where these are typicall referred to as “metaphysics” and “epistemology”, respectively. The fact that there are oodles of musings and developed theory, assertions and named processes and concepts, indicates that these are deep and complex questions themselves, with different schools of thought and dissent and debate.
b) The atheist usually crafts a comparison object that is treated as ipso facto real, to show that a valid and rational approach to these epistemologican and metaphysical matters is very common-sensical. “Here”, one might say, “behold this brick. See how real it is. Solid. Heavy. Abrasive on the surface. Red. Painful to stub your toe on, or to whack someone in the head with. It has weight, it has length, it has width, it has depth, it has volume. It has color. It has texture. It occupies a specific location in time and space. If I take it to a laboratory I can analyze exactly which of the one hundred and eighteen elements it is composed of, in what ratios, and how they are combined to make compounds”.
At this point the atheist is generally going to switch to Exhibit B, “God”, and discuss how none of that is true for God, for any God, that God lacks all these measurable physical characeristics and hence lacks realness.
I don’t regard that as a useful place to anchor a discussion, even when it is made in good faith. And it isn’t always being made in good faith. What is good faith? Well, honesty, and a sincere attempt to present one’s own thinking, as opposed to a deliberate attempt to construct and arm a conceptual trap, I suppose. Do I, in these last four sentences, confuse you or bewilder you the way I might if I were to suddenly start introducing notions that you regard as unreal, and so unreal that no reasonable and rational person would embrace them?
What is good faith, and honesty? Sincerity? Even if you don’t use any of these phrases and terms, because you think they aren’t really valid concepts, you recognize that they refer to phenomena that in the broad overall sense is real. That they are useful concepts. This, despite the fact that good faith has no mass, color, velocity, doesn’t reflect light on any wavelength, has no odor, and you can’t stub your toe on it. So, yes, you aren’t unfamilar with complex and abstract concepts of qualities that can be said to inher in situations or reside within relationships between people, and even if you regard one of them as ultimately being a faulty construct — “I don’t believe such a thing as sincerity exists. The consciousness and the ego, if you will, shape a person’s desire not only for various outcomes but also their desire to retain an admirable self-image, so everyone rationalizes their sense of their own interactions with others and conjures up this very sincere, very honest fellow, you know, and that is true for the people you describe as really trying to set one of those verbal traps” — it’s not usually the kind of disbelief and disuse of the term that causes you to regard the person who uses the phrase as someone so disconnected with reality that they go around referring to things that fundamentally don’t exist. You know what the person means when they say “sincerity”. It’s not like they dropped a word into the sentence that implies that everyone has an extraterrestrial alien sitting invisibily on their shoulders and whispering instructions into their ears. You could normally discuss “sincerity” with the person and find areas of agreement and areas of departure without it deteriorating into “This isn’t real!” “It is too!”
Very well put, AHunter3. I would only qualify the word “trap”, which sounds like it is of malicious intent, but might not be.
The person who has set up these “traps” might be very honest and sincere in trying to analyze the differences between bricks and God, but simply didn’t realize that there’s another category of very real things (e.g. honesty and sincerity).
Well, I was sort of back-dooring that admission in the imaginary dissent on the use of “sincerity” – indirectly hinting that I myself could be viewed as setting such a trap, but am not sufficiently honest with myself about doing so lest I perceive myself as less than the sincere person I like to think I am.
Yes, I agree, Keeve, I think most of us (on either or any side) who could be viewed as “setting traps” aren’t scheming to pull a “gotcha” on their opponents in the next post.
As I said, I will not respond to any posts about the existence of god or the correctness of religion.
My OP asked why so many people are finally abandoning religion. I’d like to hear opinions on that.
If you don’t want to address the subject, I’ll ask that the thread be closed.
Well, some of us have branched off into side discussions and may be enjoying them. I’ll ask that the thread not be closed, if you don’t mind.
But to address your question… people are abandoning religion in droves because they can. Which wasn’t always the case. First for a long time it was not officially tolerated that you would do so. Belief was required of you. Then after that it was technically officially permitted to be an atheist but it would make you a social pariah, likely to be viewed as an immoral untrustworthy specimen who should not be hired, married, voted for, permitted to move in on our block, allowed to be the person giving the valedictory address, and so on. Now, with most of that opprobrium finally fading into the background, far fewer people are giving empty lip service to theological beliefs just to avoid being subjected to that.
That is actually not the question you posted in the OP though. You asked a far more complicated and multi-faceted question that actuallydoes in part address whether there is any validity to theistic beliefs and/or how anyone could believe them in the face of inconsistency and so on.
You seem to be saying that an equivalent number of people in the past would have given up religion except for the opprobrium. I agree that public feeling about lack of religion was much stronger even in the recent past. But I have no way of telling how many people felt that way and couldn’t express it.
Like all of you I was born an atheist and like seemingly all of you I was brought up in a religion that I had to abandon some 60 years ago. I never hid that but I didn’t go around announcing it either. I do know that being an outsider teaches you far more about the dominant class than they understand about themselves. Believers don’t see the water they swim in.
The question to be answered becomes why the opprobrium is lifting. I offered a possible answer. Another is that the stubborn refusal of the more fundamentalist strains of all religions to accept change is driving less fanatic believers away, but that’s itself somewhat circular, begging the question of how the change came about.
But if the question is why people are leaving religion in droves, not all of them for lack of believe in a god, you have to posit some flaws in religion to form an answer.
Well, speaking as a theistic person, religion has some massively horrible flaws. Organized religion is not the protectice ensconcement of theistic understandings. Religion in its institutionalized form is the taxidemying of theistic understandings. The real stuff is generated by individuals seeking their own answers (and occasionally coming among the other people and trying to share those answers); it is disruptive and potentially destabilizing to established order and structure. But what if, instead of trying to ban it, we raise people with the idea that we already have it and revere it and, in fact, require reverence for it? So take some dead old fogey’s one-time understandings, wrap them in silver and gold trappings, laquer them in ludicrous metaphysical bullshit, and throw up some weird symbols and icons on the walls and altars and put a hierarchy of people in charge of making sure everyone attends and gets noticed if they go off trying to come to their own realizations, especially if they seek to tell others about any that they’ve had.
It’s like a vaccine against theistic processes. Inject the mostly-dead mostly-inert remnants of one into the socially shared world-view and it will reject any of the radical revelation stuff from taking hold.
So that’s been done several times with several taxidermied variants established in different cultures. One outcome of the modern globalism is that when questioning people examine these types of questions, and peer about looking for answers, they encounter exactly what you did: “Well, shit, we’ve got Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Shintoism, Islam, not to mention what looks like several hundred tiny little sects and faiths all claiming to be addressing this stuff, and they’re all over the place, claiming totally different truths that they say are absolute certain about. They can’t ALL be right, they contradict each other. And I don’t see any reason to embrace the one I’m most surrounded by in my local culture now that I see all these others and all of their true-believer lemmings. I’m discarding them all and I’ll see what I can figure out on my own!”
The individual doing so may actually reach a lot of the same insights that have formed the nucleus of theistic thought over the millennia, but may not use any theistic language to express it. There’s no reason that they would, unless they see some link between their own realizations and insights of theistic people from the past.
That raises the question of why people who went off to do their own thinking would have been any more likely to embrace theistic terminology.
I’m under the impression that within each establishment religion were narrow opportunities — available only to the select few educated literate people who were being exposed to abstract thinking and complex philosophical concepts — to sit with others and read the theological disputatons. The kind of stuff that often gets dismissed as ivory tower fools discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. A lot of it is, and was, just more bullshit, but by its very nature it is written by people doing their own thinking, not by sheeplike blind believing followers. They would stare at the mass of old dead insights and laquered bullshit that constitutes the orthodox religion of their culture and they would try to make some semblance of sense of it, and probably some of the result should be considered to be their own invention, while some other portions would actually coincide with what some previous generations had come up with in addressing the same questions and topic areas. Then the stuff that they had written would be considered a part of Christianity or a part of Judaism or whatever. May not make it into the Bible as a new chapter but it gets bandied around among the more intellectual folks. And it has a gentle shaping effect on what is regarded as the insights and truths of the religion.
So some of us when we do our own thinking actually have these “aha!” clicks of recognition that we aren’t reaching conclusions that no one has gotten to before, but that elements of them have been present within the sprawling edifices of what’s been called “religion” and “God” for all these eons. Scattered among the laquered bullshit.
I do think it is important to realize that the validity of a person’s own insights are not in any way dependent on having that recognition. That’s why it’s stupid and shortsighted of theistic people to look down their nose at atheistic thinkers.