The Concept Of Being "God Fearing"

[Dino Velvet]

This is one of the reasons to me organized religion is such BS having to do more with man controlling man instead of honoring God. I myself was born a Christian and think Jesus is a neat fella that could be God. Who knows? I was born in America from parents that were Christian so I hope that brings me good luck. Wonder what the odds in Vegas are.

Anyway, I have people in my family that are so proud to be "God Fearing". Proud of being proud of it. But, what is love and why fear someone that loves you like God? Make it sound like God is wearing a wifebeater lying in wait for us at the Pearly Gates to push us down the staircase of condemnation. That's no loving God. That sounds more like the Satan character you made up just in case we don't fear God enough. Kiss the bunny between the ears because I have nothing but scorn for you.

http://thepovertydiet.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/rabbit-ear-pockets.jpg

[dderek123]

Have you ever seen Religulous with Bill Maher? It's a pretty funny documentary about how silly organized religion is.

[Dino Velvet]

I haven't. I've seen some clips that were funny. From what I saw he looks fairly even handed in his bashing. Fine by me. I'll check it out if it comes on the DirecTV.

[martin48]

All very confusing - why fear a deity that is "loving" and "forgiving"? "God fearing" in its original meaning "respecting God". Words change meaning, like "Exception that proves a rule" - where "prove" originally meant "to test".



'When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.'

[Stavros]

There is an argument that the first people to be described as 'God fearing' were those people who did not convert to Judaism but believed in the same One God as Moses and those who accepted Mosaic law as fundamental to the practice of being a Jew. This fringe group is of some importance because they did not convert to Judaism being opposed to circumcision, strict observance of the Sabbath, and the dietary laws that were developed by 'formal Jews'. Indeed I am not sure why they are called Jews as there is evidence that by origin they were Greek, or part of the Greek civilisation as it spread across the Eastern Mediterranean, in much the same way that the word 'Amen' is derived from the name of an Egyptian god Amoun, where one notes the influence of Ancient Egypt on the same region. The relevance to Christianity is that this marginal group of 'God fearing' people became some of the first of Paul's converts precisely because Christianity did not impose the same regulations on its believers and therefore made it easier to become part of a religious community without having to be circumcised, and so on. However, it seems to me that although Judaism expects its believers to both fear and love God, there is a greater emphasis on love in Christianity, and this may have been why the 'God fearing' people as a distinct community seem to disappear from the historical record.

However, as religions have developed they have become rule-based institutions which monitor human behaviour and by doing so offer moral judgement where such judgement may appear to believers to have permanent, that is, eternal consequences. For such moral judgements to have any effect, the institute requires believers to accept what the religious laws say without question. If someone believes that there is a God, that this God has absolute power and absolute and permanent awareness of who you are and what you do, then this power is awesome indeed. And by claiming to be representatives of this terrifying power, priests in turn acquire enormous prestige in society.
From an anthropological perspective, one can see that we are dealing with the means whereby a 'state of nature' in which there are no laws or constraints on human behavior, can be replaced by a 'state of government' which offers people a social framework in which a consensus on behaviour maintains social peace in which to produce the goods and services that make living tolerable in good times and bad times, where agriculture is the primary mode of subsistence. The role that religion plays in these societies is religious where religion acts as the principal means through which people understand why they are alive, the purpose they have in living, and the values attached to that. It was in one form science, art and politics offering physical, intellectual and spiritual comfort to all.

To fear God in this context, was a warning not to break the rules; and because on earth those rules were imposed by other men with a special status -priests- the institutional power of the Church (broadly defined to accommodate the three monotheist religions) was seen as a benefit to human society, and to be excommunicated from society was therefore a disaster for an individual who chose to be different. Of the three religions, Christianity is assumed to be more forgiving and flexible, where Judaism in its formal presentation and Islam are both unforgiving and brutal. The excommunication of the philosopher Spinoza is worth reading about as an example of the harsh conditions imposed by the Jews of Amsterdam at that time, it forced Spinoza out of the city for a while, and while he returned the only means of living he had was from the generosity of friends, some private teaching, and the grinding of lenses whose dust might have contributed to his death. The writ against him is one example of the means whereby a religious institution which claims the authority of God can exercise its punishment. I feel these days that unless one is a believer, these judgements are hysterical and worthless, but to believers they must cause great anxiety, and thereby induce obedience to the community as part of the wider obedience to God. Or else.

The writ against Spinoza (Amsterdam 1656):
The Lords of the ma'amad, having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavord by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of the matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the presence of the honorable chachamin, they have decided, with their consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of all the Holy Congregation, in front of these holy Scrolls with the six-hundred-and-thirteen precepts which are written therein, with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the boys, and with all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who cleave unto the Lord God are all alive this day. We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinoza#Expulsion_from_the_Jewish_religious_commun ity

[trish]

By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God...
Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor...but if you want to lie about what you know to be decreed by angels or what consents God gave you, just go ahead and lie, God will look the other way.

I've always found the dishonesty of the fervently faithful absolutely stunning. Is it a lack of intellectual integrity, or just outright lying? Did those who condemned Spinoza actually believe they knew what angels decreed and that they had God's consent on this particular excommunication, or were they wolves in sheep's clothing merely preserving the powers of their office by shunning those who proposed opinions that undermined their power?

[Ben in LA]

Thou shalt not kill...except for that one time mass murder was committed with a flood.

[Dino Velvet]

Thou shalt not kill...except for that one time mass murder was committed with a flood.

My aunt from Texas was over and I was talking to her. My kin over there take The Bible pretty literally. I asked her, "How did Noah live over 900 years?" She paused then gave a long "Weeeeeeeeeellllllllllllllllllllllllll...", which gives her time to think of a lie if she can stretch that one word out long enough. Then she finished by saying, "People back then just lived lo'onger." Trying not to laugh I shrug it off by saying, "I guess they had better drugs back then." I will admit her faith is unflappable. Her logic is like Swiss Cheese though.

[Dino Velvet]

There is an argument that the first people to be described as 'God fearing' were those people who did not convert to Judaism but believed in the same One God as Moses and those who accepted Mosaic law as fundamental to the practice of being a Jew. This fringe group is of some importance because they did not convert to Judaism being opposed to circumcision, strict observance of the Sabbath, and the dietary laws that were developed by 'formal Jews'. Indeed I am not sure why they are called Jews as there is evidence that by origin they were Greek, or part of the Greek civilisation as it spread across the Eastern Mediterranean, in much the same way that the word 'Amen' is derived from the name of an Egyptian god Amoun, where one notes the influence of Ancient Egypt on the same region. The relevance to Christianity is that this marginal group of 'God fearing' people became some of the first of Paul's converts precisely because Christianity did not impose the same regulations on its believers and therefore made it easier to become part of a religious community without having to be circumcised, and so on. However, it seems to me that although Judaism expects its believers to both fear and love God, there is a greater emphasis on love in Christianity, and this may have been why the 'God fearing' people as a distinct community seem to disappear from the historical record.

However, as religions have developed they have become rule-based institutions which monitor human behaviour and by doing so offer moral judgement where such judgement may appear to believers to have permanent, that is, eternal consequences. For such moral judgements to have any effect, the institute requires believers to accept what the religious laws say without question. If someone believes that there is a God, that this God has absolute power and absolute and permanent awareness of who you are and what you do, then this power is awesome indeed. And by claiming to be representatives of this terrifying power, priests in turn acquire enormous prestige in society.
From an anthropological perspective, one can see that we are dealing with the means whereby a 'state of nature' in which there are no laws or constraints on human behavior, can be replaced by a 'state of government' which offers people a social framework in which a consensus on behaviour maintains social peace in which to produce the goods and services that make living tolerable in good times and bad times, where agriculture is the primary mode of subsistence. The role that religion plays in these societies is religious where religion acts as the principal means through which people understand why they are alive, the purpose they have in living, and the values attached to that. It was in one form science, art and politics offering physical, intellectual and spiritual comfort to all.

To fear God in this context, was a warning not to break the rules; and because on earth those rules were imposed by other men with a special status -priests- the institutional power of the Church (broadly defined to accommodate the three monotheist religions) was seen as a benefit to human society, and to be excommunicated from society was therefore a disaster for an individual who chose to be different. Of the three religions, Christianity is assumed to be more forgiving and flexible, where Judaism in its formal presentation and Islam are both unforgiving and brutal. The excommunication of the philosopher Spinoza is worth reading about as an example of the harsh conditions imposed by the Jews of Amsterdam at that time, it forced Spinoza out of the city for a while, and while he returned the only means of living he had was from the generosity of friends, some private teaching, and the grinding of lenses whose dust might have contributed to his death. The writ against him is one example of the means whereby a religious institution which claims the authority of God can exercise its punishment. I feel these days that unless one is a believer, these judgements are hysterical and worthless, but to believers they must cause great anxiety, and thereby induce obedience to the community as part of the wider obedience to God. Or else.

The writ against Spinoza (Amsterdam 1656):
The Lords of the ma'amad, having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavord by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of the matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the presence of the honorable chachamin, they have decided, with their consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of all the Holy Congregation, in front of these holy Scrolls with the six-hundred-and-thirteen precepts which are written therein, with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the boys, and with all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who cleave unto the Lord God are all alive this day. We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinoza#Expulsion_from_the_Jewish_religious_commun ity

Thanks buddy. Always appreciated.

[trish]

Methus'lah lived nine hundred years,
Methus'lah lived nine hundred years,
But who calls dat livin'
When no gal will give in
To no man what's nine hundred years ?

It Ain't Necessarily So -- Cab Calloway - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBOgH5f36cQ)

[sukumvit boy]

"Common sense is not so common."
"As long as people believe in absurdities , they will continue to commit atrocities."
Voltaire

[robertlouis]

Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor...but if you want to lie about what you know to be decreed by angels or what consents God gave you, just go ahead and lie, God will look the other way.

I've always found the dishonesty of the fervently faithful absolutely stunning. Is it a lack of intellectual integrity, or just outright lying? Did those who condemned Spinoza actually believe they knew what angels decreed and that they had God's consent on this particular excommunication, or were they wolves in sheep's clothing merely preserving the powers of their office by shunning those who proposed opinions that undermined their power?


I don't fear God, but I'm scared shitless by most of those who claim to be doing his work.

Or her work. Who cares? :whistle:

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, then religion is the last refuge of the hypocrite, bigot and demagogue.

[Dino Velvet]

then religion is the last refuge of the hypocrite, bigot and demagogue.

Despite the differences, that's the one thing all religions seem to have in have in common.

[robertlouis]

Despite the differences, that's the one thing all religions seem to have in have in common.

I'd make an honourable exception for the Quakers. If I did believe in God, I would be a Quaker. No intercession by a priest, no hierarchy, no bullshit.

[broncofan]

A while back I read a few chapters of one of Spinoza's treatises. I found his explanations and writing clear and sensible. There were a number of good quotations about the nature of religion that echo doubts many people have but aren't able to put into words. I found this quote of his that I like. He was also a keen observer of people's behavior and from what I remember was able to put into words how certain devoutly religious people are able rationalize their views without regard to contradiction by external events. Here's a quote that sort of points out that it is no coincidence that we assume that God shares all of our essential features.

When you say that if I deny, that the operations of seeing, hearing, attending, and wishing can be ascribed to God, or that they exist in Him in any eminent fashion, you do not know what sort of God mine is; I suspect that you believe there is no greater perfection than such as can be explained by the aforesaid attributes. I am not astonished; for I believe that, if a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped.

[Stavros]

My aunt from Texas was over and I was talking to her. My kin over there take The Bible pretty literally. I asked her, "How did Noah live over 900 years?" She paused then gave a long "Weeeeeeeeeellllllllllllllllllllllllll...", which gives her time to think of a lie if she can stretch that one word out long enough. Then she finished by saying, "People back then just lived lo'onger." Trying not to laugh I shrug it off by saying, "I guess they had better drugs back then." I will admit her faith is unflappable. Her logic is like Swiss Cheese though.

The explanation for the ages of Noah and Methusaleh can be explained rationally, indeed most aspects of religion in its textual forms can be rationally explained, not least because they were created by men (and it seems mostly to be men).

The original accounts of Noah, for example, were written on clay tablets in the Sumerian period and used a pictographic sign to denote numbers, with the ages of people drawn from their tax records. The flood in the Noah story may have been a river flood around 2900BC when Noah was 48. Re-calculating the Sumerian originals and then the mis-translations that were handed down through the Babylonian to the more modern Greek translations of these ancient texts, you find that Methusaleh fathered children in his teens and twenties and both Noah and Methusaleh lived into their 80s. It is quite simply a confusion that has developed over the mistranslation of sign-values from Sumer to other cultures. These signs are like Roman numerals, so I wonder how easy it is for people to translate XCVII?
Put another way, God had nothing to do with it.
There is an explanation here:
http://www.noahs-ark-flood.com/ages.htm

[Stavros]

Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor...but if you want to lie about what you know to be decreed by angels or what consents God gave you, just go ahead and lie, God will look the other way.

I've always found the dishonesty of the fervently faithful absolutely stunning. Is it a lack of intellectual integrity, or just outright lying? Did those who condemned Spinoza actually believe they knew what angels decreed and that they had God's consent on this particular excommunication, or were they wolves in sheep's clothing merely preserving the powers of their office by shunning those who proposed opinions that undermined their power?

I have emboldened that part of your post which I think explains the writ to perfection. It can be explained by the need for rules as a means of maintaining social order, and that in itself is not a bad thing, but clearly if someone breaks those rules there will be consequences: the question is how damaging rule-breaking is because it doesn't always follow that social change which begins by breaking old rules will destroy society. The interesting problem here is whether or not religions grow and adapt -I think they do- or remain so stuck in their 'original' form as to become fossilized, or die out.

[trish]

The interesting problem here is whether or not religions grow and adapt -I think they do- or remain so stuck in their 'original' form as to become fossilized, or die out. I agree. Some die out while others adapt and evolve, which is why I think, for good or ill, there will always be religions flourishing among us.

[robertlouis]

I agree. Some die out while others adapt and evolve, which is why I think, for good or ill, there will always be religions flourishing among us.

Very true. All religions throughout history, by their very nature, start off small and have been regarded as marginal cults until they gain traction and, of course, political muscle. There, as they say, is the rub.

Who knows which messianic survivalist nutjob in Montana is going to be the next jesus?

[Stavros]

None of which actually explains the religious perspectives that so many people have and have had, which apparently they need to have, and in which they often place greater faith than, say, politics. There are several men around the world who claim to be Jesus; Ghulam Ahmad was foolish enough to declare himself a successor to Muhammad yet the ancient religions that have survived are distinct from modern fads which offer neither a coherent explanation of the world nor a moral code to live by, Scientology in this respect is barely respectable as a form of psychotherapy. What people have difficulty in doing is separating the religious from the political where activists and states have succesfully warped the universal message into a particular ideology; it sounds like a cop-out to many these days but I think it is true.

[trish]

People have terrible needs and deep resentments. They want to live in a world that's fair and where justice prevails, at least insofar as it applies to them. When they perceive the world around them is not such a place, they imagine things will even out on a cosmic scale.

Religions pretend to tell us how Divine essences prefer us to live, what is moral behavior and what is immoral. Religions pronounce laws on every type of human action, from what we shouldn't eat to who needs to be stoned (Pass the joint Dino). It's not at all surprising that religion would press its views on politicians whose job it is to make law. This will always be the case.

[robertlouis]

What people have difficulty in doing is separating the religious from the political where activists and states have succesfully warped the universal message into a particular ideology; it sounds like a cop-out to many these days but I think it is true.

I agree completely. It's also why, albeit an atheist, I have absolute respect for the Quakers. Their independence of mind and spirit is something that other religions should emulate, to the general good.

[yosi]

People have terrible needs and deep resentments. They want to live in a world that's fair and where justice prevails, at least insofar as it applies to them. When they perceive the world around them is not such a place, they imagine things will even out on a cosmic scale.

Religions pretend to tell us how Divine essences prefer us to live, what is moral behavior and what is immoral. Religions pronounce laws on every type of human action, from what we shouldn't eat to who needs to be stoned (Pass the joint Dino). It's not at all surprising that religion would press its views on politicians whose job it is to make law. This will always be the case.

Poeple have a terrible need to be on the RIGHT side ,and to believe that all others who think and believe otherwise are Wrong .

that brings the question: what kind of god is it , to give special red phones all over the world and whisper in the ears those "chosen ones" : you are right , everyone else is wrong?

this god certainly needs a shrink ASAP.

[Stavros]

People have terrible needs and deep resentments. They want to live in a world that's fair and where justice prevails, at least insofar as it applies to them. When they perceive the world around them is not such a place, they imagine things will even out on a cosmic scale.

Religions pretend to tell us how Divine essences prefer us to live, what is moral behavior and what is immoral. Religions pronounce laws on every type of human action, from what we shouldn't eat to who needs to be stoned (Pass the joint Dino). It's not at all surprising that religion would press its views on politicians whose job it is to make law. This will always be the case.

Although I think some people need the comfort that a religious belief provides them, for example to confirm that death is not the end and that there is some kind of eternal rest, I think it is also important to recognise the link between religion and science in the ancient world. These days we know enough about the chemicals in food to prevent people eating infected products, although even in our modern world there are still food-borne diseases.

But consider: if you live in a society where God not only exists but God as absolute power informs social relations giving great importance to a priesthood, or witch-doctors for that matter, a prohibition on the consumption of pork, to take one example, is not just a moral law, it is a health and safety provision if rinderpest is endemic in that region.

The moral repugnance to same-sex relations, infidelity and abortion may be a response to a threat to the survival of the group, dealt with through the creation of rules whose primary function is to breed, given that before the advent of modern medicine and even after that and in some places today infant mortality is higher than we have become used to.

An anthropologist visiting the Andaman Islands (not Radcliffe-Brown I can't recall his name but I read a book on this some years ago) noted how common anal sex was among men, and concluded that it was both an act of pleasure and an alternative to masturbation which was and is in some societies (in Papua New Guinea) considered a waste of semen. It may be that in ancient societies anal sex and fellatio among men and boys was more common than we would like to believe, though the practices of the Greeks are reasonably well known. Could there also have been infections which enabled the priesthood to impose a ban on same-sex relations again, as a health and safety issue?

The point is that other than spiritual matters, there may often be a practical reason why in the past the wrath of God was invoked to amend human behaviour, where these days we can rely on rationality and clinical evidence...

[trish]

The anger and the beneficence of Gods have been invoked to explain weather, volcanic activity, crop yields, plagues, wars, the abundance of game or lack thereof, the ability to score a touchdown etc. One can appease the Gods with sacrifice, or prayer; as long as you do your best to keep their laws. But if your neighbor is a homosexual, your whole town might get torn up by a tornado...so says Pat Robertson.

But these are not examples of religion adapting. Religions that warned against the eating of pig might have had some adaptive value by preventing the spread of trichinosis. Would they also they would have been more adaptive by recommending pig be well cooked?

At one time, it was thought that religion could explain the workings of the physical world. This is no longer the case. Religion has been confined to the moral and the spiritual. Religions that continue to insist the world is just a few thousand years old, or that blastocysts have souls are not adaptive. In spite of that, I think even these maladaptive attributes of religion will survive into the future. How so? Because hypocrisy is adaptive. One can be against vaccinations and benefit because others in your community are vaccinated. One can be against the findings of science and still benefit from its discoveries.

[Stavros]

The anger and the beneficence of Gods have been invoked to explain weather, volcanic activity, crop yields, plagues, wars, the abundance of game or lack thereof, the ability to score a touchdown etc. One can appease the Gods with sacrifice, or prayer; as long as you do your best to keep their laws. But if your neighbor is a homosexual, your whole town might get torn up by a tornado...so says Pat Robertson.

But these are not examples of religion adapting. Religions that warned against the eating of pig might have had some adaptive value by preventing the spread of trichinosis. Would they also they would have been more adaptive by recommending pig be well cooked?

At one time, it was thought that religion could explain the workings of the physical world. This is no longer the case. Religion has been confined to the moral and the spiritual. Religions that continue to insist the world is just a few thousand years old, or that blastocysts have souls are not adaptive. In spite of that, I think even these maladaptive attributes of religion will survive into the future. How so? Because hypocrisy is adaptive. One can be against vaccinations and benefit because others in your community are vaccinated. One can be against the findings of science and still benefit from its discoveries.

It is only hypocrisy if you believe that those people who oppose vaccination for religious reasons are behaviing in a deliberately irrational manner, to them it is in fact a rational response to the options as they see them. That doesn't make them right, but it does mean that explaining the benefits of vaccination to them is going to be a challenge. The benefits of contraception to the Philippines may have produced a different outcome if the Roman Catholic church for decades had not opposed it.

What you have indicated is the way in which knowledge has been compartmentalised, with scientific disciplines taking what was once an holistic view of life on earth and the cosmos, and rationalising each component -chemistry, physics, medicine, and so on. My point was that until this fragmentation of knowledge, religion was integral to the development of science -the development of mathematics was not the work of atheists, but religious men and women, and its purpose at one time was to use numbers to understand the laws of God, just as the ancient Egyptians used mathematics to design pyramids in which chambers would have direct access to the stars at specific times of the year, on the assumption that humans were directly linked to the cosmos. It may look absurd in the modern world, and people in the modern world can look and sound absurd when they attribute physical phenomena to God or the gods when there is a rational explanation at hand, but this doesn't mean rationality and religion are mutually exclusive.

[trish]

...What you have indicated is the way in which knowledge has been compartmentalised, with scientific disciplines taking what was once an holistic view of life on earth and the cosmos, and rationalising each component -chemistry, physics, medicine, and so on. My point was that until this fragmentation of knowledge, religion was integral to the development of science -the development of mathematics was not the work of atheists, but religious men and women, and its purpose at one time was to use numbers to understand the laws of God, just as the ancient Egyptians used mathematics to design pyramids in which chambers would have direct access to the stars at specific times of the year, on the assumption that humans were directly linked to the cosmos. It may look absurd in the modern world, and people in the modern world can look and sound absurd when they attribute physical phenomena to God or the gods when there is a rational explanation at hand, but this doesn't mean rationality and religion are mutually exclusive.Religion compartmentalized the world into good and evil, godly and ungodly, terrestrial and celestial etc. Until Newton, it was thought the Heavenly spheres operated in accordance to a higher set of rules than the mere terrestrial. That the same force that made things fall on Earth was the very force that moved the planets was a break from religious dogma and a unification, not a compartmentalization. Evolution too is an example of an astounding unification that had to fight against the constraints of religious thought. Numerology is not precursor to number theory; accounting perhaps, but not numerology.

[Stavros]

The strength and weakness of religion is its holistic perspective of life and death and the rest, good and evil are not separate compartments but conditions which inform each other so you are wrong about that. The strength for believers is the feeling that one is part of a complete system in which it is not possible to get lost or be forgotten; the weakness is that codes of behaviour designed in one millenium may not 'fit' another, that explanations of existence which made sense in say, 500 BCE, make no sense in 2010. If a religion is flexible enough to accommodate change, as you agree, it survives in some form. My point about science is that separate disciplines have emerged in which people specialise, I think I was probably wrong to suggest science as a whole is not holistic, but I think you understand how some think their own niche is privileged over others, that Biology is cutting edge where chemistry is dull or vice versa. Aristotle was both a natural scientists and a philosopher, Leonardo da Vinci a scientist and an artist, and the 19th century provides many examples of people ranging across scientific and non-scientific disciplines, your illustrious Benjamin Franklin being one of them. And you seem to have a problem with mathematics, which is surely more than just 'numerology'?

[buttslinger]

When we were kids, one day after school my brother had gotten some explosive, and my friend's older brother devised a cannon of sorts in his back yard, a five foot piece of large drain pipe sunk into the ground, packed with the explosive powder, some rags, and then loaded with metal grapeshot: nuts, bolts, screws, any little metal stuff we could find. It was buried halfway down into the ground because nobody was sure if the whole thing wouldn't blow up like a large pipe bomb. Huey lit the fuse and all of the kids in the neighborhood who had gathered to witness this coolest of cool events ran to the farthest limits of the backyard fence.
As we were all anxiously and quietly waiting while the fuse sizzled down to zero hour, I heard the distant sound of car tires crunching asphalt in the front yard, and Dave, who had the only real beeline view of the driveway, said


"Daddy's home"

KABOOM!!!!

This is what's meant by God Fearing.

[trish]

My point about science is that separate disciplines have emerged in which people specialize, I think I was probably wrong to suggest science as a whole is not holistic, but I think you understand how some think their own niche is privileged over others, that Biology is cutting edge where chemistry is dull or vice versa.

In science people take degrees in “specialties,” like Biology, or even Evolutionary Biology. One quickly finds that understanding Evolutionary Biology requires an understanding of Zoology, Paleontology, Geology, Plate Tectonics, Population Genetics, Molecular Biology, Theory of Radioactive Isotopes, Chemistry of Gene Expression, Quantum Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics, Physics, Calculus, Probability, Statistics, etc.

Perhaps two hundred years ago Biology, Chemistry and Physics were perceived as having distinct and separate interests. Today they still have different aims and directions but they’ve have grown into one textured weave. This is not only the case with Biology, Chemistry and Physics but all of science. Particle physicists depend on input from Cosmologists and vice versa.

From the outside perhaps science looks like it’s divided into ever schisming sects that grow in number and that each practitioner grows more and more isolated, able to communicate only with members of her own cult. This picture couldn’t be further from the truth. True, a scientist today has much more to learn to reach the point to where she can constructively contribute to the ongoing discussion; but what she has to learn covers a broad array of interconnecting topics. This is to be expected. As we gain knowledge, the lines that were once perceived as boundaries grow together and overlap. Then when old problems are solved, different researchers pick new and different directions to explore. But no one area stands alone without support from the rest.

Yes, one runs across examples of team pride. Weinberg might write a book wherein he suggests all scientific knowledge ought to be reducible to a few principles of physics. And a biologist might protest in a letter to the NYC Book Reviews. But even this turns out to be an intelligent cross-specialty discussion of interest to the general culture. Moreover, it’s a discussion of just how holistic science might or might not turn out to be.

My domestic partner was raised Catholic. A few weeks before Christmas he received in the mail a pamphlet published by a local non-denominational (though Protestant) Church denouncing Catholics as idolators who worship the wafer-god. Should I take this to be a bit a razzing from a momentarily overzealous member of the fundamentalist team, or do the multitude of sects to be found within the various religions represent an irreducible compartmentalization of religious thought?

[Stavros]

Should I take this to be a bit a razzing from a momentarily overzealous member of the fundamentalist team, or do the multitude of sects to be found within the various religions represent an irreducible compartmentalization of religious thought?

Sounds like a fringe element in science disputing the evidence on climate change....

[trish]

Should I take this to be a bit a razzing from a momentarily overzealous member of the fundamentalist team, or do the multitude of sects to be found within the various religions represent an irreducible compartmentalization of religious thought?

Sounds like a fringe element in science disputing the evidence on climate change....
Touche'. But even those climatologists who seriously dissent from the consensus of anthropogenic origin argues (perhaps incorrectly) from the basic principles of physics, atmospheric chemistry etc. The anthropogenic origins of terrestrial energy imbalance is not a dispute about basic principles but about higher level effects of those principles, and the interpretation of data and models.

To my mind the differences between Gnostics, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholics, Baptists, Charismatics, Pentecostals, Presbyterian, Mormonism etc. seem rather basic, at least it seemed that way to the original practitioners who felt the need to separate from the branch off which they schismed.

Do you really think the various sects of Christianity cohere in the same way as the various disciplines of science.

[Stavros]

The strength of science is that is based on rational thought backed up by evidence, and that with patient explanations most people can understand what science tries to do, even if in some cases the explanations seem too complex or obscure. The weakness in science is that in some cases the same evidence is used to produce contrary explanations, and that some discoveries and developments of science have produced weapons that can destroy the planet ten times over, assuming we can agree that is a negative outcome of positive action. I recall an article that Jeremy Bernstein wrote about the reactions of the nuclear scientists working on the Manhattan Project to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they were shaken to their core. I don't think they ever thought their work would result in such destruction.

Christianity does not speak with one voice because it developed in so many different places after originating in a small segment of the Roman Empire, something it shares with most religions. It might be possible to isolate and identify the key principles of Christianity, but I doubt there would be universal agreement on them among Christians. It may therefore be pointless in drawing attention to a standard feature of religion as if it were exceptional, much as there are liberal and orthodox Jews, Muslims who claim to be Sunna or Shi'a, not to mention the differences between Buddhists in India, Thailand and Japan.

The irony, if there is one, of an American drawing attention to this, is that it is precisely this freedom to be different that was part of the motivation for 'Pilgrims' to leave Europe and settle in North America. Just as the settlers rejected the Church of Rome or indeed, any established church, so in America they were free to create their own churches, and they have. Somewhere in de Tocqueville's study of America he comments on how Christian a county he feels the US is, and it is intriguing that the USA has been -and continues to be- one of the most exciting places in which to be a scientist, yet contains within it a substantial number of people, around 30% who think evolution is rubbish and that everything we see is part of 'God's design'; and as we have discussed before I think, it would probably be impossible for a man or woman who does not believe in God to be elected President.

Perhaps it is this diversity which makes life interesting; perhaps it would be better if in the case of much religion, and some science, it was not also such a vexatious challenge.

[trish]

The strength of science is that is based on rational thought backed up by evidence, and that with patient explanations most people can understand what science tries to do, even if in some cases the explanations seem too complex or obscure. The weakness in science is that in some cases the same evidence is used to produce contrary explanations, and that some discoveries and developments of science have produced weapons that can destroy the planet ten times over, assuming we can agree that is a negative outcome of positive action. I recall an article that Jeremy Bernstein wrote about the reactions of the nuclear scientists working on the Manhattan Project to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they were shaken to their core. I don't think they ever thought their work would result in such destruction.


I think the phenomena of contrary explanations is not peculiar to science, nor even as frequent in science as perhaps in other areas of inquiry. Contradiction, is a negative when it fails to inspire honest resolution. A couple years ago scientist working on OPERA suggested their work showed neutrinos could travel faster than light, contrary to special relativity. When a flaw was uncovered in the analysis of the OPERA data, the contradiction was resolved. On the other hand, the disagreements between General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory have persisted for several decades. It’s clear to physicists that one or both of these theories will eventually have to be modified before the conflicts can be resolved. It’s generally considered to be an exciting time to be working in either or both of these areas.

That science has produced weapons of unfathomable destruction is an undeniably Faustian aspect of real knowledge (of how the physical world works). It is a strong argument that such knowledge shouldn’t be pursued, or if it is, that is should be regulated in some fashion.

If there were such a thing as real knowledge of how religio-metaphysical things like souls, angels, demons and gods worked, I can’t help but think such knowledge might be equally dangerous.


Christianity does not speak with one voice because it developed in so many different places after originating in a small segment of the Roman Empire, something it shares with most religions. It might be possible to isolate and identify the key principles of Christianity, but I doubt there would be universal agreement on them among Christians. It may therefore be pointless in drawing attention to a standard feature of religion as if it were exceptional, much as there are liberal and orthodox Jews, Muslims who claim to be Sunna or Shi'a, not to mention the differences between Buddhists in India, Thailand and Japan.

I doubt that the rapid diversification in beliefs, creeds and practices is due entirely to the rapid spread of Christianity into all parts of the globe. The spread of science since Newton was probably even more rapid. It seems to me that Christianity, and religion, lacks a real desire to confront contradictory religious believes and resolve them honestly. Is the Eucharist a metaphor for Christ’s body, Christ’s body in substance or Christ’s body in essence? Does the soul enter the egg at the moment of conception, or not? Or are these questions nonsense? Is killing a human being abhorrent in the eyes of God or not? Will our soldier’s spend eternity in Hell? Purgatory? Is God three entities, five or one? All questions worth starting a new Church over. Why is there no progress on religious issues? I would contend it’s because there’s no substance there to agree upon.




The irony, if there is one, of an American drawing attention to this, is that it is precisely this freedom to be different that was part of the motivation for 'Pilgrims' to leave Europe and settle in North America. Just as the settlers rejected the Church of Rome or indeed, any established church, so in America they were free to create their own churches, and they have. Somewhere in de Tocqueville's study of America he comments on how Christian a county he feels the US is, and it is intriguing that the USA has been -and continues to be- one of the most exciting places in which to be a scientist, yet contains within it a substantial number of people, around 30% who think evolution is rubbish and that everything we see is part of 'God's design'; and as we have discussed before I think, it would probably be impossible for a man or woman who does not believe in God to be elected President.

Perhaps it is this diversity which makes life interesting; perhaps it would be better if in the case of much religion, and some science, it was not also such a vexatious challenge.

It’s true that religious dissenters flocked to America in droves for the promise of religious freedom. I don’t think it was the threat of excommunication that pushed them across the waters to the colonies. After all, once they got here they essentially excommunicated themselves from the old religions and started their own. It was the fear of torture and death. Of course we burned witches in the Americas as well, but that was before the First Amendment. Now we have all manner of sects, each one crazier than the last.

Indeed, the U.S. is a wonderful chaos. I don’t know if that’s a strength or not.

I do enjoy our discussions, Stavros. I’ve been told on a number of occasions that I can be a bit annoying at times...perhaps they meant vexatious. If so I apologize. I’ve got a point of view and a argumentative gene embedded somewhere in my code. Have a good one.

[Stavros]

I agree with the points you make about science. If there are ways in which religions adapt, it might be found in the connection between core beliefs and social change. The ancient prohibitions against abortion, masturbation, homosexuality, marital fidelity etc have been a significant challenge to organised Christianity and as we see today there is a major problem with same-sex marriages even if the same churches -the Anglican and the Roman Catholic, have softened their attitude towards homosexuality and divorce, but not abortion. Judaism I think has also moderated its attachment to ancient rules, I don't believe adulterers are stoned to death, if they ever were, and I am not even sure if the 'ultra-religious' Orthodox sects believe stoning a just punishment (although in Israel youths are known to throw stones at cars driving through their neighbourhood on the Sabbath but that is hardly on the same level).

So, institutionally, change is possible, but it is not without controversy because either the scriptures mean one thing, or they can be interpreted to mean anything. This then leads to the problem that by adapting to modern behaviour, Christianity ceases to be what it is supposed to be and cannot be called Christianity; it becomes a moral supermarket, it replaces the principles of the gospel with the principles of marketing in order to retain the loyalty of its customers.

However I do think it is possible for this to happen with individuals; the beauty of the privatisation of religion is that you can claim to be a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim without having your beliefs endorsed by a community of believers; orthopraxy is replaced by autonomy. On another level, there are people who for one reason or another experience a crisis in their lives which conversion to a religion resolves, giving them a structure of belief, values, maybe rituals which they did not have before, thereby proving that even if religions are institutionally unable to adapt and change in the way scientific ideas impact society, change can take place at the individual level, and that may be the only way in which these religions can survive, other than through the inculcation of religion in childhood and school.

[dderek123]

http://i.imgur.com/D2ocApk.png

Konrad Von Hochstaden was awarded a statue for being able to suck his own dick.

He once was the Archbishop of Cologne too.


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Rathausturm_K%C3%B6ln_-_Konrad_von_Hochstaden_-_Gerhard_Unmaze_%286143-45%29.jpg.
Konrad von Hochstaden - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_von_Hochstaden)

[dderek123]

http://i.imgur.com/clzZUHl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/FH5RaqK.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/qvq7Zyr.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/xlJS6Zh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/CVFm5wT.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/oL4Gdy8.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ceTKKC5.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/x5LAc5H.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/0dF861w.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/7iM8vm7.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/w7T6LiL.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/2nXV2wP.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/5hiu83U.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rJRFs41.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/OErNBxf.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/sZoKO16.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/H406cER.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ARV2GEz.jpg

[dderek123]

http://i.imgur.com/3OSsZel.jpg

[trish]

It doesn’t require faith in a divine entity or communion with a cosmic being to understand thermodynamics. No such faith is required to understand how the entropy facilitates (rather than obstructs) the chemistry of life. It only requires faith in yourself. Faith that you can do algebra, calculus and elementary physics up to and including atomic theory of matter; all topics of an undergraduate education in science and or engineering. Anyone can do it. You don’t have to be a genius. Just diligent and critical.

This is in fact Jamie’s claim. Her thesis is that belief in the Christian God no longer requires faith in anything other than your own ability to learn mathematics and follow the logic of Tipler’s proof step by step. (That, or you can accept the authority of the mathematicians and physicists who have done so.)

Whether you do this or not depends on how worthwhile you think the project of reading and checking every point of Tipler’s argument will be for you. If you already have the required skills this may be relatively trivial. If not, it can be a years long project.

If the question, “Does belief in the Christian God require faith in God? is not all that important to you, (perhaps because you already have that faith, or perhaps because you already have sound reason to disbelieve), Tipler’s contribution may not require all that much attention on your part. Professional mathematicians still get mail from cranks who claim to have squared the circle, trisected an angle with ruler and compass etc. A quick glance down the page usually lands the communication in the trash in less than two minutes.

What I find curious, is that anyone would believe Tipler’s “proof” without attempting to critically and honestly analyze it in every mathematical detail. A proponent of Tipler who doesn’t give his argument that attention is merely replacing faith in the divine with faith in less than a handful of fringe physicists. Perhaps I understate their predicament: rather they are allowing their faith in the divine to inform and amplify their faith in the omega fringe.

[buttslinger]

There is no before the big bang there is only after. If the light from the sun can travel 90 million miles through space to warm the earth's oceans and spark life, even imagination cannot conceive of the POWER of the entire universe crammed into a space the size of a softball. No time, no space, no edges.

This could be a very good description of GOD. Self evident like a mofo.
Nobody really speaks for God, they point the way.

The Big Boys of Religion say it is your own attachment to the world that blinds you to a God that is standing right before your eyes. The only sin that exists is yours: pride, arrogance, sloth, all the good stuff basically. Even while Jesus spoke of God, the people all wanted to see him do magic tricks like walk on water and raise the dead.

I found a Physics test from high school, I couldn't even understand the answers I wrote!!
But I'm afraid I have to agree that Jamie Michelle's article will not be an amendment to the Bible. But even if you argue that Jamie Michelle is wrong, you cannot argue that she is not smart. The big boys of Cosmology have bitter fights all the time!! I do agree that God has many characteristics of the Mother of all black holes, power beyond your dreams, but I don't think you get there through physics, I think you get there through prayer. Meditation. Breath Control. The non-questioning faith of a child. And even then your chances of success are about the same as becoming an internationally known transsexual porn star. Better than the lottery, though.

I'm just rambling, here, I think discussing God on the internet.........you get what you pay for. ha ha

[trish]

We're all pretty smart when you come down to it. We just have different training, skills, talents and ambitions.

[sukumvit boy]

Good discussion.
From a Zen Buddhist standpoint , I would only add...a bit of humor.

[dderek123]

http://i.imgur.com/f9yrGyy.png

[dderek123]

http://i.imgur.com/98IQIFq.gif?1

[dderek123]

http://i.imgur.com/Xn42VzN.jpg

[martin48]

Thinking of have this tattoo done

[dderek123]

http://i.imgur.com/fl6lHXk.jpg

[dderek123]

http://25.media.tumblr.com/7c8d57a422afb4f5bee2a631d0d61868/tumblr_mkgaikAq7z1s8wd28o1_1280.jpg

[dderek123]

http://i.imgur.com/RH6dcVJ.jpg

[dderek123]

http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2014/03/PG-belief-in-god-03-13-2014-02.png

[sukumvit boy]

That's an interesting graph , dderek123 ,thanks here's the link.
If you click on the Complete Report tab ,on the upper right ,there's a PDF file with an expanded discussion of the findings.
Two countries stand out as clear exceptions to the pattern :China and the US . " Americans are much more likely than their economic counterparts to say that belief in God is essential for morality ,while the Chinese are much less likely to do so.
Although since China is officially atheist , makes me wonder about the methods used to gather the data in China. America is no surprise !

http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/03/13/worldwide-many-see-belief-in-god-as-essential-to-morality/pg-belief-in-god-03-13-2014-02/

[sukumvit boy]

The Moral Instinct.
Some interesting observations by Steven Pinker.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[martin48]

New research shows the Internet could be making Americans lose faith

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/526111/how-the-internet-is-taking-away-americas-religion/#comments

Sure there are lots of reasons, but if you give the masses easy access to porn, this will happen!

[trish]

I have to ask what unafiliated means in this context. I’ve had people tell me they’re unaffiliated when in fact they meant that they go to a non-denominational church (with a coffee shop, a TV room, a game room, a gym, several meeting rooms for various social events etc.); i.e. they’re unaffiliated with any particular denomination, even though they’re Christian, have a distinctly protestant outlook and prefer hanging out with like kind.

Though to be fair, I did lose my official affiliation card at about the same time the internets (a sucking series of evil tubes) lol’d me into the hot pink, frilly world of Hung Angels (you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy). Help! I’m trapped and doomed to eternal fire. I used to be such a nice girl (sob).

[martin48]

Actually this was a pretty crap paper. They selected answers from the General Social Survey (GSS) and did some iffy stats.


RELIG : “What is your religious preference?”
RELIG16 : “In what religion were you raised?”
AGE : Respondent’s age when surveyed.
YEAR : Year of survey.
EDUC : “What is the highest grade in elementary school or high school that you finished and got credit for?”
INCOME : “In which of these groups did your total family income, from all sources, fall last year before taxes, that is?”
SEI : Respondent socioeconomic index (computed by GSS based on re- spondent’s occupation).
SRCBELT : Classification of respondent’s metropolitan statistical area as urban, suburban or rural (coded by GSS based on location of interview and U.S. Census data).
WWWHR : “Not counting e-mail, about how many minutes or hours per week do you use the Web?”
COMPWT : Respondent’s computed sample weight. All statistics re- ported in this paper reflect these weights.

Don't ask me what "religious preference" means! " I would prefer to be a Hindu but I go to the Mormon Church"

Of course, correlation means nothing - an example attached.


Trish - I would not worry. I'm sure that you have brought more people pleasure in your new role. All this will be taken into account on the great day of judgement.

[Stavros]

Ramen, and may the sauce be with you...

From today's Independent:

Pastafarians rejoice as Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is granted permission to register as a religion in Poland
A church that worships an invisible flying spaghetti monster can now apply to be registered as an official religion in Poland, after a 2013 court ruling was overturned on Tuesday. A Warsaw court rejected a ruling by the Regional Administrative Court because the it had not allowed the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) a two-month extension for submitting outstanding documents, Polskie Radio has reported.
A group of Pastafarians who gathered outside the court shouting "pasta" during the hearing on Tuesday welcomed the ruling.
In January, Pastafarian minister Christopher Schaeffer was sworn into the Pomfret New York Town Council this week with a colander on his head throughout the ceremony to represent his unique religious beliefs. As a movement, Pastafarianism parodies orthodox religion and opposes the teaching of creationism and intelligent design. For example, prayers end with the word ‘ramen’ instead of ‘amen’ – a nod to Japanese noodles.
According the FSM's website, the church existed in secrecy until 2005 when the publication of a letter, complete with a drawing of the spaghetti monster that had been sent to a school board in Kansas.
The website insists Pastafarianism is a real religion, whose followers believe that pirates were the original Pastafarians and "were peaceful explorers and it was due to Christian misinformation that they have an image of outcast criminals today."


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/weird-news/pastafarians-rejoice-as-church-of-the-flying-spaghetti-monster-is-granted-permission-to-register-as-a-religion-in-poland-9248689.html

[martin48]

Images of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are everywhere - if you look

[maaarc]

whatever the creative force (god) is - if it exists at all - I don't believe it needs humans to worship it or approve of it - the human created concepts of justice,fairness, etc... perhaps mean nothing to it. it does whatever it wishes to whomever it wishes whenever it wishes cause it can.

[trish]

Quick! We need to influence what it wishes. Let's us bow our heads in obsequious prayer.

[Stavros]

Or make another bowl of pasta...

[trish]

I'll have the marinara sauce please.

[dderek123]

any father ted fans here?

http://i.imgur.com/Dg5hytY.jpg

[joanne_sven]

Little Mark... Fucking the world and his friends.

[joanne_sven]

Interesting FaceBook shit.

[Turlington]

If anyone fell for that, they're idiots.

[martin48]

any father ted fans here?



Father Ted | An Ecumenical Matter - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptd_h0dF7NE)

[dderek123]

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20080502.gif

[martin48]

Tony Perkins: Christians forced to bake cakes for gays like forcing Jews into Nazi ovens



http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/06/tony-perkins-christians-forced-to-bake-cakes-for-gays-like-forcing-jews-into-nazi-ovens/

[dderek123]

Guess he really doesn't like cake.

[Erika1487]

God is dead.......long live the sinner..........Hail Satan!,,,,,

[trish]

Every synthesis requires an antithesis. If the gods are dead, so are the demons. Hate to disappoint but there's just us ordinary mortals...nothing more...though there could've been and still could be less.

[Erika1487]

Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all fours, who, because of his " divine spiritual and intellectual development," has become the most vicious animal of all" Anton Szandor LaVey

[trish]

'Divine spiritual' development' is gibberish. We learn nothing from obscure metaphors. We're animals. We don't need a story book character to represent us as one. We do that pretty well by ourselves.

[Erika1487]

The text I quoted is from the Satanic Bible, it is part of the nine Satanic Statements. It may seem gibberish to you, but it is a corner stone of my beliefs

[Prospero]

Gotta respect peoples beliefs - providing they hurt no one else - even when dreamt up by utter charlatans like Anton Lavey

As John Lennon sang. "Whatever gets you through the night."

[danthepoetman]

....

[Prospero]

Gods and demons are truly alive... in the minds of men... who enact all manner of unspeakable things in their delusions of the divine will

[danthepoetman]

How about this possibility, Prospero? :)

[trish]

I don't believe in an afterlife, or reincarnation. But maybe we can be rebooted...

[buttslinger]

They asked Buddha why he wasted his time trying to get unbelievers with the program, and he said "some will understand"

The Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have lots of blood on their hands, but outside a few flaming suicides, Buddhism has managed to tally a pretty low deathcount. The Amish too. Even the Satanists.

Muhammad said you could be a businessman or soldier and still know the grace of God, as long as you had honor.

Lt. Col. Frank Slade: (scent of a woman) . Now I have come to the crossroads in my life. I always knew what the right path was. Without exception, I knew. But I never took it. You know why? It was too damn hard.

[danthepoetman]

....

[buttslinger]

If the question was: Who would you rather party with: the Amish, the Jews, the Baptists, the Muslims, the Satanists, or the Irish Catholics...I'd probably take the Catholics.

If I had to choose who I'd want to hang with to find God, I'd say the Zen Buddhists.

I was Baptized, but Pat Mattus came up to me after I was dunked, and said "Come on man, let's go"
I said "I don't think I'm done yet"
he said "Yeah, I've already done it, you're through" ..so I took off. It turned out later that I wasn't actually finished, so I'm not sure they'll let me into Heaven when I die.
They said my sister's name wrong when she was Baptized, accident? I don't think so.
In Sunday School they couldn't come down on you like real School, I can't say County School set me up for a Dream Life, maybe I should have spent more time in Sunday School. All that homework I did....I knew it was bullshit!!!

[martin48]

I think reincarnation is making a comeback





I don't believe in an afterlife, or reincarnation. But maybe we can be rebooted...

[danthepoetman]

I think reincarnation is making a comeback

Indeed. It often gets out of fashion, but it never cease to come back... Go figure!

[danthepoetman]

....

[8bit]

i've always understood being "God Fearing" as anti-intellectualism

my interpretation of the first teaching of god and humankind is that adam & eve were banished from the garden of eden by indulging in the temption of fruit -- from the tree of knowledge.

the first lesson is: do not learn, or you will be punished. i've always had to read and learn as to why i was different and i suppose i'd be banished away as well. i only fear not knowing more, and being artificially self-limited by the forced adoration of a supposed god which exhibits the very same sins and flaws humans do.

while its easy to take the atheist approach and that "i'm holier than thou", i have met genuinely good people who are religious. i think they mean well, but have that conflict which tethers their good-will from roaming too far outside the confines and reach of their faith

[trish]

i've always understood being "God Fearing" as anti-intellectualism

my interpretation of the first teaching of god and humankind is that adam & eve were banished from the garden of eden by indulging in the temption of fruit -- from the tree of knowledge.

the first lesson is: do not learn, or you will be punished. i've always had to read and learn as to why i was different and i suppose i'd be banished away as well. i only fear not knowing more, and being artificially self-limited by the forced adoration of a supposed god which exhibits the very same sins and flaws humans do.

while its easy to take the atheist approach and that "i'm holier than thou", i have met genuinely good people who are religious. i think they mean well, but have that conflict which tethers their good-will from roaming too far outside the confines and reach of their faith Nicely done. BTW, welcome to the HA forums :)

[buttslinger]

Welcome aboard 8bitsadollar,
While the Bible does say that GOD told Adam and Eve not to eat from the fruit of his tree, the tree of knowledge, you could make the point that the Bible is a book of knowledge that has been around a long time and has sales numbers that would make many an egocentric author kill himself for.

I personally think most people go to Church for family or neighborhood reasons, as much as an interest in God, little kids are warned to be good or they'll go to hell. I would say "God Fearing" is an admission that there is a whole lot you don't know yet, and that there may be things you are doing wrong now that you're not even aware of, and as a warning to others that they don't know everything either, but they can and should have the wisdom to be conscious of that fact.

I would say true religion is about keeping your eye focused on your personal blind spot, which has absolutely nothing to do with organized religion, but just like in Art, you can look at what other people have done and use it to find your own path forward.

One time I was drunk at 2AM in front of a strip club in the city, when some guy came up and urged me to renounce my life of sin and come join his Church. Then a young black guy walked up crying, he was hooked on crack and he was begging for help. The Church guy got a blank look on his face and walked away. I talked to the kid a bit, but I had nothing to give. Where is Jesus when you need him?

[hung9hung]

:confused:

Well , just wondering if "god fearing" means, living in a way that even God fears??!! ;) :) :P
:banana:
:cheers:

[trish]

If I have to come down there, you kids will be in big trouble.

[timmartin]

My aunt from Texas was over and I was talking to her. My kin over there take The Bible pretty literally. I asked her, "How did Noah live over 900 years?" She paused then gave a long "Weeeeeeeeeellllllllllllllllllllllllll...", which gives her time to think of a lie if she can stretch that one word out long enough. Then she finished by saying, "People back then just lived lo'onger." Trying not to laugh I shrug it off by saying, "I guess they had better drugs back then." I will admit her faith is unflappable. Her logic is like Swiss Cheese though.
Asked my mother about Adam and/or Eve committing incest with their kids so as to propagate the species. I asked her why God would approve such a thing. Her reply is that back then people lived to several hundred years of age.
OK then.

[trish]

Mathus'la lived nine-hundred years.
Mathus'la lived nine-hundred years.
But who'd call that livin'
When no gal'll give in
To no guy whose nine-hundred years?

[sukumvit boy]

Reclusive deity hasn't written a new book in 2000 years.
Satire from "The Onion".
http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=bf78bfbcb73a006625be5e73b&id=8f650aaca7&e=05568b8654

[Stavros]

Reclusive deity hasn't written a new book in 2000 years.
Satire from "The Onion".
http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=bf78bfbcb73a006625be5e73b&id=8f650aaca7&e=05568b8654

"Leading writers, scholars, and publishers gathered this week at Fordham University for a literary conference and panel discussion on God, the widely praised but reclusive deity who has not published a book since His landmark debut 2,000 years ago."

- An odd statement to make given that Muhammad claims that his revelations came from the Angel Gabriel, ie that the Quran is the word of God. I thought everyone knew that (regardless as to whether or not they believe it). The first revelations were received in 610 or thereabouts, but not brought together in a textual fashion and in a definitive version until 650 so that makes it 1,364 years ago...unless...

The conference at Fordham shows no interest in other, non-biblical religions. Following Islam, some might say related to it is the Bahai faith, which also claims that some of its canonical texts are divine revelation. This gives God a more recent entry into publishing, as Bab's Commentary on the Suri'h of Joseph was published in earthly form in 1844 -'Bab' -Siyyid Mirza Ali Muhammad Shirazi (ie a dude called Ali born in Shiraz in Iran)- claimed to be the vanished Imam or Mahdi and thus the man who had 'returned' to earth to lead mankind to salvation, or also that he was the returning John the Baptist, Elijah, and so on. He became known as 'Bab' meaning gate or door to imply that we would pass through him to eternal sunshine. Baha'ullah was a follower and was instrumental in codifying the Bahai 'faith' which now claims to unify all monotheist religions although I have always thought of it as an Islamic heresy. Whatever, that God was a contemporary of Charles Dickens and Honore de Balzac seems lost on the 'scholars of Fordham'.

[martin48]

I think it was a joke!

[Stavros]

You mean there wasn't a conference? Hmmm...still they could at least have widened their brief...

[martin48]

Though God hasn't published for awhile, apparently he does "reveal" himself to believers. I thought we would arrest old men for doing that.




You mean there wasn't a conference? Hmmm...still they could at least have widened their brief...

[fred41]

wow.

[trish]

God's literary output is very uneven, probably due to his use of holy ghost writers.

[WesJohnson]

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. The Greatest George Carlin.... couldn't said it better

[trish]

Little off topic, but I couldn't resist: The 'science' of supply side economics has convinced people that a free market has an invisible hand that carefully balances every need with just the right amount of product to fulfill that need. Moreover, like the multiplying loaves and fishes, each market interaction creates an excess of wealth in the form of profit that is drained from wage earners (who have no use for it) and into the offshore accounts of stock owners. If we just leave people, businesses and corporations to their own devices, the economy will grow and grow and grow and grow beyond the very finite boundaries of Earth and Nature herself. They will reach a heavenly and dynamically growing economic equilibrium where every need will be met and every man will be happy.

[trish]

Back on topic.

It seems to me that the question, “Does God exist?”, like the question “Do unicorns exist?” is simply incoherent.

The ontological argument goes,

God is good.
God is perfect.
Existence is a trait of good and perfect things (for a good thing that does not exist wouldn’t be perfect if it didn’t exist).
Therefore God exists.

Applied to unicorns it goes

Existential unicorns are by definition those unicorns which have the trait of existing.
By definition existential unicorns exist.
Therefore some unicorns exist.

The flaw in these arguments is that existence is not a trait; it is a logical quantifier. After all, what are unicorns doing when they’re not existing? What do gods do when they’re existing? The word “exist” is neither an adjective nor a predicate. Treating it as such can lead to paradoxes and other nonsense. “Does God exist?” is just poor grammar.

I’m sitting in a room with a laptop in front of me. “The laptop exists” is short for 
“Something in this room is a laptop.” Existential quantification is the dual of universal quantification: to say of a trait T “Something in this room has trait T” is the same as asserting “Not everything in this room doesn’t have the trait T.” Hence not everything in this room isn’t a laptop.

So the proper way to unravel the assertion “God exists” is “Not everything in the universe isn’t God.”

The trouble with quantifiers is that before you can use them you have to agree on a domain of application: quantifiers range over a domain of discourse (or using the parlance of logicians...a universe). When I say “Not everything in this room isn’t a laptop” I refer to the room I was sitting in when writing this post. When the grammatically aware preacher says, “Not everything in the universe isn’t God” he needs to make it clear to us what the universe of discourse is; i.e. what is the understood range of the universal quantifier in this assertion?

“Universe” could mean something like: every object and phenomenon found in nature taking up a region of space and having some temporal duration. Under such an understanding “Not everything in the universe isn’t God” would put God squarely in the universe. He would be an object or phenomenon of nature, explicable in natural terms. An alien life-form perhaps, certainly not a transcendent being outside the universe and responsible for its creation.

On the other hand “universe” could mean something like: every object or phenomena natural or supernatural. Then the claim “Not everything in the universe isn’t God” leaves open the possibility of God’s transcendence. The trouble here is making sense of just what sort of objects this “universe” is understood to house. Could it contain unicorns? Garuda? We need to agree on the domain of discourse before we can make specific existential and universal claims. I’m certainly not going to adopt a domain that presupposes the veracity of the claim “Gods exist.” Those who believe the claim are not going to adopt a domain of discourse that automatically closes off the veracity of the claim.

[fred41]

God's literary output is very uneven, probably due to his use of holy ghost writers.

...plus he insists on using one finger.

[fred41]

Back on topic.

It seems to me that the question, “Does God exist?”, like the question “Do unicorns exist?” is simply incoherent......


So?!!
Maybe we were all a little tipsy when we said it.
Maybe it was after someones wedding reception and we all had a little too much champagne...or maybe we like having a couple of glasses of wine for health reasons....
So we made a teensy weensy mistake Miss Polly Perfect...
I mean Christ Sakes.....






....lol..forgot where I was going with that.

[trish]

I gave you a thumbs up for remembering the Miss in the Miss Polly Perfect :)

[Stavros]

Back on topic.

It seems to me that the question, “Does God exist?”, like the question “Do unicorns exist?” is simply incoherent.

The ontological argument goes,

God is good.
God is perfect.
Existence is a trait of good and perfect things (for a good thing that does not exist wouldn’t be perfect if it didn’t exist).
Therefore God exists.

Applied to unicorns it goes

Existential unicorns are by definition those unicorns which have the trait of existing.
By definition existential unicorns exist.
Therefore some unicorns exist.

The flaw in these arguments is that existence is not a trait; it is a logical quantifier. After all, what are unicorns doing when they’re not existing? What do gods do when they’re existing? The word “exist” is neither an adjective nor a predicate. Treating it as such can lead to paradoxes and other nonsense. “Does God exist?” is just poor grammar.

I’m sitting in a room with a laptop in front of me. “The laptop exists” is short for 
“Something in this room is a laptop.” Existential quantification is the dual of universal quantification: to say of a trait T “Something in this room has trait T” is the same as asserting “Not everything in this room doesn’t have the trait T.” Hence not everything in this room isn’t a laptop.

So the proper way to unravel the assertion “God exists” is “Not everything in the universe isn’t God.”

The trouble with quantifiers is that before you can use them you have to agree on a domain of application: quantifiers range over a domain of discourse (or using the parlance of logicians...a universe). When I say “Not everything in this room isn’t a laptop” I refer to the room I was sitting in when writing this post. When the grammatically aware preacher says, “Not everything in the universe isn’t God” he needs to make it clear to us what the universe of discourse is; i.e. what is the understood range of the universal quantifier in this assertion?

“Universe” could mean something like: every object and phenomenon found in nature taking up a region of space and having some temporal duration. Under such an understanding “Not everything in the universe isn’t God” would put God squarely in the universe. He would be an object or phenomenon of nature, explicable in natural terms. An alien life-form perhaps, certainly not a transcendent being outside the universe and responsible for its creation.

On the other hand “universe” could mean something like: every object or phenomena natural or supernatural. Then the claim “Not everything in the universe isn’t God” leaves open the possibility of God’s transcendence. The trouble here is making sense of just what sort of objects this “universe” is understood to house. Could it contain unicorns? Garuda? We need to agree on the domain of discourse before we can make specific existential and universal claims. I’m certainly not going to adopt a domain that presupposes the veracity of the claim “Gods exist.” Those who believe the claim are not going to adopt a domain of discourse that automatically closes off the veracity of the claim.

An unusually incoherent post from you Trish and one which I would have expected to be more rational.

On Unicorns: historically they are most likely in reality the now extinct Indian Rhinoceros which may also have been found further west in ancient Persia where a visiting Greek doctor (Ctesius) referred to them as 'ugly brutes'. There is a strong likelihood that cave paintings which depict a beast with one horn seen from the side angle (eg in Lascaux) is in fact a beast with two horns but the artist has no knowledge of perspective.
More interesting perhaps is that in more modern times rather than being an 'ugly beast' the Unicorn has become a non-threatening, even enchanted animal much to be desired. A Unicorn shares a shield with a Lion sitting atop a local building in my town.
There is also the 'fact' according to the North Korean news agency that the corpse of the last living Unicorn, the mount of Dongmyeong -founder of the Korean Kingdom- is buried not from the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, the man who invented the Hamburger and once played a round of Golf scoring a hole in one 18 times.

Your attempt to apply rational thought to the existence of God is in fact irrational as it uses a secular mode of thought when the religious is required, it is rather like being presented with a bowl of soup and a fork to eat it with. From the point of view of most religions the existence of God or of gods is a rational explanation of everything that exists in this world, the previous world, and the world to come. The fundamental problem it seems to me is that most religions rest on texts that are thousands of years old (less than 2,000 in the case of the Quran) which raises the obvious question -how does one relate an ancient text to contemporary life?

Ancient religions express the views that were common at the time which made no distinction between life on earth and what was perceived to be in the sky above. What has become crucial to the history of human behaviour, was the emergence from this perspective of a 'moral cosmology' which continues to form the basis of contemporary morals because mixed in with the explanations of existence, and the rules and regulations which bound human communities through a shared moral recognition of what was right and wrong for the community to survive (and often to survive without destroying each other) are those principles and values which still exist in both natural law and jurisprudence, and not just in Western societies.

In other words, without ancient religions we would not have contemporary morals or law. Without ancient religions, we would not have modern science which emerged from the belief that some held that theology could not explain change. For the weakest element of theological explanations of life is that they tend to insist that what they proclaim ends the need for any further debate on what life is for. Everything you need to live is in 'The Bible' or the 'Quran'.

Hence the paradox: it is irrational to believe in God, and irrational not to believe in God. One discipline is based on evidence, the other on faith.

What science does not explain is the soul, if science even believes that there is such a 'thing'. But if science argues we human are machines, then why is that we have for the most part the same component parts, yet like or dislike this type of music or that, and why is that some people find science does not explain to them what love is, or beauty? What can be more irrational than love, causing people to lose their appetite, to lose sleep, to behave as if possessed by demons? Why do people describe the effect of a sunset or the climax of an opera or even a pop song as 'uplifting' or 'moving'? Lifting where? Moving towards what?

People need something 'extra' just as they often need the answers provided by science, and I think for most people it is love; but I do think Hegel had an interesting thing to say which resonates with people in our own times who have 'found religion' -just as I am sure others have travelled the other way and turned against it.

"Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out with endless wealth of thoughts and pictures. The significance of all that is, lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven; instead of dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the present to the Divine, away, so to say, to a present that lies beyond. The mind’s gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what is earthly, and kept fixed there; and it has needed a long time to introduce that clearness, which only celestial realities had, into the crassness and confusion shrouding the sense of things earthly, and to make attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. Now we have apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man’s mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss".

[trish]

An unusually incoherent post from you Trish and one which I would have expected to be more rational.

On Unicorns: historically they are most likely in reality the now extinct Indian Rhinoceros which may also have been found further west in ancient Persia where a visiting Greek doctor (Ctesius) referred to them as 'ugly brutes'. There is a strong likelihood that cave paintings which depict a beast with one horn seen from the side angle (eg in Lascaux) is in fact a beast with two horns but the artist has no knowledge of perspective.
More interesting perhaps is that in more modern times rather than being an 'ugly beast' the Unicorn has become a non-threatening, even enchanted animal much to be desired. A Unicorn shares a shield with a Lion sitting atop a local building in my town.
There is also the 'fact' according to the North Korean news agency that the corpse of the last living Unicorn, the mount of Dongmyeong -founder of the Korean Kingdom- is buried not from the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, the man who invented the Hamburger and once played a round of Golf scoring a hole in one 18 times.

Your attempt to apply rational thought to the existence of God is in fact irrational as it uses a secular mode of thought when the religious is required, it is rather like being presented with a bowl of soup and a fork to eat it with. From the point of view of most religions the existence of God or of gods is a rational explanation of everything that exists in this world, the previous world, and the world to come. The fundamental problem it seems to me is that most religions rest on texts that are thousands of years old (less than 2,000 in the case of the Quran) which raises the obvious question -how does one relate an ancient text to contemporary life?

Ancient religions express the views that were common at the time which made no distinction between life on earth and what was perceived to be in the sky above. What has become crucial to the history of human behaviour, was the emergence from this perspective of a 'moral cosmology' which continues to form the basis of contemporary morals because mixed in with the explanations of existence, and the rules and regulations which bound human communities through a shared moral recognition of what was right and wrong for the community to survive (and often to survive without destroying each other) are those principles and values which still exist in both natural law and jurisprudence, and not just in Western societies.

In other words, without ancient religions we would not have contemporary morals or law. Without ancient religions, we would not have modern science which emerged from the belief that some held that theology could not explain change. For the weakest element of theological explanations of life is that they tend to insist that what they proclaim ends the need for any further debate on what life is for. Everything you need to live is in 'The Bible' or the 'Quran'.

Hence the paradox: it is irrational to believe in God, and irrational not to believe in God. One discipline is based on evidence, the other on faith.

What science does not explain is the soul, if science even believes that there is such a 'thing'. But if science argues we human are machines, then why is that we have for the most part the same component parts, yet like or dislike this type of music or that, and why is that some people find science does not explain to them what love is, or beauty? What can be more irrational than love, causing people to lose their appetite, to lose sleep, to behave as if possessed by demons? Why do people describe the effect of a sunset or the climax of an opera or even a pop song as 'uplifting' or 'moving'? Lifting where? Moving towards what?

People need something 'extra' just as they often need the answers provided by science, and I think for most people it is love; but I do think Hegel had an interesting thing to say which resonates with people in our own times who have 'found religion' -just as I am sure others have travelled the other way and turned against it.

"Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out with endless wealth of thoughts and pictures. The significance of all that is, lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven; instead of dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the present to the Divine, away, so to say, to a present that lies beyond. The mind’s gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what is earthly, and kept fixed there; and it has needed a long time to introduce that clearness, which only celestial realities had, into the crassness and confusion shrouding the sense of things earthly, and to make attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. Now we have apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man’s mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss".

Good to know unicorns once roamed the world. I did not know that.

On the larger point, that existence is incoherent, I should’ve thought we might agree. I neither argue (in the post above) that God exists nor do I argue that he doesn’t. I maintained that attempts (like Avicenna’s, Anselm’s and others) to rationally prove His existence are doomed to fail. I think, from what you say about the inapplicability of reason to the questions of religion, that we both have come to that same conclusion. Our routes, though convergent, do not depart from the same ports. I take as my starting point the observation that “existence” is not a trait that something might or might not have. You, if I am not mistaken, start from premise that the world offers us more than can reason and science and what they fail to prove may yet be.

[Jia_westladyboy]

God is good.
God is perfect.
Existence is a trait of good and perfect things (for a good thing that does not exist wouldn’t be perfect if it didn’t exist).
Therefore God exists.
I’m sitting in a room with a laptop in front of me. “The laptop exists” is short for 
“Something in this room is a laptop.” Existential quantification is the dual of universal quantification: to say of a trait T “Something in this room has trait T” is the same as asserting “Not everything in this room doesn’t have the trait T.” Hence not everything in this room isn’t a laptop.
From the point of view of most religions the existence of God or of gods is a rational explanation of everything that exists in this world, the previous world, and the world to come.

Very interesting indeed your point.
I liked this thread and I have seen really beautiful arguments about god.. Please let me add my opinion and what I think about it thank you.

The fundamental problem it seems to me is that most religions rest on texts that are thousands of years old which raises the obvious question -how does one relate an ancient text to contemporary life?

Ancient text are somehow useful in everyday life, if taken for what they are without necessarily making a dogma out of them; They can reinforce our wisdom and common sense.

1 A typical example would be Buddha 2,500 years ago. A woman was suffering for the death of her brother, therefore she complained to Buddha and asked for an explanation about the god justice.. The Buddha replied and said to the woman to go to as many houses as she could and beg for some nuts.. but only one condition had to be followed and that was she should get the nuts from houses and families where nobody died before. At nite time the woman came back totally transformed and of course with no nuts, because in every family she found that someone had died in the past.. She recognized the trick of the Buddha to give her an understanding about death and sufferance.

2 Another example just few centuries BC about this is a decision taken by King Salomon; The story from the Hebrew Bible in which King Solomon of Israel ruled between two women both claiming to be the mother of a child by tricking the parties into revealing their true feelings. He simply replied to the ladies that if they both claim the child, then he should split it into two so everyone will be happy… the real mother replied that the other lady should keep it in that case. The king declared the first mother as the true mother. This wisdom can be used anytime someone claims things are not his or hers. The truth will always come up now or later on…

3 At that time, although Adam and his wife were both naked, neither of them felt any shame" (2:25).Interesting! What does this make me think of? That the grass looks always greener on the other side of the fence. A sexy woman will always look more appealing and sexy than the sexier wife. Anyone can have his/her own interpretation as long as it helps. The biblist will probably say that there was no sin yet at the time, and adam and eve were living in harmony with their bodies and senses. True too.

4 Jesus? He was great and I have photos of him in jeans. If I get rid of his ancient clothes and don’t think of him as standing always on that cross, and having a beautiful smile he becomes a very nice and wise man, still able to help in this modern times with his wisdom. We all know the ‘Ask and it shall be given to you” Knock and the door will be opened” , but I actually prefer the one that says, What’s the point of asking as it is already been given to you, and you just need the eyes to see it… Don’t knock as the door it is already opened, you just need the courage to pass through it.
Back to the god now…

To get an idea of what the god is… it would better to live in a monastery for a while, not to get more religious but to have a big laugh to the god’s idea created by a few men a couple of thousand years ago. After a while one who is not into it, begins to realise why theology should be learned without the real experience. Theology comes from the greek or latin of The words Theos = god and Logos = Logic … The logic about god. At times ignorance is a bliss.

The humanity is in need of a new dictionary,,, Seriously I think that in 2014 we are still using such old-fashioned words given to us by our ancestors. I am always replacing the word god by Existence or Sky, .. and like to call it anything but not god… that word has become so mischievous and harmful to many who prefer to live a guilty life, thinking about their sins all the time, in the hope to be forgiven by the projected image of the god they have created.

Using the word god, one is bound to think of a “He” as a person, and thinking of He as a person, it is like projecting our desires onto him.... It is restricting the infinity to something finite. Buddha gave the order to all his disciples not to create any image of him, and I love a famous sentence from someone who said: When you meet the Buddha, kill him. That is religion. Meaning…. The Buddha is within you and no need to follow false images.
I like to think of this universe with a presence of godliness…

Nietzsche gave the people a sense of freedom when he wrote the sentence: “God is Dead therefore man is free”, however that was a non complete and also a negative-only statement,,, He meant obviously the image of the god sitting in the sky who punishes people for their sins is dead.. is over, so relax.

In my opinion my vision of Religion is both negative and positive and neither this nor that; Not having any creed, and not following any particular belief, at the same time being aware of what we are and where we “Did Not come From” It is crucial for a balanced life, well at least mine. If the god created us, then I guess he can also un-create us, therefore we are the puppets and he is the puppeteer. Nahh the idea is so wrong. What about if we were never born and never to die? Even after physical death..

So many unanswered questions we still have about where we came from? Where are we going? What is there after death? Does god exists? Listening to the atheist that says god does not exists, makes them also in a way believers of the supernatural; Whenever we reject something a kind of pain is felt, and to get some release we need to hold onto something else, therefore embracing new ideals.
What about the one that says: We are not alone in this universe? The fact is that if we are alone or not alone both realities might be frightening.
Someone tried to put thing in a better way and stated that: “God is a symbol that constantly requires reinterpretation” I might agree to this concept but then again who will give the right interpretation of what god is? Thousands minds will have thousands explanations.
The god can also be a nice escape not to work on us and blame the He for what happened to us and for what we have not gotten yet.

It is not my intention to argue with any written philosophy or any religion being created on this earth, I can agree with the feeling of love and communion and the feeling of happiness that people feel when participating to a mass celebration or a religious gathering of any sort, however I had the same feeling when I was participating to a football game years back, or when working with fantastic and like-minded people, or even when making love.

I do not deny the perception of faith, not to be confused with devotion and find it to be an essential part of my life. Faith in not any who and what? Simply in the fact that being positive is not an option, looking at things and people that might appear boring, might and will expand the mind in the long term. Tomorrow is still a good day to feel good, and if it is not, then it’s only me who has closed the eyes. The others are us, is also a cool way of thinking positive when we don’t get right away what we want.
Feeling happy is feeling in tune with existence with all the human beings around us, even if it lasts a few secs… that is godliness too, and no religion is needed to feel happy and to have empathy with other people.

My escorting voyage has taught me a lot in my life, and I can say that I have learned more from my meeting with different type of people in the past year or so, than from my entire life. I will not obviously talk about escort stuff and will stick to the thread but please let me say that one of the interesting points I found.. It is the connection with sex and anger, sex and smoke, sex and loneliness, sex to release tension from work, also sex and love, sex and connection with religion, sex and clothes/no-clothes, and sex for the sex’s sake…

More than a year ago I had wrote a little Blog called: “Quick analysis of a sexual meeting or an act of masturbation, close to godliness” Re-proposed here: http://ladyboy-europe.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/quick-analysis-of-sexual-meeting-or-act.html
It has to be taken with a detached and a reasonable approach and it might be easier to understand for those gentlemen here who are into oriental religion and have grasped the meaning of it.

Many find it pointless talking about the existence of god, and everyone have their viewpoint, arguing about it will certainly not bring up the truth, but it is beneficial to know how so many people can talk about the supernatural on a shemale forum. I like to thank all of you intelligent people who started this thread and also the others who had the courage to give their opinion …. When I saw it, I stopped my work for today to write something about it..

And if I may ask, any thoughts from anyone about the afterlife, or before this life? Read about the unicorns, though I have heard about the white ones, .. what about farthing monkeys >?

Mhhwa kissex Jia

[fred41]

And if I may ask, any thoughts from anyone about the afterlife, or before this life? Read about the unicorns, though I have heard about the white ones, .. what about farthing monkeys >?

Mhhwa kissex Jia

Afterlife ?...I suppose everyone has thought about this several million times in their life.
At this moment in time I really doubt here is an afterlife...not one in which a person has a conscious awareness anyway. I realize there is no romance in that belief...and it's what makes some people fear the prospect of death so much.
but...
you do become part of a greater something when you pass. Even if it may only be in a biological sense...and there is a purpose to that...and almost everyone does leave a legacy whether they realize it or not - whether it was in remembrance of a deed or words having been spoken...hell, maybe a sentence left on this site. An individuals existence often has an impact one can barely be aware of ...and there is a purpose to that...not to mention children.
Sometimes that's enough.

[Jia_westladyboy]

you do become part of a greater something when you pass. Even if it may only be in a biological sense
I tend to be closer to the buddhist explanation about the afterlife... I am not entirely sure about turning into a cow or a rich man depending on the past action of the previous life, however it is also true that people who went trough the process of hypnosis could remember up to 3 past lives.
The less credible of the possible theories is the one that believes that people will be condemned to eternal hell or be blissful in heaven according on how religious they have been.
I find it hard to think that such a cruel god can exists ... Our life span is 70 years, minus the childhood, minus 8 hours sleep per day... and being condemned for eternal time? That must have been created by the ancient priests to keep under control and fear the god fearing ones...

[trish]

I'm already a part of something greater than myself. My community, the throbbing planet, the swirling solar system etc. I really don't think that my death will make the universe any greater than it is (though some may disagree). And since no part of myself will be "passing" out of the universe to a better place (I'm plan on bequeathing all my quarks to the cosmos) I definitely will not be part of something greater than I'm already a part of now.

Briefly the universe has a bit more information packed into the corners you and I now inhabit. But entropy will catch up with us that will dissipate. The universe will expand, its matter and energy will transmogrify, change and transform. Our cupful of particles will bounce around with the rest, but in the long run the whole will neither be the lesser nor greater for it.

I'll die, but I won't pass. My bits and pieces will be part of the same spectacular universe they're already a part of now. Their roles will perhaps be quite interesting (to a physicist), but in time, my role will be considerably diminished.

[buttslinger]

There is nothing more I would like than to hear Trish admit the possibility of the existence of God, but my Brother was a Teacher also, and he was a big fan of THE TREE OF KNOWLEGE, he can actually tell you how much the air in the room you're in weighs. His kids never went to Sunday School.
The DEATH you need to see God is an artistic license type of death, those Yogis you see in intense meditation turn their bodies off by slowing down their breathing, like an anesthesia. It is like as close to physical death as you can get without dying. So when they say you have to die to go to Heaven, I think that's an inside joke.

Dealing with people and traffic and problems all day is not exactly the most REFINED life you can experience. The WORLD argues with everybody. God doesn't kill babies or deny you a bicycle when you're a kid, that's the world and the laws of nature talking. Eating that shit is a full time job, and then you die.

In a way a guy sleeping is completely worthless, eh? But sleep solves almost every problem the world can come up with. Hop out of your meat suit and master the game of life, the game that hasn't changed in 10,000 years.

Why wait any longer for the one you love, when he's standing, in front of you?**


**Bob Dylan, Lay, Lady Lay

[trish]

Admit the possibility of God's existence?! I have a whiskey with Him every Tuesday down at the Bada Bing after work. Says He's some sort of architect and right now He's overseeing some construction in a whole 'nother universe. The Bada Bing is on His commute so He drops by on Tuesdays for a little Holy Huba Huba.

He's a bit depressed these days. Says, He's not too happy with some of His past projects. But He's a good Guy, a really Good Guy, when He's not smitin' people.

Said He created me, and Pete over there, and everybody in here. Said He created our whole fuckin' universe.
I asked Him once, "Who created you?"
He looked me in the eyes and said, "You did."

[buttslinger]

I asked Him once, "Who created you?"
He looked me in the eyes and said, "You did."

I'm sensing a LOT of bitterness here. LOTS.

[trish]

Not bitter, just an acerbic personality. :)

[broncofan]

That avatar's making me bitter buttslinger. Holy shiite.

Personally I can admit the possibility of anything that is not known to a certainty. But there are many things more plausible than the existence of God that aren't really plausible at all. For instance, what if we are simulations playing on futuristic computers? At least then it would makes sense that the rules of the universe were flexible. We would only be what was programmed, pure consciousness; and our bodies and the material world for that matter, would be an illusion.

But if we believe the universe is material, and we are both participants and observers, we expect there not to be such contradictions. We would not expect to find 4 billion year old rocks on a 6,000 year old planet. Or that many things in these old books contradict known laws of physics, without at least having a reason the laws suspended themselves, but otherwise operate without fail thus obscuring this proof except to the authors of these books.

[broncofan]

By the way, that idea about simulations on futuristic computers is not my idea (though I made it sound that way). I heard someone mention it as some philosopher's idea, and it wouldn't surprise me if he weren't the first to think of it.

[buttslinger]

I'm not a practicing Christian, I do believe that the entire universe never had a beginning....once, and that long long ago the energy of a million suns was crammed into a very heavy softball sized mass of very hot funk. Mmmmm...maybe those scientists are just pulling our legs.
One thing I think we can all agree on, what it is is what it is!!

[Stavros]

you do become part of a greater something when you pass. Even if it may only be in a biological sense
I tend to be closer to the buddhist explanation about the afterlife... I am not entirely sure about turning into a cow or a rich man depending on the past action of the previous life, however it is also true that people who went trough the process of hypnosis could remember up to 3 past lives.
The less credible of the possible theories is the one that believes that people will be condemned to eternal hell or be blissful in heaven according on how religious they have been.
I find it hard to think that such a cruel god can exists ... Our life span is 70 years, minus the childhood, minus 8 hours sleep per day... and being condemned for eternal time? That must have been created by the ancient priests to keep under control and fear the god fearing ones...

Jia, your earlier post stressed the personal nature of faith. Your last comment- being condemned for eternal time? That must have been created by the ancient priests to keep under control and fear the god fearing ones -is where I think many posters believe that 'god fearing' becomes something more dangerous.
I don't think those people who think of religion as a belief in sky fairies actually have a problem with those who do believe in God when it is something personal, it is when an individual relationship to God becomes part of a communal relationship that problems develop. It may be comforting to be in a Jewish neighbourhood, to have a strong Church community, and so forth, but what worries many people is the way in which religions have developed socially binding expressions of the faith which do not just resemble political systems, but systems that cannot change, or which resist change. Attitudes to sexual preference are a good example of how flexible a religion is or can be, and for its critics, religious systems resemble dictatorships that do not tolerate dissent, but it must also be said that creating a systematic explanation of a religion does tend to create a rule book -and 'specialists' (priests, et al) who are paid to enforce the rules...

[Jia_westladyboy]

Hi Stavros,,, I don’t know what else to believe after I have tried them all…. I also find it kinda offensive to my mind to believe into something and someone… and have come to the conclusion that an intelligent person cannot be a believer …. I feel close to the Buddhist explanation, it is true, perhaps it makes me feel better and forget about my priesthood time- The zen seem to be the highest level of perception and have lifted the consciousness of many who have become totally silent and find it useless to talk and argue.

I find that Living the everyday life in awareness of the things happening around us and inside us is the most reliable and realistic approach I can have in order to live a balanced life… Being just a witness, assuming a non judgmental attitude helps a lot.

Considering the fact that somehow we all have hidden powers in our minds and we are not using them 100%, makes me more confident that we can change things beginning from ourselves and as a consequence around us. Like attracts like, and what we think about we bring about are realities that cannot be denied and no god can interfere with those. It is my faith too.

I liked also the Trish way of thinking: I'm already a part of something greater than myself. My community, the throbbing planet, the swirling solar system etc. I really don't think that my death will make the universe any greater than it is (though some may disagree). And since no part of myself will be "passing" out of the universe to a better place (I'm plan on bequeathing all my quarks to the cosmos) I definitely will not be part of something greater than I'm already a part of now.

Exactly !.. it means awareness for me .. and ultimately being happy with what we have and what we are…. If there is a god, then there is a devil too, and if god is heaven then the devil is hell… therefore our mind will project paradise and nightmare after death.

I once suggested in a feminist forum that perhaps if “some men” seem to be too dominant with women, the problem could be originated by the wrong concept of god that we all have in our early childhood conditioning. God has traditionally been described using masculine terms, and therefore can I imagine that men feel more powerful because of this? (Unconsciously more authoritative maybe)… It is like having the creator on their side and feeling that exist more, have more rights, thus putting women in a second place. Just my personal theory.

Why should god be described in masculine terms, and not both man and woman too, and neither this nor that.
I remember once reading a text… Once a wise man was asked… Do you believe in god? He replied: Yes, not, both yes and not, god is both not: neither is nor is not. Existence is Indefinite and contradictory, moving and changing all the time;

The names that we attach to realities like the tree, the mountain and the river make us forget the authentic meaning of things surrounding us,,, I like some times to use the word River-ing, as it reminds me of the changing and moving status of the river.

A good day for all of you
Jia

[buttslinger]

How come we can make jokes about God, but we can't make jokes about gays or blacks?

[timmartin]

How come we can make jokes about God, but we can't make jokes about gays or blacks?
Gays and blacks are real and they have feelings.

[martin48]

How come we can make jokes about God, but we can't make jokes about gays or blacks?

Or, it could be that if you do, God smites you down.

[buttslinger]

Uh oh, I almost got serious.

[Plaything]

Interesting discussion.

Can't help but chuckle at what the HA programme algorithm has determined to constitute 'similar threads'

And, dearly beloved, Let us not forget the greatest lesson of them all.

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

[Laphroaig]

Interesting discussion.

Can't help but chuckle at what the HA programme algorithm has determined to constitute 'similar threads'

And, dearly beloved, Let us not forget the greatest lesson of them all.

Blessed are the cheesemakers.


If we're going down that route then surely this is the greatest lesson of all...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo

[Plaything]

Religion?

Piece of piss.

And the lord sayeth (no capital T: not suggesting a definitive article, insert your own deity)

'Don't be a twat'

That pretty much wraps it up.

[martin48]

God's "To Do List"

[trish]

Apologies in advance. Just felt like rambling a bit. It’s a nice day for a walk.

Is it possible to decide what one believes and disbelieves? What is belief? Our daily life is underpinned by a multitude of unconscious assumptions and commitments to action. Before you jump out of bed in the morning, I’m betting you do not generally ponder the solidity of floor, review the mechanics of stress and strain, access the evidence and decide to believe the flooring will indeed support you––rather than grow eyes, open its gullet and gobble you up. Perhaps it’s not fair to call an unconscious assumption a belief. But now that it’s been brought to mind, certainly you consciously believe the ground upon which you now stand, or your chair stands will continue to support you into the near future. It’s a belief probably based on recent and current experience. But what is that belief? Some might say it’s merely a commitment to action (a gamble that the ground currently beneath you will continue to support you).

What does it mean to believe the Earth is between four and five billion years old? Is there a correspondence between reality as we observe it and what is believed? Perhaps the correspondence is that the Earth has has already made over four billion trips around the Sun but not five billion? But how can anyone observe that? What commitment does such a belief entail? To many, it entails no real commitments. You just say you believe it and go on with your life. If later we discover the Earth is at least six billion years old, you can shrug your shoulders and say, “Imagine that.” But if you’re a geologist, or an astronomer, or a paleontologist etc., the belief that the Earth is between four and five billion years old entails quite a number of commitments and the consequences of being wrong would involve quite a number of reassessments, adjustments and new commitments. Everything would have to be rethought.

The point is that belief involves commitment. The less committed you are, the easier it is to change your mind. World views tend to have a lot a inertia and are accordingly more difficult to change. We have predispositions for against various propositions, depending on who we are. Often we do not decide what to believe. We believe first and investigate second. This is not so bad, if we are in the habit of investigating with honesty and integrity.

So what does it mean to believe the universe was created by a god? It depends on the believer. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition maintains that belief entails commitment to the commandments of the creator god as detailed by his recorded word in the various holy texts. But belief that the holy texts record the words of the creator god as revealed to the prophets presumes the existence of such a god. Such commitment depends ultimately (and circularly) upon one’s trust in the text, and penultimately upon one’s trust in the prophets. This was the view against which protestants rebelled during the reformation. Protestants (and Mormons) maintain the each person has direct access to the creator-god and speaks with him on a daily basis through via a religious/moral conscious and prayer. Personally, I’m inclined to describe anyone who claims to have a personal relationship with god as having a serious lack of (and misunderstanding of)intellectual honesty__but self-deceit is a serious charge that’s difficult prove.

Of course belief in a creator god needn’t involve such a clutter of moral and metaphysical commitments. There are some, for example who simply believe that the present values of the fundamental constants indicate that they’ve been fine-tuned; i.e. deliberately chosen by conscious agent to favor the evolution of life in the universe. What does it mean to believe this? Does the hypothesis have any testable consequences? To what does it commit us? Functionally, to no more than the observable fact that “life exists” already commits us. It remains an empty, though to some, a comforting perspective on a cosmic contingency.

My guess is that we are sometimes incapable of deciding what we believe; like the parents who insist their child is not a murderer in spite of the evidence to the contrary__ and who knows, they may be right. We believe what we believe. Sometimes logic will take us by the throat and force us to see the world as it is, and sometimes the throttling just cuts off the flow of oxygen to our brains. The trick is to know when you’re hallucinating and when you’re not. Honest examination won't always help, but it's our only ally.

[Plaything]

Cormac McCarthy sees things.

Rather brilliantly.

You see Cormac.

I imagine that when walking in the country you also see the wind play across a field of wheat, where others stride head down and calculate the calorific value of their journey.

I see Cormac.

I see the breeze.

Diggin it.

[trish]

I saw ...

a potato chip shaped exactly like Prophet Muhammad once. No mistake about it. And just an hour before the most illustrious assassinations yesterday of twelve cartoonists ...

I saw ...

all thirteen of Muhammad's wives on the burnt surface of a piece of Texas toast.

Don't shoot me. They were just there. I just saw 'em, I didn't draw 'em.

[martin48]

As it is blasphemous to have any visual image of Muhammad, shouldn't all chips and toast be destroyed?

What's "Texas Toast"? Is it larger than normal toast or is it toasted using burning crosses?




I saw ...

a potato chip shaped exactly like Prophet Muhammad once. No mistake about it. And just an hour before the most illustrious assassinations yesterday of twelve cartoonists ...

I saw ...

all thirteen of Muhammad's wives on the burnt surface of a piece of Texas toast.

Don't shoot me. They were just there. I just saw 'em, I didn't draw 'em.

[martin48]

This was my toast (non-Texan) this morning - honest! I know what I'm going to worship in future. It's a sign.

[trish]

Just for safety's sake, best to add a disclaimer:
Ce ne est pas les organes génitaux du prophète.

[broncofan]

Just for safety's sake, best to add a disclaimer:
Ce ne est pas les organes génitaux du prophète.
You'd need a bigger piece of toast;

[Fyusian]

Time for a thread necro...


Gays and blacks are real and they have feelings.

So you've acquired empirical evidence that no god exists? This is what I find absolutely ridiculous about atheism, it's just like any religion being based on faith. The universe is a big place and an even bigger place is the apparent multiverse beyond it which is supposedly infinite and yet you atheists decree that there is absolutely no god just because you don't see a bearded man walking on this Earth and jumping from cloud to cloud. I find it hilarious.

Worst yet is the explanation from atheists about how the universe came here: "it's just here because" apparently unaware that a theist can use that same very argument then to argue that a god just exists "just because" and arose the same very way that apparently a godless universe could.

Just adding my two cents, I'm not religious myself so I can understand the criticisms against religions but I think atheism is absolute arrogance.

I don't know what god is like or if he even cares but it makes more sense believing than not. If conciousness can arise by itself then I see no reason why it can't do so outside of the universe or in another dimension.

[martin48]

It is hard, if not impossible, to show that something does not exist, if you accept (agreed a matter of faith) Occam's Razor

The principle states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove to provide better predictions, but—in the absence of differences in predictive ability—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.

Then the argument is do we need a deity (in the christian juristic tradition) to explain what we can observe. If not, then god is an invention - useful for many. Being useful, does not make it correct.

[Stavros]

You cannot observe neutrinos, but science believes that they exist. Discuss.

[martin48]

Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1995 to Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines for experimental observation of the effects of neutrino fluxes. Want more?

In fact neutrinos are a powerful example of the scientific method from Pauli's and Fermi's prediction that such a particle was necessary to explain observed phenomena then numerous observations have confirmed its existence.

[trish]

In the late 1920’s early 1930’s it was discovered that a proton (another particle we can’t see) could become electrically neutral by absorbing an electron, thereby becoming a neutron. In the reverse process, a neutron can be stimulated to eject an electron becoming a proton. The latter process is called beta-decay (beta-particles had earlier been identified as electrons and both names remained in use). There was some difficulty in keeping track of all the energy and momentum in these processes; i.e. momentum of the neutron prior to beta decay is greater than (by a small amount) the recoil momentum of the proton plus the momentum of the ejected electron. This contradicts a principle known as conservation of momentum. Conservation of momentum had been established since Newton, elaborated upon and tested over and over again in many different contexts. Nevertheless, Niels Bohr suggested that on subatomic scales the conservation of momentum may need to be amended. Perhaps its a statistical principle with a small range of allowable fluctuation. Wolfang Pauli, however, proposed that during beta-decay a neutron not only ejects an electron but it also ejects another particle with just the right amount of momentum to save the law of momentum conservation. The proposed particle would have to be very small, very light weight, very speedy and electrically neutral, hence the name neutrino.

So the existence of neutrinos was first hypothesized as a possible explanation of how energy and momenta should be accounted for in beta-decay.

Since then other types of particle decay were shown to be consistent with the conservation of energy and momentum provided certain particles were involved that had exactly the physical characteristics (charge, spin etc.) as Pauli’s neutrino. Other subatomic interactions revealed other types of neutrinos (antineutrino, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos).

Still, no one really understood why beta-decay happens in the first place. Glashow, Weinberg and Salaam addressed this question in their Nobel prize winning work (I believe in the 1970’s). Later the Standard Model of particle physics (a set of assumptions that propose the dynamical equations that describe the behavior of quarks and leptons must display certain kinds of symmetry) was shown to entail the existence of neutrinos.

The proton is another particle we can’t literally see. But because it is positively charged it will ionize ordinary matter if it has a high enough energy to pass through it. Think cosmic rays. For that matter, the only things we do literally see are photons with frequencies in the range of visible light. I don’t literally see the lip of a cup as I sip my morning coffee, I see light reflected off the lip. We “see” things by their effects upon our biologically evolved detection systems. In 1950 neutrinos ejected by a nuclear reactor were detected. It was predicted if a large body of water into which cadmium chloride was dissolved were placed near the reaction, the flux of antineutrinos through the water would interact with protons in the solution and produce positrons (which in turn would quickly annihilate with the electrons in the water producing a quantifiable, signature amount of energy) and neutrons (which were absorbed by the cadmium ions in the water produce a quantifiable, signature number of detectable gamma rays). The prediction was born out. Since then neutrinos of various types from various sources have been detected in various ways.

Does science believe that neutrinos exist? Well, science isn’t really the sort of thing that believes, is it? When asked, most scientists will assent to the probable existence of neutrinos. Most of them (who are in fields other than particle theory), instead of employing first hand evidence, will be relying upon the intellectual integrity of their colleagues. Those who do have deep familiarity with the theories, equations, experiments and measurements will say they believe that neutrinos almost surely exist. Although, like Niels Bohr who was willing to give up the well tested principle of momentum conservation, they will have a reservation buried in that “almost surely” and they, if necessary, would be willing to give it up for a more encompassing, testable explanation of all the phenomena which are currently quantitively explained by the neutrino hypothesis.

[martin48]

OK - that's a fuller explanation than what I gave but what the heck. I'm not the one to let brutal facts stand in the way of anyone's beliefs

[Stavros]

So there is a person who truly believes that he or she sees God when the rising sun illuminates a cornfield. In this case, the science is impeccable: the sun is shining, the cornfield is there, in all its glory; and the believer is convinced the light is from God, that it may even BE God, a hypothesis that science does not, and cannot refute. And there is not even a need to be afraid, but there may be an inclination to rejoice. Was it not Turner who once said I paint what I see, not what is there -?

[trish]

...and knowing her belief had only intangible consequences, she remained secure in the knowledge that no tangible thing could ever threaten the strength of her faith.

[Plaything]

So there is a person who truly believes that he or she sees God when the rising sun illuminates a cornfield. In this case, the science is impeccable: the sun is shining, the cornfield is there, in all its glory; and the believer is convinced the light is from God, that it may even BE God, a hypothesis that science does not, and cannot refute. And there is not even a need to be afraid, but there may be an inclination to rejoice. Was it not Turner who once said I paint what I see, not what is there -?

Perception is reality.

Pretty certain that, even if we just get one ride...it's a gift.

The trick, not easy, is realising, and recognising that - in our day to day.

Finding grace in ordinary things.

Somebody way smarter than me posited that happiness is as simple as:

Somewhere to live.

Something to do.

Someone to love.

I can get with that.

Great thread, and some fabulous posts.

[martin48]

Perception is isn't always reality

[hippifried]

Time for a thread necro...



So you've acquired empirical evidence that no god exists? This is what I find absolutely ridiculous about atheism, it's just like any religion being based on faith. The universe is a big place and an even bigger place is the apparent multiverse beyond it which is supposedly infinite and yet you atheists decree that there is absolutely no god just because you don't see a bearded man walking on this Earth and jumping from cloud to cloud. I find it hilarious.

Worst yet is the explanation from atheists about how the universe came here: "it's just here because" apparently unaware that a theist can use that same very argument then to argue that a god just exists "just because" and arose the same very way that apparently a godless universe could.

Just adding my two cents, I'm not religious myself so I can understand the criticisms against religions but I think atheism is absolute arrogance.

I don't know what god is like or if he even cares but it makes more sense believing than not. If conciousness can arise by itself then I see no reason why it can't do so outside of the universe or in another dimension.

Being atheist merely means that I am unaffected by personal religious beliefs of my own. It's not any kind of religious belief, by even the wildest stretch of the imagination. "A"something doesn't mean "against". It just means "not". I have no problem with theism, gnosticism, humanism... or any other kind of "ism", jism, or whatever. I find it all very interesting and entertaining, as long as nobody tries to force me to follow its tenets.

[martin48]

Well, "Amen" to that

[buttslinger]

There are no Atheists in foxholes. I remember me and my pal joking years ago about the crappy anesthesia they used back then, in the recovery room guys coming out of it would be spilling their guts. Anesthesia takes you down to one notch above DEATH, and it sounds to me like your conscious takes center stage when you're about to face the final curtain. The choices you made. A few years ago I had a scare and spent a long night in the hospital, when I got home I deleted an entire exterior hard drive.

[trish]

There are no Atheists in foxholes. Of course there are. You shouldn't believe every motto that's been printed on a dorm room poster. There have been a number of well-known atheists who have remained atheists to the final end. Of course you might call them know it-all-know nothings. Still,

a brush with death might scare the bejeezus out of you (or into you), but the imminence of death is not evidence of God.

Besides, God fucking well knows what was on that hard drive and you're still going to have to answer for it when you get to those golden arches...er...I mean St. Peter's gate.

[buttslinger]

God fucking well knows what was on that hard drive and you're still going to have to answer for it when you get to those golden arches...er...I mean St. Peter's gate.

No I was absolved of those crimes, I still have faith you will one day renounce your education.....all those people who have died not believing in homework........bless their souls.

[trish]

Are you sure you're forgiven? I know it's written down in a book somewhere that Jesus died for your sins. But then the bastard got himself resurrected. Seems to me that undoes the dyin' for yer sins part. In any case, God Remembers Everything...after all, he's (oops, He's) all-knowing. And He's known to be a real prick. I wouldn't trust Him. He ordered His own son to die for your sins, and what are they worth?

[buttslinger]

Your sin is PRIDE,Trish, that's a tough nut to crack.
It's not like I'm Kyle Reese trying to tell you that the Terminator is real and came back from the future, there are actually one or two fairly rational books that discuss God, as well as a few widely respected artists. I give you my solemn promise that you are stubborn and pigheaded on this issue.
Exhibit A? YOU!!!!
ha ha ha!!!

[trish]

Sorry, but I have very little pride. Some ambition perhaps, and a great deal of curiosity accompanied by a desire learn and understand; but I'm certainly not prideful. My sin is selfishness, pure and simple. I could definitely do more to be conscious of others around me, take on more responsibility and be more available to people, but I'm too absorbed in the things the really interest me - my partner, my immediate friends, my work and pornography. Life may eventually catch up with me and make me regret my ways, but I'm beyond the reach of the fictional fingers divine ghosts.

If I were you, I would've tried dropping that hard-drive into a black hole. Might've work, but Stephen Hawking says, "No, the universe remembers its entire content."

[buttslinger]

.... my partner, my immediate friends, my work and pornography.."

I'd say we're about 25% in agreement. As for that dark hard drive, I think there are quite a few people here who wouldn't want their nephew to hop on their computer and check their browsing history. People are the only animals that don't walk around naked.

[trish]

Amen to that.

[fred41]

Besides, God fucking well knows what was on that hard drive and you're still going to have to answer for it when you get to those golden arches...er...I mean St. Peter's gate.

Thanks Trish...This reminds me of all those idiots who use the rationale of "saying" they believe as an insurance policy for a 'possible' after life. "Better safe than sorry" they say...as if an actual all-knowing, supreme deity would be akin to the Burl Ives snowman in "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" - chuckling and singing away, and excusing you for any sins you may have committed, because on any given day , during a conversation you may have had on a city bus, you said - "I believe in God".
Like a being like that couldn't/wouldn't look into your heart/mind to see what was really going on there...and possibly toss that person further down than he would an honest unbeliever.

[Laphroaig]

880770

[Stavros]

"You don’t need to go to church to be a Christian. If you go to Taco Bell, that doesn’t make you a taco."
-Justin Bieber.
Be afraid, be very afraid.

[buttslinger]

I can understand why eighteen year old Catholics want to go out and break every rule that's been shoved down their throat,
and I can understand why nobody here wants to give a thumbs up to an egomaniac asshole who has insulted shemales, gays, blacks, whites, brits, knowitalls, Koreans, Stevegrooby, etc etc etc.


Hey maybe I'm struggling with my internal buttslinger here.

If you go to the doctor's office and while you're sitting there for twenty, thirty, fifty minutes, maybe you've noticed those receptionists huddled behind the counter filing their nails, staring into space or avoiding eye contact, gossiping, talking on the phone. While you're hurting. What is your perception?
Are they minimum wage losers, or are they pissed at their boss, do they not care, or do they have problems of their own?
Do you pass Judgement on them because they never really stepped up front and center and took the pain to become a nurse instead of a lazy receptionist? Do you forgive them, because they know not what they are doing?

I would say humans caring about the patients sitting in their waiting room would be the very basic entry level Bible Lesson, and GOD would be more along the lines of twelve years of medical school. While I don't understand much of what my Doctor might say, I don't think he's full of shit. I have some faith he knows what he's talking about.

[trish]

I trust my doctor no further than he is able to explain his treatment and procedures. I trust the pharmaceuticals I buy only insofar as I trust the FDA to test them (which is getting more difficult for them to do in the present political climate). I have no faith :(

[buttslinger]

I trust my doctor no further than he is able to explain his treatment and procedures. I trust the pharmaceuticals I buy only insofar as I trust the FDA to test them (which is getting more difficult for them to do in the present political climate). I have no faith :(

What's next, Doubting Thomas, you'll say that 50 million Bieber fans are delusional???!!!!??? What about tacos, no love for tacos??? Are you going to say the perfect taco does not exist because you've never tasted it?
Where is the Humanity??
There's a difference from being skeptical and being pigheaded. And there's a difference from having faith and being an airhead.
There's a big difference from what the Buddha says from what the Church Lady says.
The Father in Heaven is the new improved self, more centered, more forward.
When you sell out stadiums Trish, I might listen to you. But til then, I've got Bieber Fever, baby.


PS....I think Jesus stresses Faith more than Buddhism, say, because faith was all poor Jew peasants in Biblical times could afford, and Faith is one way to get to God. He was actually talking to Jews, and he believed Jews were the chosen people.
His Flock.
I can dig that the Church of Transsexuality and the Church of Latter Day saints aren't always on the same page.

[fred41]

Haven't been to a doctor much lately, but when I did go, I've rarely seen receptionists like that. Maybe on T.V. ...The last time I went to a Dentist, her receptionist was a guy who never came on time. He's gone now.
So...

[trish]

It's not pigheaded to want to understand a medical procedure before consenting to undergo it, nor is it pigheaded to insist on a surgeon with a good track record. Does the Platonic Taco even exist? Pride didn’t cause St. Thomas to doubt the resurrection of Jesus, lack of evidence did. He needed to see and touch the wounds. Had he not seen them (as the story goes) he probably wouldn’t be a saint. Frankly, I doubt the whole story. The dead dude with the wounds never rose, never walked; Thomas never saw the walking zombie and his doubt never relented. That's why I like kinda like him (Thomas that is). He's really sorta cute, don't you think?

[fred41]

looks a bit twinkish to me.

[trish]

looks a bit twinkish to me.Yeah. He's cute, but I can't imagine having brutish anal sex with him all night long. He'd probably end up crying.

[fred41]

Yeah. He's cute, but I can't imagine having brutish anal sex with him all night long. He'd probably end up crying.

..and , of course....he'd doubt himself.

[broncofan]

because faith was all poor Jew peasants in Biblical times could afford, and Faith is one way to get to God. He was actually talking to Jews, and he believed Jews were the chosen people.
His Flock.
.
But he had a very low approval rating with his intended audience. Mind you, we wouldn't hurt a hair on his head despite what his followers would have you believe. But let's just say we didn't think he was much more credible than the local taco vendor (his name was also Jesus but he pronounced it differently) and without being disrespectful we may have had doubts about his mother's chastity. It wasn't exactly an easy topic to bring up with young Jesus.

[buttslinger]

But he had a very low approval rating with his intended audience.

I feel his pain. I can't even get you heathens to be Bieber Believers. Looks like Sodom and Gommorah were not good choices to start my Ministry.
Well, as long as I'm here I might as well check out a couple of clubs. I can get back on the road to Damascus tomorrow.

[hippifried]

I trust my doctor no further than he is able to explain his treatment and procedures. I trust the pharmaceuticals I buy only insofar as I trust the FDA to test them (which is getting more difficult for them to do in the present political climate). I have no faith :(
Oh ye of little faith... You're going to piss off the Goblin. You could pick up a couple extra millennia in Purge a Tory for that kind of hubris alone. I fear for too much of your spirits being consumed, my love. Your sole could be filleted. Cum thee to the nearest Jizzuit monastery, & prostate yourself before the holee seed!
Bless you & remember that the number to "Dial-a-Prayer" is E cum speary 2 2 oh.

[Stavros]

Now that members of HA have had their fun with cartoons and put-downs it may be time to ask what is at the core of the problem many have with God and to pose the contrast between the God of Religion and the God of Science.

I think what people object to is not so much the idea that God, or A God, or Gods created the heavens and the earth, but the way in which religion has claimed the authority of God to create or impose moral judgements about and upon human behaviour, and in particular, the idea that there is some form of eternal damnation for those who do wrong, and eternal bliss for those that do right, and moreover, that a system of reward and punishment here on Earth can be justified even when that results in acts of cruelty to the person.

A God of science is not hard to understand, because Science cannot yet explain the existence of the Universe before the Big Bang, yet it could be rational to claim it is the work of 'God' without yet being able to define what God is, to use God as a functional term. It also removes the moral core in religion by ascribing to the God of Science observable phenomena and agreeing that just as life on Earth involves us, and the rivers and the seas, hurricanes and tornadoes, volcanic eruptions and beautiful flowers, meadows and snow-capped mountains, so in the Universe solar flares, gas clouds and ice storms on Venus may be considered a form of 'Life'.

Humans can thus be understood in terms of evolutionary theory where God may be the God of Creation, but not religion.

It is clear that with a few exceptions, all human societies at some point in their existence appear to have a concept of supernatural forces that they cannot explain, but which they believe exert a controlling influence over their environment, and it also appears to be the case that probably some time after the onset of the Neolithic Revolution human societies developed a 'moral cosmology' to explain who we are, how we got here, and what the best way to live might be. From this we derive the concepts and rules of reward and punishment that sustain life as individuals and as part of a social structure -from the obvious such as not putting your hands in the fire for too long, or immersing yourself in the river for too long; to knowing how to cook animal flesh so that it does not poison the system, to not having sexual intercourse with close relatives for fear of killing the family off over the generations.

Out of basic human survival (as Hippifried has suggested in another thread) rules based on 'common sense' and a form of 'science' before science, we can see how the natural and the supernatural combine. The fear of God thus becomes a critical form of social control, for if people believe that there is a Supreme Being, that this Being not only sees us always and everywhere, but judges us, then indeed, God is to be feared if the result of bad behaviour is eternal fire. And those who claim to be in communication with God or to be his 'servants' on Earth can (and have) exert[ed] real power over others.

It thus enables the Rationalist to adopt almost all of the rules and norms of behaviour bequeathed by Religion, while removing a religious God from the argument -thus, we believe murder is wrong, robbery is wrong, lying is wrong (most of the time), that infidelity is wrong (most of the time) and so on. Basic rules and norms with a few tweaks here and there. And even where there does not appear to be a Supreme Being -absent in Jain religion and Buddhism- both are closely related to Hinduism. Some Pygmy tribes in Central Africa appear to have no system of belief, or live through rituals, but this appears to be quite unusual for humans.

One remaining and intriguing difference remains: ritual. Why have humans developed rituals as a form of expression, of faith, of apology, of remorse, of celebration and so on? Why do religions in some cases expect their faithful to kneel in prayer, or to cover, or uncover their heads? Or to 'put off their shoes' when walking on 'hallowed ground'? What does it mean to be 'anointed' and how can water or oil be 'holy'? We have seen over the millenia how a crucial ritual like Sacrifice, has gone through phases -human, animal, human, animal -but do we know why Sacrifice is even so important? Rene Girard has argued it was an essential means whereby societies could resolve inner conflicts through ritual because in most cases shedding blood terrifies and is taboo but in a controlled setting it can channel and release pent up negative energies and allow societies to express rage without causing further violence than has already taken place.

Yet outside religion, secular societies maintain rituals. A man or a woman sings a song or makes a speech, and the collective response is to clap. Crowds sing an Anthem at the start of a football game -why?

The God of Science is functional, it has no moral compass. The God of Religion is commanding, and vengeful. If you believe, then one assumes the believer lives in fear of the Wrath of God. The non-believer need not fear, yet may feel guilty when violating basic rules and norms, being unfaithful to one's partner; drowning the cat to put it out of its aged misery. Finally, and worst of all, is the campaign to force one stream of thought and behaviour upon another, and that I think is where many people take their leave of religion altogether. Because even though we are all made of the same stuff, and often adhere to the same or a similar set of rituals, we can choose to be different.

[martin48]

Let’s start with agreeing some definitions

Deism is the belief in a creator, who made the Universe but does not take any personal interest in it -- doesn't require worship, answer prayers, judge behavior, or necessarily promise a life after death Deism is a benign belief, because there are no consequences for accepting or rejecting it.

Theism is the belief in an active, interventionist god who not only created the Universe (maybe, mainly for us), but also requires worship, answers prayers, judges sinners, and may have created a divine son or other entities to live among us. Theists are 100% certain their god(s) exist, and have faith in this without any objective, verifiable evidence. There are many theistic religions, each of which insists it is the only true one.

Athesium is the absence of belief in any gods. It is not a belief system and it is not a religion. Based on the absence of any evidence for the existence of any god(s) where such evidence should be if god(s) did exist, many atheists are 99.9% certain that no god(s) exist. But they may be open to the slight possibility they could be wrong and would be willing to accept the existence of god(s) if convincing objective, verifiable evidence were to appear. Therefore they do not have faith in the nonexistence of god(s). They simply have no belief in any gods.

Agnosticism is a formal uncertainty about the existence or nonexistence of god(s). The agnostic asserts it is impossible to determine existence or nonexistence. Theists sometimes try to tell atheists that because they are not 100% certain god(s) don't exist, they are agnostics. This is not true. An atheist has no belief in god(s). That is not the same as believing it is impossible to tell if god(s) exist or not.

Agreed?

Now, we can continue ...

[trish]

Crowds sing an Anthem at the start of a football game -why?Many fans ask the question but to no avail.

If I understand correctly this “God of Science” is the Enlightenment vision that led some deists to substitute Nature for the various notions of the Divine. I’m not a defender of Nature’s God, but I do understand that quite a few of the early deists and philosophers whose work influenced the deists (e.g. Locke and Spinoza) were deeply concerned with moral philosophy and conceived the notion of Natural Rights. I think it’s unfair to accuse them of not having a moral compass; especially when the Christian’s of the same period seemed to revel in the notion that God can toss a non-Christian into the pits of Hell to burn forever and ever for the sin of disbelief. It is as you say, “The God of Religion is commanding, and vengeful.”


Finally, and worst of all, is the campaign to force one stream of thought and behaviour upon another, and that I think is where many people take their leave of religion altogether.
You are probably right. It is a theme that the proselytizing New Atheists effectively play upon. It is a note that Nietzsche struck over a century ago when he identified in religion the will of believers to assert their power over the most intimate thoughts and behaviors of others.

Readers of these threads already know that I subscribe to neither the God (or the gods and goddesses) of Science nor to the God (or gods and goddesses) of Religion. We humans are lost and alone in a vast uneasy sea: we have a compass, but no absolute and rock steady platform upon which to place it.


...even though we are all made of the same stuff, and often adhere to the same or a similar set of rituals, we can choose to be different.
Very nicely said; and a very nice post too. Thanks for taking the time to write and share.

[trish]

And thank you Martin for the definitions. I think many people are confused about what it is atheists don't believe. (I wrote my response to Stavros and posted it before I read your post...otherwise I might've incorporated it in my reply).

[buttslinger]

When I think "God fearin' man" I think Gary Cooper riding his mule with his rifle through the pouring rain on a dark Kentucky road, with murder on his mind and blindness in his heart, and then lightning strikes and splits his rifle and kills his mule and he has an Enlightenment of sorts. (Sgt York)

There is a lyric from an old song the Grateful Dead sing at the end of their concerts..."I love you, but Jesus loves you best" (Goodnight)
so to me that's like Martin's breakdown of the various levels of God, how close we are to God. Jesus is a better authority on God than I am, just like Picasso is a better authority on Art than I am, but I can still have my view of God and Art, it's just not as good.
I tried to read a book on Goethe once, it referred to so many other heavy duty religious books and authors of his time, I was completely lost. Religion was much more on the forefront then.
It wasn't until the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire that being gay or kinky became a bad thing, Mastering the seven deadly sins meant denying them, unlike this crew, where the latest sin goes on the weekend "TO DO" list. haw haw haw.
Finally, "The path is the goal" and if you're not interested, then that's that.
Life is Life, an experience, an outlook, a day. If God is a bringdown, then by all means, leave God in the weeds and get back to your life. You can't think outside the box til you know what the box is.
Van Gogh said Jesus was an artist of the flesh. Rather than using paint and canvas to focus on some long forgotten promise most people that claim Enlightenment get there through a pretty heavy duty daily regimen of Meditation. Breath control and yoga exercises, boring repetition. In the Middle East they pray every day. Yawn.

[hippifried]

I don't think I like the term "new athiest". What's new about them? Every bent has its fanatic prosylitizing "wayists". Don't worry. I won't try to psychoanalyze them here. But maybe the wayists should have their own niche in this discussion. Might make it a bit easier to distinguish the catagories we're trying to establish.

Oh... We keep talking & hearing about agnostics, but not gnostics themselves. If memory serves, these are folks who are sure there's some spiritual supreme being, & actlvely seek its nature outside the strictures of dogma. I'll bet most of us know someone who says they're "spiritual but not religious". Another niche?

[trish]

I don't think I like the term "new athiest". What's new about them?I think they're fireproof; they're not being burned at the stake. I agree the name is a bit irritating to those who have been atheists since before ever hearing of Harris et. al. I think the big difference is they're speaking out and writing best sellers. What decade was the first to have a best seller on atheism? They can easily be accused of proselytizing (as I sometimes do) but one can also object that they are merely and finally pushing back against the influences of religious fundamentalism that constrains our politics and stifles the lives of even non-believers. Besides accusing them of being a bit proselytizing, I also thank them for creating an atmosphere (at least here in the U.S.) that has allowed atheists to come out of the closet...not that we'll have an openly atheistic president, Congressman, Senator or Supreme Court Justice anytime soon.

[Fyusian]

Firstly to Martin:

Agnosticism is a wide spectrum. Not all agnostics think it's impossible to determine the existence or non-existence of a god. You have agnostic-theists who hold a belief in God but are uncertain and agnostic-atheists who hold that there might not be a god but are uncertain so those theists who make those claims aren't exactly wrong. You do also have agnostics who think it's impossible to determine the existence or non-existence of a god too.

Atheism arguably is a belief in some. Not all atheists "hold a disbelief" some are gnostic atheists who are 100% certain there is no god despite there being no empirical evidence supporting this statement, therefore their claim is a belief based on faith and their own perception of the universe (just remember, some see the fine-tuning as argument for God's existence and from a philosophical perceptive, this can be debated).

Theism is different for different people. Some theists are certain God exists, others simply hold a belief that God exists but theism has nothing to do with worship, the following of religious rituals, belief in an after-life or prayer and most theists won't make an arrogant statement saying that they are 100% certain that God exists. This is often seen in many debates, the theist says "I believe in God" whilst the atheist says "there is no god" so which one is claiming 100% absolutely certainty? Not the theist.

Also what's the difference between being 99% certain and 100% certain? The former seems a cop-out for atheists to refuse the categorization of their worldview as a belief or that they are claiming they are absolutely sure.

Don't confuse theism with religion and even theistic religions don't all the share the same attributes in common. The Sadducees were Jews who denied the existence of an afterlife and judgement. In fact there's Christian sects and Progressive Jewish sects today who share beliefs like these still.

Now to Stavros:

I think you've got many things right. Especially the part about human desire for rituals. This is all part of our evolution. Also the point on the hatred for religion is an interesting point, I think that too is what many self-identified atheists object to really rather than the concept of a god.

Among the liberals and LGBT community, this disbelief of God seems to arise from hatred towards religion. Liberals see the bad religion did in the past (and still continues to do) and the LGBT have themselves actively experienced judgements, persecution or discrimination from religion so it's no surprise so many of them hate religion according to the statistics.

This is where the statistics become interesting, lots of those in the LGBT community, at least in the west, identify as atheist or non-religious so they became disbelievers because of what they saw and experienced of religion? Isn't their disbelief then emotional? Perhaps they can't believe in a "pure god" as they get sodomized brutally or suck cock or some nonsense because traditionally, most religions are against such practices and as they're sucking cock they're thinking "no god can exist, I LOVE THIS, COCK IS MY RELIGION!" in an effort to reduce guilt that might be brought on by continued religious belief? But then surely these aren't explicit atheists but anti-theists whose hatred is emotional?

Do some of these people who reject religion really disbelief in a god or just religion's concept of a god? I've debated with some who then turn around and say "well actually I do believe a god could exist but I just hate religion and don't think this [insert religion's deity here] could exist" so then these are anti-theists (which can refer to those who oppose religion but not belief in a god as well as those who oppose belief in a god).

Of course there are those of the LGBT who continue to follow religion, some noting that Jesus himself (the central and fundamentally, the core part of Christianity) never even spoke upon homosexuality being a sin, that notion came from Moses and later Paul. I don't know much Islam to know how the LGBT believers in that community reconcile their faith with their sexuality or lifestyle.

I've noticed many atheists debate against God's existence arguing about the evils of religion etc but few will argue against God's actual existence and seem to think when we're debating about "God" we're talking about the Judeo-Christian concept of God so they rage on about "God" being a "vindictive, bipolar, murderer" blah blah. At this point I have to point out my own god is basically a unknowable god who I believe probably does nothing but watches us (which I guess is deism but I don't deny if God interacts with the universe at all in some subtle way so I would personally label myself as a theist).

Just don't use your hatred of religion to argue against the existence of a god. There's no reason why you can't disbelieve in religion but hold the belief that there is still a god.

I've got nothing against the religious though, so long as they're tolerant, don't commit violence etc then they can have whatever views and beliefs that they want. I believe in freedom of speech and belief. There's a difference between hating gays and simply thinking homosexuality is wrong. I know many disagree or think that these religious people are still bigots but then what do you make of people who say vegetarianism is wrong? These people don't hate vegans, they just think their lifestyle is wrong, same with these type of religious people and therefore I have nothing against them even if I disagree with them.

You know, I've used prostitutes, I've lied, I've stolen and many religious people would condemn my lifestyle and say I'm going to Hell if I don't change my ways but I'm not going to hate them or their religion, they're entitled to those views even if I don't believe in Hell or their version of Hell. Yeah I see the bad of religion, it's caused deaths, discrimination and persecution but I can also see the good where it's caused great acts of charity (in fact the largest charities are still religious) and has been used to argue for tolerance.

People go on and on about religion doing bad things but forget the good. Some atheists think they're freeing the religious from a life from blind faith and delusions but what are they bringing them too? A new life of delusions in the digital age where worship of a supernatural god is replaced with a material god such as a celebrity idol, sport, lifestyle and social networking? This is different from religious devotion how? There are people who worship the likes of Kim Kardashian or refer to their twitter idols for advice on life. Now I don't know about you but I'd rather have someone preaching the words of a wise 2,000 old Jew to me than the words of Jaden Smith...

Even the atheists in this "new atheism" movement are religious in their own right having their own forums, meetups and almost religious devotion to atheist speakers even going as far to use pictures of people like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens on their social networking profiles which they dedicate to spreading the ideals of atheism. There is even symbolism for atheism itself (the A that is inside an atom) that many atheists embrace.

Dawkins knows this religiosity of these atheists (although he refuses to directly remark upon it) which is why he rallies his followers on twitter even giving them instructions, he also is like the religious preachers of America, he has his own site that you can join the "inner circle" (which is aptly named the Dawkins Circle) of by "donating" through either monthly or annual payments and by doing so you get a chance to meet the man himself. So what we have here is a atheist cult of personality built around Richard that everyone but these atheist "Dawkinites" are too blind to see.

At the end of the day, despite what either groups may claim, no one truly knows all there is to know about the universe. The atheists try to champion science and say "see here, there is no god even though we haven't explored all of our own galaxy let alone the universe and beyond to know anything like this, I'm going to make this absolute claim anyway" and then the religious "my scripture is absolutely right and knows the answers to everything" in reality we're all in the same boat of knowing precious little even these so-called scientists are in that boat.

We haven't even got out of our own solar system for God's sake and there's arrogant people saying "there's no god beyond this universe."

So in this regard I think the atheists can be as arrogant as the religious if not more so. If the multiverse exists, then who is say what this means? Current science speculates that there's different dimensions, realms and universes where the laws of physics could be different. This means realms that we could not comprehend exist perhaps alongside beings that we could not comprehend whom would appear supernatural to us. One could even argue our own universe or another could be alive itself and then the argument falls down to not "does a god exist?" but "how do you define a god?" If a god is a creator then for all we know there could be an infinite number of extra-dimensional beings that fit this description. The multiverse says our universe is a bubble in a bigger bubble filled with other bubbles but what if the multiverse itself is just one more bubble in another?

All I can say is we should keep an open mind. If you want to say you disbelieve or believe in a god or gods, fine but when you say "I know for certain" you've got a lot to prove, in fact to "know for certain" you have to be omniscient and therefore God himself.

Oh and another thing, why the hatred and mockery for people like Jesus? You hate his followers (and arguably only the extremists) not him. If you read The Bible, Jesus was himself critical of religion! So it makes it hilarious that I see such hatred towards him from those who hate religion today. Jesus himself criticized the priests of his time as hypocrites, he criticized their traditions and rituals, their love for money as well as their intolerance, he himself refused to obey many of the laws of the Old Testament including the stoning of a woman who committed adultery even though Judaic laws commanded for her death. It's easy to read Jesus in a modern setting attacking the Catholic Church (the modern day Pharisees) and organized religion in the same way once again.

The central teaching of Jesus is this: love your fellow man. This is in fact how he summed up the 10 commandments (along with a love for God).

So if we had Jesus back in today's world, who do you'd think he'd be most critical of? People in the LGBT community or the religious? He might consider homosexuality a sin but like with the adulteress, his real ire would be directed towards the religious hypocrites who judge these people thinking that they themselves are perfect. Jesus recognized asexuality "for there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother's womb" even going as far to praise it (possibly owing to him being asexual himself) so for all we knew he recognized other sexualities as being something nobody can help or at least not something to judge someone on.

I don't believe the future will be without religion and despite some arguments from atheists or secularists, a society without religion isn't any better. We've seen this in communist and socialist states. People will always have their ideologies that they'd be willing to fight and kill for, religious or secular. I think the future lies in unity. Unitarian Universalism has this right, combine all the good beliefs into one and be tolerant towards all. Many people of today's society already have this philosophy, even atheists, the thing about Unitarian Universalism is that it's neither theistic or atheistic, you can be a part of it regardless of your belief in God.

Long ass post I know...

[Caleigh]

ag·nos·tic



[agˈnästik]



NOUN


a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.

[hippifried]

Y'all're tryin' to rewrite the dictionary to make it fit your arguments. It's not as complicated as you try to make it. Gnostic means searching for spiritual knowlege. Theist means believing in a god or gods. The prefix "a" simply means not. Atheist (long a, stress 2nd syllable) just means not theist. Agnostic (long a, silent g, stress 2nd syllable) just means not gnostic. I am both atheist & agnostic, & I resent my thought processes being defined using the blather of fanatics who don't know anything either. I'm not confused or unsure what to believe. I just can't buy the ancient tales of some omnicient goblin or that there's any klnd of spiritual knowlege to be had. It's not based in hatred either. So stop with all these lame assumptions & generalizations already. Please.

[trish]

As Hippiefried and others have made clear the suffix “a” means “not” or “without.” One who is not a theist is an atheist. You may say of every atheist, “That person does not believe that such and such a deity exists.” Some atheists may also hold particular beliefs which logically entail their atheism, but the definition doesn’t require it.

Even that latter sort of person may stand upon fairly secure epistemological ground depending on the nature of his or her negative assertion. For example, even though there are infinitely many numbers and no one can list them all, a mathematician can say with confidence that none of them is the largest prime number. Even though we haven’t explored the entire universe, and much of what we wish to know about it remains obscure and beyond our reach, astrophysicists may say with confidence that of all the luminous stars in existence none have a mass smaller than that of Earth’s mass. Such an astrophysicist may acknowledge her knowledge is not absolute, but she might also remind us that the whole notion of absolute knowledge is plagued with paradoxes and ambiguities.

It is not the obscurity of the universe that makes theism problematic, but the obscurity of theism itself. When asked, “Are you a believer?” you establish the question’s context before you answer, right? Are you being asked, “Do you believe in the God of Abraham as espoused in the First Testament?” Or are you being asked, “Do you believe in Thor?” Perhaps the question is, “Do you believe in the Cause without a cause and that uncaused Cause is God?” Or, “Do you believe the Universe Itself is God and We are part of Him?” You may have different assessments of all of these queries.

My answer to all of these questions and many others like them is, “No, I don’t believe that.” As very young child I approached these sorts of questions with wonder and if not belief, a propensity to believe. These days, I approach them without belief. I think it’s only fair then to say I’m an atheist. Do I believe in God? Define God. If it a God I haven’t thought about before, I’ll think about it. Given the record though, the answer to the question will likely be, “No.”

[broncofan]

I think they're fireproof; they're not being burned at the stake. I agree the name is a bit irritating to those who have been atheists since before ever hearing of Harris et. al. I think the big difference is they're speaking out and writing best sellers. What decade was the first to have a best seller on atheism? They can easily be accused of proselytizing (as I sometimes do) but one can also object that they are merely and finally pushing back against the influences of religious fundamentalism that constrains our politics and stifles the lives of even non-believers. Besides accusing them of being a bit proselytizing, I also thank them for creating an atmosphere (at least here in the U.S.) that has allowed atheists to come out of the closet...not that we'll have an openly atheistic president, Congressman, Senator or Supreme Court Justice anytime soon.
I rarely highlight someone's post just to say one part I like, but this is how I feel. I am not saying there is no such thing as "new atheist", but typically the word is used in a lazy fashion as a pejorative. It almost has no value to call them "new atheists" if the only thing new about them is that they are more vocal in their criticism of the excesses of religion and more eager to express the value of non-belief in a deity. If the practice of religion were invariably a benign and personal endeavor, their aggressive expression of non-belief would be puzzling and unnecessary.

I've also heard some people say stuff like "the new atheists are extremists just like religious fundamentalists." I have not seen anything from them that is dogmatic or at all analogous to religious fundamentalism. They are strident in their criticism, but they are trying to identify problems that flow directly from belief in various doctrines. I actually think that many new atheists have in good faith pointed out that religious dogmas frequently interfere with the public's ability to engage in reasoned discourse on a broad range of social issues.

[broncofan]

They can easily be accused of proselytizing
I want to focus on this part Trish. I agree they are more solicitous and sell their viewpoint more aggressively. But I think what distinguishes religious proselytizing is that the religious are selling people on personal, spiritual benefits. They say, "believe Jesus is the savior (or some equivalent) to save your immortal soul." They want you to believe in something not because they are under threat from non-belief or competing religious beliefs, but for belief's sake. It is an aggressive intrusion into the lives of people who pose no threat to them, disguised as altruism.

New atheists are trying to sell people on the social and collective benefits that accrue to everyone from reasoning without constraints. Everyone who believes something will want others to believe it if they think the alternative interferes with their life. If a creationist wants intelligent design or some other dressed up form of creationism to be taught in schools, it soon becomes an imperative to identify the big picture problem. The big picture problem is that people allow their personal religious philosophies to interfere with policy, which secularists believe should be based on a rational interpretation of the available evidence.

[trish]

I want to focus on this part Trish. I agree they are more solicitous and sell their viewpoint more aggressively. But I think what distinguishes religious proselytizing is that the religious are selling people on personal, spiritual benefits. They say, "believe Jesus is the savior (or some equivalent) to save your immortal soul." They want you to believe in something not because they are under threat from non-belief or competing religious beliefs, but for belief's sake. It is an aggressive intrusion into the lives of people who pose no threat to them, disguised as altruism.

New atheists are trying to sell people on the social and collective benefits that accrue to everyone from reasoning without constraints. Everyone who believes something will want others to believe it if they think the alternative interferes with their life. If a creationist wants intelligent design or some other dressed up form of creationism to be taught in schools, it soon becomes an imperative to identify the big picture problem. The big picture problem is that people allow their personal religious philosophies to interfere with policy, which secularists believe should be based on a rational interpretation of the available evidence.

The goal of proselytization is to convert. In the case of religion it would be to convert people from one religion to another or (as in the case of large non-denominational Christian churches) from one Church to another. The explicit motivation behind proselytization is to save the the souls of those to be converted. On the face of it, it seems to be a highly altruistic endeavor. The missionary’s soul is already saved, but her mission is to save the souls of as many strangers as she can.

Insofar as atheism is neither a religion nor a belief the proselytization of the “New Atheists” (if indeed they do proselytize - they do aim to “educate”) could only have the aim to convert people from a particular theistic belief to non-belief; i.e. so sow doubt. I think the fairly explicit motivation behind the books and websites of the “New Atheists” is to undercut the hold of religious fundamentalism on people, our schools, laws and political institutions. On the face of it, an altruistic endeavor.

In my mind, the difference is that one is nonsense and the other a worthy goal. But I’m not sure if that’s the crucial difference between proselytizing and educating.

As long as the aim of both is to spread, I have see them as nearly equivalent. The only real difference is content.

Perhaps the best we can do is take whatever it is we think is knowledge and make it available to people, be there to explain it and explain why we are enthusiastic about it. That is a noble goal. Expanding your numbers: not so much.

But wait. By this criteria isn’t all political campaigning ignoble? That can’t be, because democracy depends upon changing peoples minds and gathering votes. Speaking truth in the public square to power. You see what a quandary I’m in?

I’m left (right now - I’ll change my mind in an hour or two) with one conclusion. Content makes the difference between proselytization and education. One spreads memes and the other teaches critical thinking. The difference between teaching and indoctrination is the former encourages students to think and to examine everything - including the conclusions and methods of the teacher - with a critical eye (toward improving it or even undoing it all and starting over again)...the later reinforces the rote and amplifies the meme.

It remains for individuals to decide what Richard Dawkins is doing, or what Pat Robertson is doing, or what Pope Francis is doing.

[hippifried]

Proselytizing is proselytizing, regardless of who's doing it or why. It's "Wayism". They're all preaching "THE WAY, MY WAY, OUR WAY, THE ONLY WAY", etc... Wayists sell memes. Let's face it; a huge part of what we believe or think we know is memetic. All points of view are up for debate because there's really no such thing as "ONE WAY". If there was, there would be no need for memetic competition, or memes at all for that matter. Fanatic fundamentalism is extreme wayism, measured by the amount of intolerance toward memetic competition. Content & motive really don't have much to do with it, IMO.

The problem I have with fundamentalists is not that they want me to think as they do. But rather that they want me to do as they think.
~ plageurized from a t-shirt I saw in passing ~

[trish]

Proselytizing is proselytizing, regardless of who's doing it or why.Never claimed otherwise. My claim is that some teaching amounts to something akin to proselytization and some does not. My suggestion is that the difference is in the lessons: do they include self-criticism and illustrate the principles of critical thinking in general? A high school physics lesson on friction might just give the usual formula for friction (the frictional force on a body sliding down an incline is proportional to that component of the body's weight normal to the incline) or one could attempt to explain where that approximation comes from, why it's only an approximation, discuss its domain of application and have the students suggest other factors that might play a role outside that domain. The former approach is memetic and indoctrinates students into a set, formulaic way of thinking, the latter is self-critical and deviates from the one-and-only-ONE-WAY approach to the issue. In the former the meme is the approach and the content. In the latter, the many-ways idea and self-criticism is both the approach and the content.

Does Dawkins The Selfish Gene proselytize or educate? You have to read it for its content to find out. Does Pat Robertson's 700 Club proselytize or educate? You have to watch a few shows to find out. Both will of course maintain that they have the correct solution to a certain sort of problem. Do they reason you through the solution, contrast it with other proposals, compare it with observation & experiment, discuss what sorts of future observations would confirm and what sorts of observations would disconfirm their hypothesis?

I'm wondering if doubt isn't one the more important elements of an education. One needs to know how to doubt, test, refine and doubt again. Doubt is an essential part of real confidence.

[hippifried]

Sorry Trish. That doesn't work. Proselytizing is an attempt to covert a person or people to a specific doctrine or point of view. Noone's contesting the idea that friction affects a downhill slide, or that there's a way to figure out a formula to measure the effect. This is about tolerance or intolerance toward differing points of view. It's that egoistic contention between memes that causes so much trouble, not the teaching techniques.

The arguments over technique can become contentious. But most of that is short lived & silly to start with. I remember the big public argument over whether to scrap the "see-say" method of learning to read in favor of the phonics system. At 7 or 8, I understood what the argument was, but not why, since both methods were used in my class. It didn't last long. But the memory came back when I saw the scene in Gulliver's Travels where war was breaking out over a disagreement about which end of the egg to break. Silliness seems to be an age old problem. Common sense consensus usually wins out over such nonsense. But memetic arguments over politics or religion present a different dynamic because there's usually a dearth of factual information to base the most contentious opinions on.
I guess that's why we have this separate board. Right? Butt don't worry. Nobody gets left out. The general board still gets to deal with all the insipid bullshit over who's gay or not.

[trish]

Noone's contesting the idea that friction affects a downhill slide, or that there's a way to figure out a formula to measure the effect.Not the point of the example. Suppose someone wrote a book about (say friction, or the methods of dating geological features, or how natural selection operates at the genetic level) and that one of the premises of the book was that one has to look at all seriously competing views - including the ones the book may be endorsing - and judge them on their relative merits; i.e. their explanatory value, their internal consistency and their consistency with observation and experiment. Suppose also the book examined and clarified the conditions under which its conclusions would fail. Suppose doubting, checking, testing, eliminating inconsistencies and doubting again is not just a technique of presentation but one of the main points of the book. Would such a book be an example of proselytization?

Is Dawkins', Selfish Gene such a book or does it fail in that regard.

For that matter, does your post against "wayism" support (by way of its content) a single doctrine: the doctrine of "anti-wayism?" Is "anti-wayism" a kind of "wayism," and at the same time intolerant of "wayism," or does it somehow escape the charge of proselytization and the charge of intolerance? I'm inclined to say the latter, but I'm not sure. You seem to be saying the former, or am I reading you wrong?

[hippifried]

For the most part, I find broad wayism to be silly, unmanagable, sometimes dangerous, & an infinite source of entertainment. We all have our own strongly held opinions. My post was merely an explanation of my perceptions. I try to keep the scope of my own proselytations & wayist viewpoints as narrow as possible.

I've heard of the selfish gene theory in passing. I think I vaguely understand the concept. But I've never actually read Dawkins' thesis, & probably won't. (Cateracts) The little bio info I've seen though, tells me he's an activist in the spread of atheism. By default, that makes him a proselytor. That's how you change beliefs or opinions in a politic manner. The term itself is neutral. We all do it to some extent. The techniques of the argument can make it more or less effective, but that doesn't change what you're doing.

[martin48]

Firstly, I think we need to separate Dawkins’s thesis as expressed in The Selfish Gene and his very proactive activities in condemning religion. For me, Christopher Hitchens was the far superior commentator on the failings of Abrahamic religions. I quote:

“Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.”

The underlying concept embodied in The Selfish Gene is very simple and could have been expressed in 30 pages and not 300. It is a pity that Dawkins choose the adjective “selfish” – as in no way did he imply emotions or intent to the inanimate gene. He was expressing a gene-centred view of evolution as opposed to focussing on the organism and the group. The genes that survive, that is reproducs, are the ones that embody the organism most likely to survive. It was not a radically new idea.

[martin48]

,,,,,

[buttslinger]

You guys are overthinking this.
There is a pivotal moment in all Religions where you "step out of your skin suit" and become aware God, and the path to God.
The path and the God are universal for everyone, and while the goal is suddenly very easy to understand, the work is just beginning. The Mountain doesn't come to Mohammed.
The path, and God, are not seen with visual light, they register by their actual energy.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

[trish]

You guys are overthinking this.
...The path, and God, are not seen with visual light, they register by their actual energy.You're under-thinking this.



There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. That I can believe. Horatio was a protestant humanist. The only ghost in his philosophy was the Holy One.

[buttslinger]

You're under-thinking this.



The man says you gotta give action to get action.

[Stavros]

For me, Christopher Hitchens was the far superior commentator on the failings of Abrahamic religions. I quote:
“Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.”


The quote from Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great. Religion Poisons Everything illustrates the weakness of Hitchens as an intellectual, a man who in the course of his lifetime claims to have been a Trotskyist in his youth and by middle age endorsed regime change in Iraq, possibly because of his association with a Shi'a crook callled Ahmad Chalabi, a most unusual friendship to have for a rationalist like Hitchens. A man who dismissed religion but was married in a Greek Orthodox church, who, in effect, smoked and drank himself to death as if life had no real meaning or purpose if it was not shrouded in smoke or dunked in booze -hardly a role model for rationalists.

Among the confusing statements that Hitchens makes in order to justify his relentless attacks on religion, one finds the following -
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.
-The problem with reason is that Hitchens is unwilling or unable to recognise that to many believers, their religion is entirely rational, indeed, to such people not to believe that God created the heavens and the earth is irrational -what to Hitchens is a sequence of events that (presumably) starts with the Big Bang to others is the work of God, or, without God meaningless chaos.

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul.
-It seems almost incredible that Hitchens can make this statement and conveniently ignore the extent to which the authors he mentions relied on 'the mythical morality tales of the holy books' for their language, their metaphors, their stories - does he think George Eliot got the Zionism of Daniel Deronda solely from political pamphlets? Tolstoy's religious faith is wished away for what reason? Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, he was a regular church-goer both in Stratford and in London and for a time lodged with Huguenot refugees from France, and there are numerous allusions to the Bible and Christian morality in the plays, particularly As You Like It, and The Tempest. Hitchens wants to dismiss religion and its texts, yet allows them to re-enter his cultural life through the literature of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, through the music of Bach and Beethoven without seeing a contradiction in any of this.

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.
-Where does Hitchens think ethics come from? From the same mental processes and social interactions as religion, is the answer, from devising ways in which to explain who we are, how we got here, and what the purpose of our lives might be. Incredibly, there is no disputing the vast numbers in history murdered or ostracised or injured by religion, but Marxism and the crimes committed in its name have been just as bad, perhaps because the rationalist Marx larded so much of his text with allusions from secular and religious literature? (cf SS Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature).
The place rationalism plays in mass murder has been evident since Plato's Republic where the philosopher presents an eminently reasonable case for a dictatorship, benign or otherwise, but still a dictatorship. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan also uses reason to argue for an absolute ruler who guarantees the security of the population through a 'state of government' but who is assumed to act in so perpetually rational a manner that no dispute could ever disrupt the practice of government (or else!). Lenin's creation of the vanguard party uses rationalism to create a ruthless political machine in which the centre issues commands that cadres pass on to the 'masses', a machinery of indoctrination, ostracism, segregation, oppression, incarceration and death that Stalin used to slaughter his way through history.
Just as Hitchens is correct to claim a weakness of religion is [I]sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need, the Communist Party played the same role as the source of absolute and unchanging facts.

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness.
-Did not Hitchens hit the bars of London and New York as often as he could to drown his inner demons?

We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine
-But atheists value the work of Charles Darwin higher than that of say, Cardinal Newman; and Hitchens I suspect did have a hierarchy of his 'greats' in which Shakespeare ranked higher than Ben Jonson, so his own rationalism consists of a hierarchy, and it is policed -by Hitchens and people like him.

I could go on at length about this mildly interesting man, but it does not really grapple with the way in which thought and behaviour has evolved over 4 million or so years or however long it has taken for humans to emerge and become so articulate. It is absurd to deny the moral cosmology that emerged probably in the Neolithic period as the foundation of human thought, from it we have religion and science, and I agree that organised religion -like organised politics- presents as many problems as it solves, but these are challenges to be met head on, not to be dismissed because one dislikes the manner in which some people kill and their reasons for it. I am sure even Hitchens would agree that human societies have systems of punishment and reward related to human behaviour, whether the judgements of what is good or bad behaviour is endorsed by reigion or 'secular' law (if there is such a thing).

Because Hitchens, endorsing regime change in Iraq, fatally endorsed acts of violence which in other contexts he is appalled by, as if it mattered how Abdul lost his head rather than that he lost it at all, and if it was chopped off so Hitchens could sleep more soundly, so be it?

A sizable chunk of Hitchens screed can be found here-
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/features/2007/god_is_not_great/religion_poisons_everything.html

[broncofan]

-Where does Hitchens think ethics come from? From the same mental processes and social interactions as religion, is the answer, from devising ways in which to explain who we are, how we got here, and what the purpose of our lives might be.

That was a very powerful and thorough argument. But I think we should consider at least one difference between secular ethics and religious ethics. A secularist may latch on to certain bad ideas and have difficulty letting go of them, but there is nothing to keep him from revising his views in the face of new evidence or changing conditions.

The authors of holy books may have thought about ethical issues in a sincere way, but they decided to take the Machiavellian approach of creating allegories and adopting rules that are supposed to be the word of God. So, the only thing someone who inherited this doctrine as part of their tradition can do is ignore what they don't like. Their answer for laws that do not make sense but are the word of God is cognitive dissonance.

[Stavros]

That was a very powerful and thorough argument. But I think we should consider at least one difference between secular ethics and religious ethics. A secularist may latch on to certain bad ideas and have difficulty letting go of them, but there is nothing to keep him from revising his views in the face of new evidence or changing conditions.

The authors of holy books may have thought about ethical issues in a sincere way, but they decided to take the Machiavellian approach of creating allegories and adopting rules that are supposed to be the word of God. So, the only thing someone who inherited this doctrine as part of their tradition can do is ignore what they don't like. Their answer for laws that do not make sense but are the word of God is cognitive dissonance.

Yes and no. The problem is that people are turned on, or turned off by the certainty of religion and the proposition that everything we need to know is already known and written down for us, and that nothing can change. We are led to believe that it is the capacity for new thinking and change that enables Science to progress, yet a substantial part of scientific knowledge is based on the same principle that we have established facts about the world we live in and that they cannot change, or that if they did it would be because of some hitherto unexpected phenomenon -gravity would be an example.

Repetition establishes facts, to a degree, the orthopraxy of religion may be more conducive to 'social control' as the faith itself, just as science repeats itself until something goes wrong. In both cases, pragmatic behaviour violates rules and often, over time, changes what are supposed to be rules that cannot be changed. Murder and infidelity both take place in violation of Christian, Judaic and Islamic laws, the best a human can do is make an excuse and apologise, or not as the case may be, and take their punishment.

On a deeper level, it is clear that modern societies do not obey religious law -Jews no longer stone adulterers to death, and even in those Muslim countries where this happens, it is rare and I believe most Muslims think it is simply wrong. The science that explains homosexuality to be irrational is almost impeccable -if everyone were homosexual, the human race would die out. The prospect of life being freed from the conception-gestation-birth process anchored in the womb and moved to a test-tube or laboratory may remove the fixed certainty that for life to exist one needs a man and a woman.

Science relies on fixed categories or it cannot function, just as you assume the car you parked outside last night will work when you turn the key this morning. The fixed reality of gender has been challenged, successfully I think, since the 1960s but primarily at the level of social role where the definitions of homosexuality for example, have changed, and where the concept of being transgendered is different from being intersexed, which one may say is a scientific rather than a social category to explain anomalies in the formation of the human. But consider the fracas over Germane Greer's consistent attacks on transexuality and what it means to be female, or 'feminine' -is Greer arguing for a science that does not and indeed, ought not to change just to accommodate a minority of people who 'choose' to swap genders?

Science and religion are not far apart as some think, rigid thinking is found in both. 'Immutable laws' are found in both. Fanatics and fierce debates with denunciations and character assassinations are found in both, and just as the founders of modern science were arrested by the religious state, often ended up in gaol, or burned at the stake, science has subjected humans to appalling cruelty in the laboratories of the Third Reich, and only some of it was driven by the bogus science of race.

Thus science replaces religion, Darwin is to science what Moses was to religion. And so on.

[trish]

Yes and no. The problem is that people are turned on, or turned off by the certainty of religion and the proposition that everything we need to know is already known and written down for us, and that nothing can change. We are led to believe that it is the capacity for new thinking and change that enables Science to progress, yet a substantial part of scientific knowledge is based on the same principle that we have established facts about the world we live in and that they cannot change, or that if they did it would be because of some hitherto unexpected phenomenon -gravity would be an example.

In other words, we have well substantiated claims about world which we are reluctant to modify unless further investigate of the world warrants a revision.

You mention gravity as an example. Newton’s inverse square law was such a success, it became the paradigm example of a scientific theory. It quantitatively predicted the orbits the planets, the moon and other satellites, a number of astroids, the rise and fall of the tides and more...with one exception: the rate of advance of Mercury’s perihelion. The prediction was off by 40 seconds of arc per century. The inverse square law was not abandoned, but explanations were sought. Irregularities in the Sun’s gravitational field within the orbit of Mercury due perhaps in irregularities in the Sun’s shape or distribution of mass. Perhaps there were undiscovered planetoids perturbing Mercury’s orbit. Newton’s inverse square law was bested when Einstein’s theory of gravitation accurately retrodicted the advance of Mercury’s perihelion. Do we now take Einstein’s theory to be established fact instead of Newton’s? What has been established is the domain of Newton’s applicability. What has not yet been established is the domain of applicability of Einstein’s theory.


On a deeper level, it is clear that modern societies do not obey religious law -Jews no longer stone adulterers to death, and even in those Muslim countries where this happens, it is rare and I believe most Muslims think it is simply wrong. The science that explains homosexuality to be irrational is almost impeccable -if everyone were homosexual, the human race would die out. The prospect of life being freed from the conception-gestation-birth process anchored in the womb and moved to a test-tube or laboratory may remove the fixed certainty that for life to exist one needs a man and a woman.

This reminds me of the Shakers who believed intercourse to be sinful if the intent was pure for procreation. Needless to say, there are no more Shakers in the world. I’m not aware of any modern science that maintains homosexuality is irrational. It would be rational to maintain that if we value the continuation of the human species, then some people have got reproduce; but that claim involves a value judgment that lies outside the principles of the biological sciences. I know of no scientific principle in physics, biology, anthropology etc. that says, “The continuation of the human species is to be valued.”


Science and religion are not far apart as some think, rigid thinking is found in both. 'Immutable laws' are found in both. Fanatics and fierce debates with denunciations and character assassinations are found in both, and just as the founders of modern science were arrested by the religious state, often ended up in gaol, or burned at the stake, science has subjected humans to appalling cruelty in the laboratories of the Third Reich, and only some of it was driven by the bogus science of race.

Thus science replaces religion, Darwin is to science what Moses was to religion. And so on.

There are certainly examples of scientists and preachers who are rigid thinkers, unwilling to give up principles which in their eyes are immutable for one reason or another. There are profiteers, con-men, criminals and bigots in both worlds. Both science and religion, perhaps unwittingly, provide platforms that make it easy to for such rogues to operate their scams and perpetrate their crimes. I take it we are not talking about these sorts of exceptions (although this may leave some of the ‘new atheists’ out of the discussion). As you said above, religious practices have changed and as I’ve mentioned, so have some scientific principles at a fundamental level. One difference, however, is that its seems very difficult to override sacred text. Theologians may have very progressive ideas. As far as I know, there may be books and papers by theologians that explain why stoning adulterers is not what God has in mind for modern practitioners of the faith. But it’s the Bible that most practitioners and ordinary preachers read, teach and quote; and so the naive practitioner is faced with a quandary -a contradiction between scripture and practice- which she has to work out on her own. On the other hand, there are very few astrophysicists today who still read Newton. More biologists probably read Darwin, but more with historical interest than scientific: for there are more modern sources that lay out more modern arguments upon which modern biologists are more reliant.

[broncofan]

I am of course glad that Jews don't stone people to death and that not many Muslims support the practice. Any exception to a rule that imposes a cruel result should be considered a net positive. However, I have not heard the explanation by Jews or Muslims as to why they should not follow a practice that is commanded by their religious doctrine and presumably endorsed by the deity whom they worship.

I cannot understand how someone can practice a religion with a fully formed doctrine, complete with history and direct interactions between ancient figures and their deity and believe only some of the claims are true.

When a law is passed by a legislative body and legislators are asked what they meant, you have the difficulty of divining the opinions of dozens of legislators.They each might have had a different subjective understanding of what they passed. With scripture you have the opinion of one entity that matters but he does not exist and has not made a single appearance to arbitrate.

But often it's not even a matter of the text being unclear; people simply don't want to follow provisions that have aged badly. And there is the cognitive dissonance. They must hold beliefs that contradict each other. What they follow is the word of God, God is omniscient, and he also commands things that are unwise. And if they choose not to believe their doctrine embodies the word of God, then what is superior about this bill of goods as a moral philosophy given all the baggage it comes with?

As for science, I love to read about it, but I have very little formal study of the subject. But I feel that what makes something a science is that it is testable, and a lot of the reasoning is inductive or based on observation. A theory may be developed based upon what is observed, but if there are phenomena that challenge the theory it may then be considered a useful but incomplete description of nature. It must be refined until it describes every anomaly, or scrapped if the data supporting it were misinterpreted or some other theory better explains them. At no point in the process should someone close their eyes to contradiction or allow their beliefs to be unchanged by something that challenges their original theory.

[Stavros]

In other words, we have well substantiated claims about world which we are reluctant to modify unless further investigate of the world warrants a revision.

You mention gravity as an example. Newton’s inverse square law was such a success, it became the paradigm example of a scientific theory. It quantitatively predicted the orbits the planets, the moon and other satellites, a number of astroids, the rise and fall of the tides and more...with one exception: the rate of advance of Mercury’s perihelion. The prediction was off by 40 seconds of arc per century. The inverse square law was not abandoned, but explanations were sought. Irregularities in the Sun’s gravitational field within the orbit of Mercury due perhaps in irregularities in the Sun’s shape or distribution of mass. Perhaps there were undiscovered planetoids perturbing Mercury’s orbit. Newton’s inverse square law was bested when Einstein’s theory of gravitation accurately retrodicted the advance of Mercury’s perihelion. Do we now take Einstein’s theory to be established fact instead of Newton’s? What has been established is the domain of Newton’s applicability. What has not yet been established is the domain of applicability of Einstein’s theory.



This reminds me of the Shakers who believed intercourse to be sinful if the intent was pure for procreation. Needless to say, there are no more Shakers in the world. I’m not aware of any modern science that maintains homosexuality is irrational. It would be rational to maintain that if we value the continuation of the human species, then some people have got reproduce; but that claim involves a value judgment that lies outside the principles of the biological sciences. I know of no scientific principle in physics, biology, anthropology etc. that says, “The continuation of the human species is to be valued.”



There are certainly examples of scientists and preachers who are rigid thinkers, unwilling to give up principles which in their eyes are immutable for one reason or another. There are profiteers, con-men, criminals and bigots in both worlds. Both science and religion, perhaps unwittingly, provide platforms that make it easy to for such rogues to operate their scams and perpetrate their crimes. I take it we are not talking about these sorts of exceptions (although this may leave some of the ‘new atheists’ out of the discussion). As you said above, religious practices have changed and as I’ve mentioned, so have some scientific principles at a fundamental level. One difference, however, is that its seems very difficult to override sacred text. Theologians may have very progressive ideas. As far as I know, there may be books and papers by theologians that explain why stoning adulterers is not what God has in mind for modern practitioners of the faith. But it’s the Bible that most practitioners and ordinary preachers read, teach and quote; and so the naive practitioner is faced with a quandary -a contradiction between scripture and practice- which she has to work out on her own. On the other hand, there are very few astrophysicists today who still read Newton. More biologists probably read Darwin, but more with historical interest than scientific: for there are more modern sources that lay out more modern arguments upon which modern biologists are more reliant.

I do not disagree with what you say, perhaps I am trying to suggest that reverence is a factor here, that the reverence that is shown to science and what it has achieved, and what people believe it can achieve, can replace religion as a form of emotional and intellectual security. If not in 'the certainty of the resurrection', the certainty that these pills will stop the pain, that if I contract a disease, there will be a cure. It is coincidental that in the latest Times Literary Supplement (October 23 1015) Martin Kemp reviews Frank Wilczek's A Beautiful Question. Finding Nature's Deep Design and calls it 'a magnum opus on the secular theology of modern physics', refers to Wilczek's discussions of bosons, muons, gluons, leptons and electrons as being part of a 'Noah's Ark of particles', perhaps inevitably referring to Pythagoras, Plato, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and Einstein as 'prophets'. Perhaps the other issue is how do core theories in science change, if at all, compared to core theories in religion? Is it so important for a Christian to believe in the Virgin Birth that not do believe it disqualifies one as a Christian? Is String Theory a core theory in science or a sham?

Historically, the claims of science are outstanding in our times, not least because since Thomas Aquinas was charged with refuting science in favour of the word of God, science has proven to have practical solutions to practical problems that in the same period religion has failed to deal with in the same way. Thus more people put their faith in science, or should the word faith be banned as being inapplicable? It is perhaps not the core beliefs that interest, but the modalities of thought and feeling that mark the transfer of allegiance from a supernatural condition to one more humble and, dare one say it, temporary. None of which proves or disproves the existence of God, but may retire the fear.

[Stavros]

I am of course glad that Jews don't stone people to death and that not many Muslims support the practice. Any exception to a rule that imposes a cruel result should be considered a net positive. However, I have not heard the explanation by Jews or Muslims as to why they should not follow a practice that is commanded by their religious doctrine and presumably endorsed by the deity whom they worship.

I cannot understand how someone can practice a religion with a fully formed doctrine, complete with history and direct interactions between ancient figures and their deity and believe only some of the claims are true.

When a law is passed by a legislative body and legislators are asked what they meant, you have the difficulty of divining the opinions of dozens of legislators.They each might have had a different subjective understanding of what they passed. With scripture you have the opinion of one entity that matters but he does not exist and has not made a single appearance to arbitrate.

But often it's not even a matter of the text being unclear; people simply don't want to follow provisions that have aged badly. And there is the cognitive dissonance. They must hold beliefs that contradict each other. What they follow is the word of God, God is omniscient, and he also commands things that are unwise. And if they choose not to believe their doctrine embodies the word of God, then what is superior about this bill of goods as a moral philosophy given all the baggage it comes with?

As for science, I love to read about it, but I have very little formal study of the subject. But I feel that what makes something a science is that it is testable, and a lot of the reasoning is inductive or based on observation. A theory may be developed based upon what is observed, but if there are phenomena that challenge the theory it may then be considered a useful but incomplete description of nature. It must be refined until it describes every anomaly, or scrapped if the data supporting it were misinterpreted or some other theory better explains them. At no point in the process should someone close their eyes to contradiction or allow their beliefs to be unchanged by something that challenges their original theory.

I think what we are dealing with here is the subtle differences between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The central tenets of a faith may not change -indeed, may not be allowed to change- yet the contemporary application of what sacred texts say is clearly not applied always and everywhere in the same way. Two outstanding issues can be found with Jews and Muslims in Christian Britain, where the rights of women to be treated equally before the law are concerned. In both cases where divorce is the issue, a legal divorce conferred by a court of law, may be challenged by the Beth Din, in the case of Jews, and by the opinion of an Imam in the case of Muslims. In many cases women argue that the Beth Din fails to recognise the law of England as the primary judgement, and that husbands, perhaps for vindictive reasons, refuse to divorce their wives 'religiously'. For observant Jewish women, obtaining a judgement from the Beth Din is crucial if they want to marry again, so that this obstacle is seen as hurtful, even if it appears to conform to Jewish law. In the case of Muslim women, the issue of who becomes the legal guardian of the children becomes an issue if an Imam awards them -as most often they do- to the father than the mother. Neither of these processes has any legal clout, but because of the behavioural nexus of Jews and Muslims 'united in their faith', it would be difficult for them to ignore the judgements or cause them genuine distress to do so.

On this basis one has to recognise that it is important for many to be part of a community of believers, but that in doing so they become part of a social group where their individuality is challenged, or enhanced as the case may be, and that I think is where the fractures appear, because how that community interprets the sacred texts -or not- can determine behaviour which may be benign in some cases -not excommunicating someone from the community for adultery- or extremely violent -excommunication or even murder as a consequence.

Mob mentality is clearly a distressing example of how badly things can go with so called 'religious faith' as the shocking case of Farkhunda in Afghanistan shows. Her personal complaint was that a man was selling spells, which is clearly not Islamic, but which also seems to be common amongst Muslims in Afghanistan much as people around the world of all faiths believe in prayer, magic, superstition, the intercession of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, and so on- but when she challenged the man, he accused her of burning a Quran whereupon a mob descended on her, beat her to death and tried to burn her body, most of this being caught on video. I don't know if any of this has links to religion or theology, but it does illustrate how collective reactions to perceived injustices can flare up. The assumption that a course of action must be taken if someone 'insults the prophet' or the Quran is just that because there is no blasphemy in Islam and most of these violent reactions are cultural rather than theological. There is a link to Farkhunda's case here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Farkhunda

A stark cleavage between religion and science can be seen with disease, where science has been able to isolate the causes of disease and find treatment and a cure, while religion explains disease as 'the wrath of God' or divine punishment for collective sins. This can have devastating consequences, notably for outsiders in a community. The historian Frank Snowden writing on Cholera noted how in southern Italy in the early 20th century the local name for it was 'lo zingaro' ('the gypsy') with all the connotations that has. The emerging fascist movement in the UK, the British Brothers insisted Jews brought diseases with them from Russia, just as in today's Telegraph people writing comment on an article on immigration insist Syrian refugees arriving (or in their parlance, 'invading') in Europe are bringing with them Jihad and disease, in this case with no God at the back urging them to think of it as punishment for sins committed.

I doubt most people read the Bible for what it means, but suspect they skim it for what it says, and are only satisfied when they find something they want to read just as Muslim radical read the Quran to find a justification to kill someone regardless of the actual meaning or context in which that sura was delivered. The social relations in which these religious texts are read thus shapes the way they are understood, and it may have no relation at all to the meaning that was intended but is validated by that social context, not least if there is a project to complete, be it conversion, missionary work, an assassination, or a bombing. The fact that one can probably justify anything with reference to the Bible or the Quran does not in fact justify it, and that it seems to me is where the chasm opens up between theology and politics and most of what we have these days, is politics, and bad politics at that.

[trish]

It is coincidental that in the latest Times Literary Supplement (October 23 1015) Martin Kemp reviews Frank Wilczek's A Beautiful Question. Finding Nature's Deep Design and calls it 'a magnum opus on the secular theology of modern physics', refers to Wilczek's discussions of bosons, muons, gluons, leptons and electrons as being part of a 'Noah's Ark of particles', perhaps inevitably referring to Pythagoras, Plato, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and Einstein as 'prophets'.

I hope its coincidental! I confess to not knowing who Martin Kemp is but it makes me cringe to see anyone speak of science in this way. My skin crawls! No one should hold science in such awe. Reverence toward nature is fine. Feeling humility when confronting the vastness of our ignorance is natural. But I do not see how the analogy between subatomic particles and the creatures Noah brought onto his ark is supposed to work. Scientists model nature and attempt to predict (in order to test the model) the outcomes of designed experiments; they do not prophesy. But your point is well taken: obviously some people (like Martin Kemp) look to science as a new religion. I think they are terribly misdirected. I do hope Wilczek did not encourage him in this comparison.

Taking your points here somewhat out of order:


Perhaps the other issue is how do core theories in science change, if at all, compared to core theories in religion? Is it so important for a Christian to believe in the Virgin Birth that not do believe it disqualifies one as a Christian? Is String Theory a core theory in science or a sham?

Newtonian Mechanics (not including his theory of gravitation) was certainly a core theory for three centuries. Although Descartes, Leibniz and Mach had philosophical differences with it, classical mechanics was not only self-consistent, its predictions were incredibly accurate. Not only was classical mechanics self consistent and consistent with observation, Laplace was serious in his suggestion that it was complete. But it wasn’t complete. A separate theory had to be developed to describe electrostatic phenomena and another to model magnetic phenomena; although it was fully expected those theories -when developed- would be consistent with classical mechanics. Unfortunately for classical mechanics, they weren’t. It was Einstein’s theory of special relativity that sorted out the inconsistencies. Classical mechanics is now seen to be an approximation with a known domain of application; it is not universally true. Is special relativity universally true? Probably not, but we don’t know.

Is String Theory a core theory? It’s a class of theories. Currently general relativity (Einstein’s theory of gravitation) seems to be at odds with quantum field theory. Various string theories resolve this conflict. However, computational difficulties make string theories difficult to deal with. This makes it difficult to use any string theory to make experimental predictions. To my knowledge, no feasible experiments have been proposed that would put string theory on the map or even distinguish one from another. If this situation persists, either the number employable string theorists will diminish or fundamental physics will become a more speculative and abstract endeavor.


...I am trying to suggest that reverence is a factor here, that the reverence that is shown to science and what it has achieved, and what people believe it can achieve, can replace religion as a form of emotional and intellectual security. If not in 'the certainty of the resurrection', the certainty that these pills will stop the pain, that if I contract a disease, there will be a cure.


I would encourage people to revere one another and have a little less reverence toward science or religion. What I would ask people to do is take less on faith and attempt to understand the issues that matter to them. It’s difficult. I’m not a medical doctor: but I have one and I usually wind up taking her advice...not without question and not without doing a little research on my own. Even in my own field, I have to have faith in my colleagues: that they have done the experiments they’re reporting precisely as they have described and have made exactly the observations described.

The spate of crime scene investigation shows on U.S. television glorifies scientists, portraying them as geniuses with nerdy glasses and geeky tastes who work crime solving miracles. In real life the Washington Post (on April 18, 2015) ran the headline “FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades,” (you’ll have to google it - for some reason I can’t link it).



Historically, the claims of science are outstanding in our times, not least because since Thomas Aquinas was charged with refuting science in favour of the word of God, science has proven to have practical solutions to practical problems that in the same period religion has failed to deal with in the same way. Thus more people put their faith in science, or should the word faith be banned as being inapplicable? It is perhaps not the core beliefs that interest, but the modalities of thought and feeling that mark the transfer of allegiance from a supernatural condition to one more humble and, dare one say it, temporary. None of which proves or disproves the existence of God, but may retire the fear.


If it isn’t blind, faith is a perfectly reasonable attitude one may have toward a person or even a principle. When I drive through the Tuscarora Mountain Tunnel in Pennsylvania I have faith in the principles of classical physics and geology (but not blind faith -you don’t have to have a Ph.D. or even a B.S to understand and enjoy learning a little bit about the physical world). But most of all I have faith in the geologists, surveyors, architects, engineers and workers who are directly responsible for the construction and continued maintenance of the tunnel -not that I know any of those people personally or professionally. I have faith that all of those people brought and continue to bring the same integrity to their jobs as I bring to my job. That faith, however, is also tempered with the knowledge that there are many pressures, political and financial, to cut corners, slacken maintenance schedules, etc. I see the growing fractures in the walls and hear the drops of water splattering on my roof and wonder if it isn’t time to reassess.

I would like us to have measured faith in each other and the projects in which we are engaged; a little less blind faith in gods, heros and their substitutes.

[Stavros]

I hope its coincidental! I confess to not knowing who Martin Kemp is but it makes me cringe to see anyone speak of science in this way. My skin crawls! No one should hold science in such awe. Reverence toward nature is fine. Feeling humility when confronting the vastness of our ignorance is natural. But I do not see how the analogy between subatomic particles and the creatures Noah brought onto his ark is supposed to work. Scientists model nature and attempt to predict (in order to test the model) the outcomes of designed experiments; they do not prophesy. But your point is well taken: obviously some people (like Martin Kemp) look to science as a new religion. I think they are terribly misdirected. I do hope Wilczek did not encourage him in this comparison.


Martin Kemp is well known over here for his research and writing on art and science, I suspect the language he used which you don't like is in fact playful in a nice way, Martin does have a sense of humour and is generally urbane and well-dressed. You can read more about his work here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kemp_%28art_historian%29
http://www.martinjkemp.com/welcome.html

I think on the more substantive issues, the end result is that however we think of faith, of religion and science, we do not, or we no longer fear God. It is a negative element in that theology which concerns punishment rather than reward, which claims the 'wrath of God' is to be feared lest all manner of plagues be unleashed upon us. It may have once worked as a supernatural explanation of the plague, and some Christian and Muslim preachers still believe in it, but in fact knowing what we do diminishes God as a power as one wonders why the same God who loves us also wants to punish us in a most cruel way -rather like wondering why science has invented chemical and nuclear weapons with which to destroy human life in a disgusting, if near total manner.

[trish]

I think on the more substantive issues, the end result is that however we think of faith, of religion and science, we do not, or we no longer fear God. It is a negative element in that theology which concerns punishment rather than reward, which claims the 'wrath of God' is to be feared lest all manner of plagues be unleashed upon us. It may have once worked as a supernatural explanation of the plague, and some Christian and Muslim preachers still believe in it, but in fact knowing what we do diminishes God as a power as one wonders why the same God who loves us also wants to punish us in a most cruel way -rather like wondering why science has invented chemical and nuclear weapons with which to destroy human life in a disgusting, if near total manner.

Knocking on wood, throwing spilled salt over your shoulder, blessing one who sneezes, making sacrifices and offering prayers seem like superstitious rituals performed not so much to ward off evil as to calm one’s anxiety about the evils the future might hold.

I suppose fundamentalists still have Satan as an out: God loves and Satan hates. God creates and Satan spoils. At least science never claimed to love us. In fact popular culture is filled with deranged scientists who are either bent upon mankind’s destruction or unwittingly engaged in an immoral project that will bring devastation upon us all.

Was Oppenheimer comparing himself to Lord Krishna when he exclaimed, “Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds?” To what extent was Lord Krishna giving unconscious voice to the author of the Bhagavad Gita?

In the end we are ones to be feared and the ones who need to be loved.

[fred41]

Knocking on wood, throwing spilled salt over your shoulder, blessing one who sneezes, making sacrifices and offering prayers seem like superstitious rituals performed not so much to ward off evil as to calm one’s anxiety about the evils the future might hold.

Probably, in the western world, people usually learn these traditional habits in childhood. We do most of these things automatically without thought. Our parents (or parents' parents) may have learned to practice these things to ward off, what may have felt like, a more palpable evil to them at the time, but to us it may be more of a routine to bring us the comfort of 'belonging'...belonging to family or community, even if those ties are tenuous. In the case of saying Gesundheit after a sneeze...I think at this point it's just out of politeness without the recognition of reason.
I think religion and cults in the modern world are the same...a reason to belong to a group or community, with a built in social life...and if you follow the rules, you never really die.


In the end we are ones to be feared and the ones who need to be loved.

...and I take this out of context, but it certainly seems true that, quite often - the ones that need to be loved the most always need to be feared the most.

[trish]

...and I take this out of context, but it certainly seems true that, quite often - the ones that need to be loved the most always need to be feared the most.Perceptive, and not out of context at all.

[martin48]

Just wondering where we had got to with this one

[broncofan]

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/starbucks-minimalist-holiday-cup-war-on-christmas/

Apparently not featuring Christian symbols on a cup during the holiday season is a war on Christmas. I can't say this is the only reason I'm an atheist, but viewing this nonsense does make me happy to be one. More pathetic, chauvinistic nonsense....when not giving preference to one group, even the majority is considered discrimination we are dealing with the expectation of hegemony.

[trish]

I dunno. Seems to me the blank red space stands for the absence of God and the obscenely burning passions of Lucifer...not to mention the Mermaid belongs to a ancient pantheon of Pagan creatures and demons that lured Greek sailors to their deaths. The swirled mountains of rich, thick, viscous, cream surmounting the brim in all defiance of gravity entice one and all to lick, slurp and devour its satanic virility. Get thee back Satan. I say: GET YE BACK IN THE NAME OF JESUS!

[Stavros]

The Mermaid is there to seduce people of faith and people of reason, to make them weak and compliant to the desires of a woman grieving over her role in the death of her lover, seeking revenge through the sacrifice of willing victims. At one time the siren would position herself atop the mountain or a hill overlooking a river before a weir or a waterfall, beguiling sailors who, mesmerised by her beauty would ignore the peril ahead and tumble to their death.

Starbucks in America is thus the anti-Christ, the goddess of chaos holding out her blood-stained cup in mockery of Christ's sacrament, willing all to tumble into darkness.

I mean, have you tasted that stuff they call coffee?

Do not fear God, fear Starbucks.

[Stavros]

The death of Rene Girard prompts this useful summary of his ideas in the Telegraph obituary today (link with photos at the end). For some the argument that Jesus offered a quite different route out of the cycle of sacrificial violence is a key argument and though he was a Roman Catholic the idea does not emanate from the Church whose own history of violence is anything but what the master ordered.

"René Girard, the French-born philosopher and anthropologist, who has died aged 91, was once described as the “most compelling Catholic thinker of the age”; he was best known for his “mimetic theory” in which he elaborated a sweeping anthropology of religion.
Set out in his first major work, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1966), the theory holds that human beings learn by imitating those around them , wanting to have what others have. This “mimetic desire” operates pervasively in all cultures, at once reinforcing social ties, but also fomenting envy, rivalry and conflict. “Mimesis,” Girard wrote, “is an unconscious form of imitation that invariably leads to competition, and desire is the most virulent mimetic pathogen.”

The idea was hardly new , but Girard went on to examine how societies at different times had sought to accommodate this destructive urge, while keeping the community together.

Primitive societies, wrote Girard, were rife with rivals struggling to outdo each other in terms of status and material possessions. This often produced tribal antagonisms that fostered cycles of revenge lasting many generations. But our ancestors also sought to maintain order through the occasional sacrifice of a collectively identified “scapegoat” or scapegoats – chosen, perhaps, because they looked different or thought differently from others.

The scapegoat would become the focus of communal hostility and would be sacrificed, often ritually, to rid the community of its fears. “There is an irresistible urge in human communities from time to time to purge themselves by choosing an innocent victim from among their ranks, on whom to blame all of their own faults and vileness,” Girard wrote.

In Violence and the Sacred (1972), however, Girard showed how once they are killed and peace returns, such sacrificial victims often become seen as “founding figures” of a society or religion, owing to the powerful mix of guilt and shame that remains in the collective memory: “The victim of a mob is always innocent, and collective violence is unjust.”
Girard described sacrificial violence as “the dark secret underpinning all human cultures” and the basis for many works of fiction and drama. In recent history this has been played out in the horrors of communism and fascism – and Islamist terrorism, a phenomenon Girard described as “mimetic rivalry on a planetary scale”.

But democratic societies, too, have their scapegoats – with elections often serving as a communal purgative. It is at least notable that the two British prime ministers who have acquired almost mythic status in the past century, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, were both victims of political “sacrifice” – Churchill in his 1945 election defeat and Margaret Thatcher in her deposition by her own party in 1990.
Girard saw religion not as the cause of violence , but as an often desperate attempt to resolve it, with biblical texts representing the development of a new consciousness which rejected scapegoating as an answer to society’s ills. Guided by their mimetic desires into rivalry with God, Adam and Eve set humanity on the path leading to Cain’s murder of Abel.
But the tenth commandment tells us not to “covet”, and in the story of Abraham and Isaac, an animal replaces the human sacrificial victim. In The Scapegoat (1982), Girard developed the idea that the Christian scriptures inaugurated a long process of questioning this founding violence. Jesus’s sacrifice is presented not as a means of appeasing an offended deity, but as an example of a loving God offering human beings liberation from this destructive cycle. The resurrection of the forgiving victim offers human life new foundations.
René Noël Théophile Girard was born in Avignon on Christmas Day 1923. His father was curator of the city’s Musée Calvet and later its Palais des Papes.
Following his father, Girard was educated at l’École des Chartres, a training school for archivists and librarians, writing his dissertation on marriage and private life in 15th-century Avignon. After graduation in 1947 he and a friend organised an exhibition of paintings at the Palais des Papes, which eventually turned into the annual Avignon Festival.
The same year, Girard moved to the United States to do a PhD at Indiana University, Bloomington, on “American Opinion on France, 1940-43”. He remained in America for the rest of his life, publishing more than a dozen books in French while teaching at American universities, most recently Stanford, where he became a professor.
A striking-looking man with deep-set blue eyes and a mane of grey hair, Girard wrote some 30 books, was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected to the Académie Française in 2005. He was also a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.
Girard is survived by his wife, Martha, and three children.
René Girard, born December 25 1923, died November 4 2015 "

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11984372/Rene-Girard-philosopher-obituary.html

[trish]

Girard’s interpretation of the social function of Christianity is certainly a charitable one. Jesus’s sacrifice, in his view, breaks the violent sacrificial cycle that arises out of our mimetic desire to do what others do, have what others have, be treated as others are treated and apparently expel, kill or sacrifice those who, for one reason or another, do not properly express, as judged by the norms of their society, this allegedly universal human trait.

Unfortunately Christianity inherited the notion of sin, a concept foreign to most religions outside the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Guilt is one thing. Sin is another. Guilt is a psychological phenomenon. Sin is metaphysical. The Christian God, in the name of His Son, will forgive a repentant sinner; but He will wreak vengeance upon any family, village or town that harbors (even if unknowingly) an unrepentant sinner or worse, a pagan or a nonbeliever whose souls are black with Sin. So even if there were such a thing as a mimetic tendency toward sacrificial violence and even if belief in the sacrifice of Jesus acts to mitigate that tendency, the very reason Jesus had to sacrifice Himself, namely Sin, remains and acts to compound the urge to expel and harm those whose beliefs, lifestyles and appearances don’t fit with the Christian norm.

Nevertheless, it may be the case that the benefit to society of the proffered escape from the cycle of sacrificial violence had been a factor in the spread of Christianity over Europe. Still, I would think missionary zeal and the biblical command to be “fishermen of men” and to broadcast the “good news” played a larger role. Christianity’s combination of proselytization, and enforced monotheism drove more pagan beliefs and practices to extinction than any religion that came before it. Whatever happened to all the local religions and spiritual practices that existed in Europe before the invasion of Christianity?


Back to the issue of Starbuck’s choice of seasonal cups: we modern non-Christians are happy to let Christians take the Solstice out of Winter; but for them to pretend that there’s a liberal movement to take the Christ out of Christmas is just an absurd irony. Christian monotheism, almost by definition, has no tolerance for a diversity of gods, or a diversity of religious beliefs, spiritual beliefs or even non-belief.

[Stavros]

Unfortunately Christianity inherited the notion of sin, a concept foreign to most religions outside the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Guilt is one thing. Sin is another. Guilt is a psychological phenomenon. Sin is metaphysical. The Christian God, in the name of His Son, will forgive a repentant sinner; but He will wreak vengeance upon any family, village or town that harbors (even if unknowingly) an unrepentant sinner or worse, a pagan or a nonbeliever whose souls are black with Sin. So even if there were such a thing as a mimetic tendency toward sacrificial violence and even if belief in the sacrifice of Jesus acts to mitigate that tendency, the very reason Jesus had to sacrifice Himself, namely Sin, remains and acts to compound the urge to expel and harm those whose beliefs, lifestyles and appearances don’t fit with the Christian norm.

Nevertheless, it may be the case that the benefit to society of the proffered escape from the cycle of sacrificial violence had been a factor in the spread of Christianity over Europe. Still, I would think missionary zeal and the biblical command to be “fishermen of men” and to broadcast the “good news” played a larger role. Christianity’s combination of proselytization, and enforced monotheism drove more pagan beliefs and practices to extinction than any religion that came before it. Whatever happened to all the local religions and spiritual practices that existed in Europe before the invasion of Christianity?
.

I think you are confused by the concept of sin which in practice exists in most religions, either as an explicit denial of the commands of God which in practical terms means a violation of social norms or laws; or exists as part of the relationship of the person with life here or in another time, as with the concept of Karma in Hindu and Buddhist religions -Karma may have positive and negative consequences, but the point is that a person's actions have consequences, whether or not guilt is part of the emotional content of sin.

The more complex problem in Christianity lies more in the (political) development of Christianity as a system of belief and behaviour than in the gospels themselves. In some places pagan rituals were not crushed by Christianity but absorbed into the faith, such as the 'Christianizing' of the Solstice and harvest festivals. Islam incorporated pre-existing rituals into its faith -the Hajj and Ramadan being two, whereas after the Hijra to Medina Muslims who used to turn toward Jerusalem to pray turned instead to Mecca.

Even more problematic for the Roman Catholic church as it converted its Pauline doctrines into the exclusive rites and beliefs we now associate with the Catholic Church, is that it treated alternative Christian practice and belief as heresy, which in the case of the Cathar communities in what is now south and south-western France became a campaign of mass murder, just as in later centuries Catholics and Protestants murdered each other as heretics. Along with this Pauline conversion many rites and beliefs which presented women both as priests and as examples of what it meant to be a good Christian were erased as much as possible -books extolling women were excluded from the Bible, icons and other visual representations destroyed. It is for this reason that some people reject the Roman Catholic 'version' of Christianity with its hierarchy, its rota of sin, guilt and redemption for a more 'anarchist' view of what it was Jesus intended. Crucially, perhaps, the concept of the 'Just War' which enabled Christians to don armour and equip themselves with swords to kill to their hearts content, is seen by some as a complete contradiction of what Christianity means.

None of this means anything to those people who do not believe in the soul, or in what might be called the 'spiritual life', yet it remains the case that all human societies have developed concepts of right and wrong and good and bad behaviour, and to whatever extent have built rule based behaviour around such morals to better organise social groups.

The key point is that there are ways in which anger can be managed, without it leading to human sacrifice and that human societies have been able to live without war.

[trish]

I think you are confused by the concept of sin which in practice exists in most religions, either as an explicit denial of the commands of God which in practical terms means a violation of social norms or laws; or exists as part of the relationship of the person with life here or in another time, as with the concept of Karma in Hindu and Buddhist religions -Karma may have positive and negative consequences, but the point is that a person's actions have consequences, whether or not guilt is part of the emotional content of sin.I agree with the point that a person’s actions have consequences. However, Christians tell us that even newborn babes harbor original sin and should they die without the proper blessings they would spend eternity in limbo, whatever that is. Christian Sin is some serious metaphysical shit. It’s not just a regretful action with undesirable consequences. God had to sacrifice His Son just to make it possible for humankind to redeem itself of the magically everlasting sin of Adam and Eve which somehow still spoils all of our souls, whatever they are. The story of the crucifixion is not about breaking the cycle of sacrificial pogroms; its about establishing the notion of metaphysical sin from which you can only be cleansed by disavowing all your previous beliefs, your previous spiritual and healing practices and converting to Christianity. That’s the meaning of the redemption story. It’s bait. It’s an early version of spam. It’s a mind virus.


In some places pagan rituals were not crushed by Christianity but absorbed into the faith, such as the 'Christianizing' of the Solstice and harvest festivals.
Of course Christianizing a people is done without recourse to threats of violence (eternal or otherwise), and no one was ever expelled, tortured, burned or otherwise harmed in the Christianization of the Winter Solstice, nor any traditional spiritual practices outlawed and punished.


None of this means anything to those people who do not believe in the soul, or in what might be called the 'spiritual life', yet it remains the case that all human societies have developed concepts of right and wrong and good and bad behaviour, and to whatever extent have built rule based behaviour around such morals to better organise social groups.
One doesn’t have to lead a spiritual life or believe in a soul to behave ethically and morally. Nor is spirituality a requirement for the development of a secular democracy or a rule-based system of law. It might be claimed that the souls, holy spirits, and sins that are of concern to Christians don’t mean anything to those who do not believe, unless: you’re a poor woman who was hoping to get a mammogram at your nearest planned parenthood clinic but can’t because Christians are shutting them down, or a doctor who works there because Christians are threatening your life and the lives of your family, or a gay boy who was hoping to join the boy scouts (oh this one just got fixed!), or an atheist who wants to run for governor, or an Iman who was hoping to build a Islamic community center with a Mosque within three city blocks of the 9/11 memorial, or a high school biology teacher who just wants to introduce children to the excitement of science, or you’re a CEO for Starbucks who is just trying to find an appropriately seasonal paper cup for your lattes, or you want the currency you use on a daily basis not to carry an advertisement for monotheism...etc.


The key point is that there are ways in which anger can be managed, without it leading to human sacrifice ...
About that we we were never in contention, only the means were in question: empathy, caring and reason or spirituality, sin and redemption.

[buttslinger]

One doesn’t have to lead a spiritual life or believe in a soul to behave ethically and morally.


Amen to that, schoolmarm.

http://s27.postimg.org/osmap87lf/tom_brady_gisele_bundchen.jpg (http://postimage.org/)

[sukumvit boy]

Agreed buttslinger .

[sukumvit boy]

Amen to that, schoolmarm.

http://s27.postimg.org/osmap87lf/tom_brady_gisele_bundchen.jpg (http://postimage.org/)

And the "Golden Rule" is pretty much all the 'commandments ' we need to know.

Shit if were as simple as all that than we wouldn't have diddly squat to argue about ...
893092

[Stavros]

I agree with the point that a person’s actions have consequences. However, Christians tell us that even newborn babes harbor original sin and should they die without the proper blessings they would spend eternity in limbo, whatever that is. Christian Sin is some serious metaphysical shit. It’s not just a regretful action with undesirable consequences. God had to sacrifice His Son just to make it possible for humankind to redeem itself of the magically everlasting sin of Adam and Eve which somehow still spoils all of our souls, whatever they are. The story of the crucifixion is not about breaking the cycle of sacrificial pogroms; its about establishing the notion of metaphysical sin from which you can only be cleansed by disavowing all your previous beliefs, your previous spiritual and healing practices and converting to Christianity. That’s the meaning of the redemption story. It’s bait. It’s an early version of spam. It’s a mind virus.
Of course Christianizing a people is done without recourse to threats of violence (eternal or otherwise), and no one was ever expelled, tortured, burned or otherwise harmed in the Christianization of the Winter Solstice, nor any traditional spiritual practices outlawed and punished.
One doesn’t have to lead a spiritual life or believe in a soul to behave ethically and morally. Nor is spirituality a requirement for the development of a secular democracy or a rule-based system of law. It might be claimed that the souls, holy spirits, and sins that are of concern to Christians don’t mean anything to those who do not believe, unless: you’re a poor woman who was hoping to get a mammogram at your nearest planned parenthood clinic but can’t because Christians are shutting them down, or a doctor who works there because Christians are threatening your life and the lives of your family, or a gay boy who was hoping to join the boy scouts (oh this one just got fixed!), or an atheist who wants to run for governor, or an Iman who was hoping to build a Islamic community center with a Mosque within three city blocks of the 9/11 memorial, or a high school biology teacher who just wants to introduce children to the excitement of science, or you’re a CEO for Starbucks who is just trying to find an appropriately seasonal paper cup for your lattes, or you want the currency you use on a daily basis not to carry an advertisement for monotheism...etc.
About that we we were never in contention, only the means were in question: empathy, caring and reason or spirituality, sin and redemption.

I think you have allowed yourself to relate to an agenda set by some Christians who others would criticize for the zealous imposition of practice and belief when there are other ways of living a Christian life which do not involve coercion, or discrimination or picketing abortion clinics.
There is a similar problem with Islam where critics take the 'radicals' at their own word and thus assume their interpretation of Islam is the right one even if it is rejected by most Muslims and can be shown to be theologically incorrect on a wide range of claims. It is thus absurd to believe that Christians condemn a new born baby as a sinner, the practice of baptism is an induction, it has more to do with belonging to a community than it does with faith itself, indeed this is one of the central problems of Christianity in general and the Roman Catholic church in particular with its bizarre sets of rituals and even its own furniture -who ever heard of the Confession Box in Roman Palestine?

The criticism is of a separation of Christianity as a set of established rituals with a catechism which must be administered by priests, from a personal form of spiritual belief and practice that can be done daily without causing harm to others and has no need of priests at all. I suspect that this is one of the most potent dangers in all religions, because the institution can, indeed in many cases has become more powerful than the message it is supposed to express. The problem of orthopraxy emerges here to illustrate how a religious sect evolving from a small space into a world wide religion organised from a centre can take hold of communities where the community dynamic makes free expression difficult if not impossible -at a time when most people lived in small village communities not appearing in church on a Sunday was a big deal, the Scarlet Letter in this context offers an entertaining if grim account of how such communities behaved. I was once told by a Muslim from Libya how at a prayer room in a university a Saudi approached him and asked him 'why do you pray like that?' because many North Africans do not cross their arms in prayer even though they are Sunni -it was common among the Maliki in North Africa even though it has now become an assumption that only the Shi'a stand with their arms by their side. To complicate matters most Arabs who cross their right over their left hand do it above the navel whereas in the Indian sub-continent and parts of Asia they do it below the navel. 'Did I do something wrong?' was the reply and 'No' came back yet one man was in effect forcing the other to feel that he had not behaved properly in a mosque and that is another example of how religion in a community setting can modify or coerce behaviour.


And while you are free to interpret the Crucifixion as you wish, I do believe you are wrong about it. Perhaps the most telling aspect of Christianity is that the simple message of love that Jesus says humans should always express appears to be the hardest for them to do. George W Bush, on the day after 9/11 probably should have told Osama bin Laden that as a Christian he loved him and forgave him for what he had done, but he chickened out on that one, choosing hatred and violent death instead.

The problem you have is that even without a processional view of the history of ideas, religion does appear in many cases to have been the portal through which secular morals and laws have emerged. I don't see how you can disentagle the relationship between punishment and reward as expressed in the moral cosmology that emerged in the Neolithic and the latter judgement of what is the right and wrong way to behave in society, that these ideas were presented in the language of religion is just the way it is, and you are free to reject it. But you can sense how Hobbes wanted to separate politics from religion but was not comfortable with that, least of all with Cromwell peering over his shoulder, just as it has been said Hegel could not have admitted he was an atheist as he would have lost his job in Berlin. We are often told that our values are part of a Judeo-Christian heritage, with the Greeks and the Romans mixed in there somewhere, but I find it a vague heritage and often one that seems to have opposed the development of reason and science rather than facilitating it. At an early phase in the history of science Thomas Aquinas was tasked with the demolition of scientific thought and the Summa Theologica was the turgid and unconvincing result even though it remains in the curriculum today and not always as an oddity.

As we have become more secular, the religious foundations of law have receded as the source of law, and I think that is a good thing, because it does express the fact that many people no longer live or even believe in a religious life. But many do, which is why there is no real contradiction between the two unless there is a clash between aspects of secular and religious law, as appears to be the case with, for example, divorce among Observant Jews, and Muslims, even though there are ways round it as is also the case with religious objections to same-sex marriage.

Thus, to say that One doesn't have to lead a spiritual life or believe in a soul to behave ethically and morally is an empty slogan if you have not identified what the ethics are or where they come from, or why we even think ethically.

You may not approve of what many religious people do; they do not approve of much of what secular society does, and yet on a wide range of issues there is common ground. The saddest aspect of all this is found in the arid imprecations and ideological attachments that have become embedded in the discourses, sometimes the 'dialogue of the deaf' that attend the endless debate over religious belief and practice in the context of social breakdown and war. Perhaps it is not God who is to be feared, but other people

[martin48]

Indeed


L'enfer, c'est les autres

[buttslinger]

Until God registers on Hungangels.com and start posting, I'm afraid we're destined to hearsay. heresy? If God notifies us, it will be on a personal line, and fear that, yeah, because if he does, the fuckin party is over, no more carefree existence. Time to pay the Piper. If that scares you, run, do not walk to the nearest exit. Jesus was young once.
Do we talk about God as we would talk to a child?


http://s13.postimg.org/46zuq7wh3/o_MARY_BREASTFEEDING_JESUS_facebook.jpg (http://postimage.org/)

[buttslinger]

Evil is not the opposite of Religion, Sex and money are the opposites of religion. I would say Hell is incorporated into religion, and that religion is actually pretty scary stuff. Niceness is the PG-rated Disney version of religion, and it keeps lots of people out of prison and happy. Jesus got crucified, man.


http://s13.postimg.org/tc9ijzd1j/scary_reflection_300x186.jpg (http://postimage.org/)
upload gambar (http://postimage.org/)

[martin48]

Until God registers on Hungangels.com and start posting, I'm afraid we're destined to hearsay. heresy?



I read this wrong the first time as
"Until God registers on Hungangels.com and starts posing"


I am doomed

In in the picture. I'm in the bottom right corner - see you there

[buttslinger]

I'm in the bottom right corner - see you there

I'm the guy in front shaking your hand. Nice Party.


http://s15.postimg.org/qylx7zxvf/Stefan_Lochner_006.jpg (http://postimage.org/)

[trish]

You two have fun at the Last Judgement. Just between you and me, Jehovah's a bore. Fortunately Dionysus is throwing a Bacchanalia the same night. I'll be there instead.

[hippifried]

Until God registers on Hungangels.com and start posting, I'm afraid we're destined to hearsay. heresy? If God notifies us, it will be on a personal line, and fear that, yeah, because if he does, the fuckin party is over, no more carefree existence. Time to pay the Piper. If that scares you, run, do not walk to the nearest exit. Jesus was young once.
Do we talk about God as we would talk to a child?


http://s13.postimg.org/46zuq7wh3/o_MARY_BREASTFEEDING_JESUS_facebook.jpg (http://postimage.org/) Hey! I've been here over 8 years. Nobody noticed? I think I need a new sacrefice. I won't be providing the blood to let this time though. All y'all're gonna have to get creative & lmpressive. Shoot me some prayers with original ideas & I'll decide what I like. Or text me @ ecumspiri22o.

[voldo999]

Some of the very funniest stuff.on this forum here in this thread. God can take a joke if he even exists.

[martin48]

We don't know what kind of jokes he (or it is a "she") likes. Puns, knock-knock, bathroom humour, gay,pure filth, ....

Here's a go(o)d one

[trish]

As a kid I had a knock-knock joke that was so good (imo) that thought I'd share it with God. So I prayed, "Knock knock!" ...........Silence. No response. So I try again, "Knock knock!".......Still no reply. One more time, "Knock, knock!" ......... At that point I shrugged and said to myself, "Guess nobody's home."

[Laphroaig]

Question: "Does God have a sense of humor?"

Answer: Perhaps the best indication that God does have a sense of humor is that He created man in His image

http://www.gotquestions.org/God-humor.html


Says it all really...

[Jia_westladyboy]

I am the opinion that the Transexual phenomenon began stronger in this last 20/30 years or so, as soon as many people began to switch from believer to non believers and there was a huge drop of faith, especially amongst women who felt him to be kinda of racist god and to give all the power to men.

So our forgotten god, decided to create more Ts to give to everyone a better understanding of what he/she is and what it is not-

The god can’t be male or female, neither a she nor a he, moreover the god is an atheist itself. It can be only a Ts god / M-t-F / F-t-M and neither this nor that.
There is obviously no god as such, and just an image created by ourselves to feel more at ease and I like to call it “godliness” rather than using the stereotyped usual words. The image of the fake god is more for those who cannot grow in perception, and need the consolation of a father figure.

Someone was asked if he believed in god and the poor guy was only able to give long answers by saying: Yes/No/Yes-No-both/ Perhaps yes, Perhaps not, perhaps both not/ Perhaps both yes and not and so he went on for ages….

Along with the idea of the god, comes also the idea of sin, and I find it a bit unfair the way we should all be punished for all of our supposed sins. For sins made in an average life of 70/80 I should be punished in the other life and be in the eternal hell? More over one begins to commit sins at the age of 14/15 yo when one begins to be fully conscious of his/her action…. Plus a few more years until he is 70/80 yo, when one loses even the strength to commit a sin and he does it in more unconscious way. It is really an unfair equation as in 55/60 active years one must be punished for life.

I am happy for now to follow my deduction and to think that Forgetfulness is the only sin-

By the way this thread is very enlightening and happy to see so many who have commented on it….

[martin48]

He might just like this one

[zerrrr]

I am the opinion that the Transexual phenomenon began stronger in this last 20/30 years or so, as soon as many people began to switch from believer to non believers and there was a huge drop of faith, especially amongst women who felt him to be kinda of racist god and to give all the power to men.

So our forgotten god, decided to create more Ts to give to everyone a better understanding of what he/she is and what it is not-

The god can’t be male or female, neither a she nor a he, moreover the god is an atheist itself. It can be only a Ts god / M-t-F / F-t-M and neither this nor that.
There is obviously no god as such, and just an image created by ourselves to feel more at ease and I like to call it “godliness” rather than using the stereotyped usual words. The image of the fake god is more for those who cannot grow in perception, and need the consolation of a father figure.

Someone was asked if he believed in god and the poor guy was only able to give long answers by saying: Yes/No/Yes-No-both/ Perhaps yes, Perhaps not, perhaps both not/ Perhaps both yes and not and so he went on for ages….

Along with the idea of the god, comes also the idea of sin, and I find it a bit unfair the way we should all be punished for all of our supposed sins. For sins made in an average life of 70/80 I should be punished in the other life and be in the eternal hell? More over one begins to commit sins at the age of 14/15 yo when one begins to be fully conscious of his/her action…. Plus a few more years until he is 70/80 yo, when one loses even the strength to commit a sin and he does it in more unconscious way. It is really an unfair equation as in 55/60 active years one must be punished for life.

I am happy for now to follow my deduction and to think that Forgetfulness is the only sin-

By the way this thread is very enlightening and happy to see so many who have commented on it….

It is a little more complicated than that. Transgender individuals have always been around in one way, shape, or form. Most spirits and beings are one singular gender of their particular race (in our case human). Native Americans used the term two-spirit to describe individuals that were either Transgender or had two spirits occupying a body for a particular reason.

Higher level spirits can take on multiple genders some moving between male and female or evolved to be both.

There are Transgender gods/goddesses/deities depending on the religion but many are minor and have been forgotten over time but they are aware.

Even if you do not believe in the concept of a god that is cool because that is your choice. The only unfortunate part is that some atheists down here do not realize that by having no concept of a god means they have greater responsibility for their actions. 100% free will comes at a choice. The choice to always know the difference between right and wrong and not just your right or your wrong.

You are 100% correct on the whole sin thing.

Some transgender individuals, mostly in Asian cultures, have two spirits sharing a body on this planet. I met one transgender woman in Toronto who was Thai. Many people could not understand her but I figured her out by taking a moment to do an in-depth search. What I discovered was that a husband and wife wanted to come down and occupy a body together with the male spirit being the strong business sense while the female spirit was more of a homemaker. Once I understood that part of her, knowing what spirit I was speaking with made dealing with her easy.

Some people come down as a punishment. For example, Buddhist priests who do evil are punished by coming back as a woman in a mans body since a woman is treated different in their culture. It is not all cases but some.

Others come down to hide from something that may be chasing them on the other side or from a past life.

It is not as simple or as black and white as our culture decries so often.

[trish]

Even if you do not believe in the concept of a god that is cool because that is your choice. The only unfortunate part is that some atheists down here do not realize that by having no concept of a god means they have greater responsibility for their actions. 100% free will comes at a choice. The choice to always know the difference between right and wrong and not just your right or your wrong.

Another unfortunate part is that some theists don’t seem to realize that what constitutes moral behavior isn’t necessarily determined by the Creator God nor is it that which is espoused by His prophets. Morality and godhood are two independent notions and neither entails the other. Believers have been known to pray fervently, commune with God, hear His Word in their heads and then commit horrendous atrocities, thinking they were doing the right and moral thing because God commanded it.

Moreover, whether or not we have free-will (or 100% free-will, as you put it) is independent of whether there is a god or not. In most religions people have the choice to do good or ill, albeit they will eventually be rewarded or punished for their choices. In some religions we have no free-will and everything we do is preordained. Some religions maintain God Himself can do no evil. This is sometimes understood as a restriction on God’s will and sometimes misunderstood as the definition of Good (this error is nicely explored in Mark Twain’s novella The Mysterious Stranger). Perhaps the more reasonable understanding is that what is Good is not determined by God but rather God always freely chooses to do Good; but of course this is an additional assumption which doesn’t follow from the assumption that there is a creator god. 'God exists' is one assumption. 'God is Good' is another.


It is not as simple or as black and white as our culture decries so often.

As for spirits inhabiting bodies, coming down, rising up, or being chased across the nether dimensions by their own karma: these notions involve a slew of additional independent assumptions which, however, are not too difficult to assess. The world of make-believe rarely simple and certainly never mundane. You may enjoy the novels of David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks and Slade House are very entertaining.

[Rcrxjlb]

903494

[holzz]

since there is no God, then it figures...

[buttslinger]

since there is no God, then it figures...

You Rang????

Happy Easter!

Oh what, now the Easter Bunny doesn't exist either?????
How about Alice's White Rabbit, does he exist?
Somewhere in the HALL of IMAGINATION there is a FACTS and FIGURES ROOM that charts the WORTHWHILENESS of all seven and a half billion people.

Just kidding.


http://s11.postimg.org/40fmt8dbn/scary_easter_bunny_6.jpg (http://postimage.org/)

[trish]

That one must be the Easter bunny. This one's Alice's ->

[hippifried]

🎼 🎤 "Feed your head!" 🎧

[trish]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2yQLXTuctA

[martin48]

See this thread has gone down hill

[Stavros]

See this thread has gone down hill

Because the thread has become dominated by infantile cartoons, rather than a debate.

Donald Trump's flippant remark on women and abortion, in which he said that women who have a termination should be 'punished' -a statement he then had to retract- illustrates his indifference to women, but also a sudden impulse to say what he thinks the Republican Party wants to hear, only even they have held back from the kind of policy that exists in countries such as El Salvador where women have been imprisoned for terminating a pregnancy and one woman was incarcerated for having a miscarriage (though it is not clear if the prosecutors could tell the difference).

There was a time when the Republican Party did not have a single position on abortion, it has been argued that it was a campaign by the Moral Majority that began in the 1970s which merged with the existing if marginal evangelical Christian churches to change the way the GOP thought about this issue, galvanised by Roe-vs-Wade after 1973 much as Jon O'Brien claims:

"Taking over school boards at local and district levels, the evangelical politicians rose through the ranks of the Republican Party and eventually took over the party platform. These were the same tactics used during Prohibition by the temperance movement, which preyed on the fears of the conservative Protestant Scottish contingent in the United States by using stereotypes of drunken Irish and Polish to galvanize the vote against them."
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/republicans-weren-t-always-pro-life-but-as-donald-trump-has-shown-you-now-have-to-act-that-way-to-a6961881.html

It is a curious aspect of Evangelical Christianity in the USA -if that is what it is- that it should appear to be so angry, and vengeful, and focus its attention on 'sin' and 'bad behaviour', rather than promote goodness in society, and the capacity that people have to co-operate and be charitable, indeed, to improve the quality of life -dare one even say 'the spiritual life'. Oddly perhaps, or not, this bleak agenda of societies cast down by attacks on the family (abortion, same-sex marriage), on the economy (state control and taxes), and belief and 'public morals' (godless, immoral cinema and tv; pornography on the internet), sounds like a menu of corrosion from within that might have been written by the fundamentalists of Daesh or al-Qaeda, or the government of Saudi Arabia (but maybe not on taxes).

Another curious tone was set in Obama's first campaign, because he offered a different agenda from the constant Republican Party factions ranting on about what is wrong with America -his message of 'hope and change' may have seemed absurdly wonderful, yet the tone it set was one that people responded to after years of terrorism and war, and one can see today the radical difference with the angry brigades that follow Trump and Sanders, and while they might have a lot to be angry about, the tone it sets in public debate makes politics uncomfortable and even dangerous. If the view is that 'American is broken' and the next guy must fix it, what happens when he fails?

The Old Testament God of Moses was a jealous and an angry God, the God of Jesus, we like to believe, was by contrast a loving God. It seems to me that the decline of religious belief in the USA is measured by the ever more strident position of the Republican Party, and this is one reason why I think they appear on this side of the pond to be out of touch on a range of social issues on which most Americans are either relaxed or don't get upset about. They appear to have chosen rage over calm, emergency over tedium, and punishment over reward. I am not sure that the Democrats are any more coherent on a range of issues, Sanders offers little in terms of hope, but that suggests to me that both parties are struggling to develop a policy framework that will create jobs and grow the economy, on which it is not so much 'God only knows', as an area where even God cannot help.

[buttslinger]

Look, if you've SEEN God,
Then God exists
If you haven't,
Then He doesn't.
Not a problem.

The people who are talked into believing in God,
can just as likely be talked out of it.

http://s30.postimg.org/4u0fzn43l/easter_bunny_death_1.jpg (http://postimage.org/)
free upload pictures (http://postimage.org/)

[martin48]

That's just the sort of infantile cartoon that gets this thread a bad name. Shame on you

[buttslinger]

Listen, if you're afraid to give away everything you own, leave all your friends and family, give up sex and fine food, TV.......Then you're rightly afraid of God.

And even a fool as foolish as buttslinger sees this debate as a no-win draw at best.
I contend that the actual Entity of God is standing directly in front of you at this direct moment.
One size fits all.
What kind of reasonable person would try to sell that?
http://s24.postimg.org/43nl1q9ad/Alice_Liddell.jpg (http://postimage.org/)
pic host (http://postimage.org/)

[hippifried]

1 size fits all, huh?
So God's an asshole?

[martin48]

1 size fits all, huh?
So God's an asshole?


Not a totally new theological argument. The question to ask "With all the shit in the world, where does it come from?" Or perhaps, he (I assume "he") doesn't care a shit.

[hippifried]

Butt aparently, "he" gives one.

[buttslinger]

If I have any weakness it is that I care too much.

[trish]

Trump just quickly drew the logical conclusion to the pro-life premise. If a fertilized egg is a person and abortion is murder, than women who hire abortionists are contract murderers and should be punished. Trump is guilty of two things here. 1) Adopting the pro-life premise (probably for political purposes - because he clearly never gave this issue two minutes of thought on his own). 2) Not having enough familiarity with the issue to know that pro-life adherents have long ago been forced to retreat from the logical conclusion their position entails. Trump got himself snagged by the logical conundrum inherent in position he is forced to adopt if he wants the pro-life vote.

Jesus Christ is usually presented as a kind, gentle and forgiving healer. He intervenes between humankind and the angry Old Testament God. I was taught to pray to God in Jesus’s name. But among the End Times evangelicals today that Jesus is on the wane. The modern Jesus carries a sword and rides a steed. He wreaks vengeance and beheads monsters. He’s more like Gandalf and less like Gandhi.

[Stavros]

It is curious how this thread seems to generate a mixture of baby-talk and incoherence, as if the concept of God were so obscure, or so daunting no rational sense could be made of it. If we reconsider the concept of God in the context of 7,000 years or more of human history, it should not be difficult to see how at one time humans viewed themselves as part of a cosmic, universal system from what they could see on earth to what they thought they saw in the sky during the day or at night. Most systems of belief thus attributed super-human powers to earth, air, fire and water -the earth breaking apart in front of you and swallowing up a village, or providing grain and fruit and other tasty foods. The air that enables you to breathe and live, or carries with it bad smells, or nice smells, or the 'mal-aria' which kills with fever. The fire that gives you roast meat, warmth in winter, or burns your family to a crisp as it comes roaring out of the forest. Water to drink, to live, with which to cook, that floods your home and takes away everything you own. And not so hard to imagine humans making moral judgements on the basis of either a catastrophic event, or a blessing.

The Ancient Egyptians shared with the Hindu as they shared with Australians a cosmology in which they were embedded in time and space across the earth and in the universe they could see and imagine. There was no beginning and no end to time, no limits to space, and a sense in which humans were on a journey and/or that life revolved in cycles again and again. One wonders why people from different parts of the world all had a similar view of their place in the scheme of things, and why it has been so important for others to dismiss it, for just as the baby-talk brigade or the confused prefer to lean on Darwin and dismiss thousands of years of human thought as gobbledegook about a sky-fairy with no relevance to the modern world or the cause of most of its misery, so they walk arm in arm with those religious fanatics who also dismiss thousands of years of belief and practice to insist that their version of Judaism, Christianity or Islam is the only one that matters and that everything since Moses, Jesus and Muhammad has been a mistake or is an error that needs to be corrected. It is a negative reaction to modernisation which cannot cope with the complexity and diversity of human societies, and thus reduces it all to a piece of shit.

One would have thought we also had a more educated cohort of citizens more willing to think deeply about issues be they religious, secular, scientific or political, rather than march arm in arm with those who wish education, like the wheel, had never happened.

So the answer to: "The question [to ask] "With all the shit in the world, where does it come from?" Or perhaps, he (I assume "he") doesn't care a shit" is one that produces a simple explanation: human agency. Just as humans have either created the concept of God as a concept of power, or deduced from the evidence there must be a supernatural power religion has always placed the explanation of human behaviour on human agency -if you are rewarded by God with a life of happiness it is because you led a moral life in accordance with the scripture; if you failed, it is because you wanted to be exempt from the rules. But it was always a human response to human success and failure, the God element is thus, like the law, the benchmark by which human agency is judged. It doesn't take a genius to come up with the idea that the sky is angry when lightning and thunder wake you up at night, and not much genius to use it to organise society as, I suspect, societies want to be organised and look for organising principles to control human behaviour. Thus, whenever there has been a breakdown in state power, when 'the centre does not hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world' in fact humans find a way of organising authority amongst themselves, be it a tribe, a gang, a guerilla band, a coven, whatever it might be.

The role played by violence in the dismissal brigades of religion is a curious one because just as the baby-talkers want to 'bomb the shit out of ISIS', ISIS wants to bomb the shit out of us. The same Christians in the US who want to classify abortion as murder and thus punish the murderers who take away a human life, send adults to the death chamber for execution, or young men and women to a battlefield to fight and die, or sit in a bunker in Ohio while a drone drops a bomb on a village in Afghanistan. And yet the religious texts on which they base their creed admonishes them for the ease with which they kill others, just as Muhammad faced with someone rejecting the existence of the one God would feel sorry rather than angry, and prefer to persuade rather than to kill.

And one does wonder why it is that so many religious texts use literary devices such as metaphor, allegory, simile; and tones of voice such as joy, exaltation, bitterness and sarcasm with which to express the 'word of God' -as recited by man of course. Thus when Jesus in Matthew 10:34 says "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword", does this mean that a Christian can go to the shop and buy a sword with which to slay his enemies? If you think that the words are literally what they mean, then onward, Christian soldiers, go.

Or could it be that in an age when most people were illiterate, religious thought was transmitted through oral recitation and used literary devices as aids for memory? (cf Frances Yates, The Art of Memory). It does seem logical. Studies over many years of the oral traditions of epic poetry enabled scholars to unlock the means whereby the Iliad and the Odyssey became so crucial to understanding ancient Greek societies and indeed, our own. The moral composition in these poems is the basis of ancient Greek religious thought and uses literary devices, repetition of key phrases in particular, as modes of memory. People remember stirring or moving phrases, they remember that Agamemnon has a 'loud war cry' and instantly know of 'Man-slaying Achilles' and all his attributes, and from the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt to the symbology of Ancient America, you find this curious fact that in religion people do not always seem to be saying what they mean.

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" -If a person is not living a moral life or a happy life and they are discontent, they are not 'at peace' and maybe the 'sword' is the 'sword' of justice, or a weapon that will cut through the mire and the unhappiness and release the victim from his or her torment. One can see how the image of the sword is not intended to refer to Valerian steel or an object that beheads unbelievers, yet one can also see how in the hands of the baby-talk brigade, that is what it becomes, just as one can understand how decent people revolt against it, and prefer to make the connection between the metal and the man, rather than the metaphor and the human.

[trish]

In Matthew 25:31,32,33 we read “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate the people one from another like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”

Are we to take this literally or is the second coming a metaphor? In either case, people are being likened to sheep and goats. What distinguishes the sheep from the goats?

Matthew 25:34-46 tells us that essentially the sheep are those who treated people with charity even though they were strangers and the goats are those who were uncharitable. The goats will say, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not give you whatever you needed?” And the Son of Man will answer, “...just as you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for me.”

One metaphor is made explicit here: every person, even the stranger, is Jesus and Matthew here is telling us that we must treat others as charitably as we would treat Jesus. But why?

Matthew has Jesus tell the sheep, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” To the goats he says, “...depart into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

If this is a metaphor, an implicit analogy, then what is homologue of eternal life? Well-being? Satisfaction? Contentment? Justice? Knowledge that you’ll be fondly remembered? What is eternal punishment? Frustration? Being disliked? Empty? Knowledge that you’ll be forgotten or hated by future generations?

From my perspective, these interpretations work fairly well as providing reasons (albeit selfish ones) for being charitable.

Now suppose eternal life and eternal punishment are not metaphors. Surely the harm done by any being of finite power is finite. Even the destruction of the planet and on life upon is a finite amount damage (especially if every soul on it lives forever anyway either in Heaven or Hell). Why would a charitable God choose to punish anyone eternally for something they did as a finite material being during a tiny, finite window of time spent on this little ball of dirt? Eternal life, eternal punishment, Heaven and Hell on one side of the scale and human beings, ignorant except of whatever conflicting things they’re told by human authorities purporting to speak for the Gods on the other side. Do the scales balance? I think not, not if eternal life and eternal punishment are interpreted literally.

So I’m perfectly willing to accept that the parables, the stories and the advice given in the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita etc. work as metaphors. But does any Christian, Muslim, Hindu etc. take all of these stories metaphorically? Are there any Christians who think the soul is finite? That life after death is a fiction? That the second coming is just a metaphor? Just a way of presenting a story? Or do Christians continue primarily to think in the primitive modes our prehistoric forebears explored? Do they not still walk in those same baby steps, afraid to set out on their own because otherwise the cosmos seems too big, too bewildering? Here in the U.S. Christians refuse to acknowledge that humans give purpose to life and as a result they live empty lives waiting for a non-existent God or one of his earthly authorities to tell them how to live.

I have no interest walking arm in arm with religious zealots who would force others to believe as they do. Conversation and thought are tools enough. As far as I’m concerned people can believe and will believe what they wish. That doesn’t mean I respect all religious belief, or will not criticize some religious beliefs or belittle some religious beliefs.