Religion

You were arguing with me on whether or not the current accepted theory on the universe is finite or infinite.

I'd say human nature

 

he was telling you evidence is implying one way and not the other, not that you'll burn in hell for it.
stop trolling.

 

I have to disagree with matty. Atheism is not 'about' anything, as atheism is not a set of beliefs, it is a lack of one belief, and there is nothing in the description of atheism which requires anything else.

 

debating semantics is unnecessary, atheism points towards science, thus objectivity and open-mindedness.

 

Thats sort of ridiculous in itself, as just by being atheist, it does not make you either of those things, I have seen enough people who are close minded and irrational who nevertheless are atheistic to know that making a parallel between them is silly. Atheists may be these things, but they also may not, as can theists; Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project is strongly christian, and he is one of the top scientists in the world, so will most likely be objective etc.

You may call it semantics, but by setting yourself into a position that points at a notion that can be shown to be false very simply, in this case by simply providing examples of people who are both irrational and atheist, you put yourself in the position of defending something you should not have to.

Atheism as a position has absolutely nothing to do with science. Science can be used as a method of validating it in a person's mind, but at the same time it can have no relation at all for a person, and for these reasons I do not accept a parallel to be drawn to two things which are independent of each other. You do not need to be rational to be atheist, and you do not need to be atheist to be rational.

(note I am an atheist, and my reasons are in fact based around the rational, but I have observed others for whom this is not the case)

 

People overthink atheism too much. I'm atheist and I believe in nothing, and I don't believe I'm doing anything wrong here. Also, I'm not going to burn in hell for not having a religion, so people can't assume that because of their Christian beliefs.

 

Sure they can, they're Christian.

Kinda like how I think all Christians are gonna be eaten alive by a plate of spaghetti.

Both beliefs should be taken with as such, not that they're bad or anything. Just kinda weird.

 

...I'm curious where the first reference to "flying spaghetti monster" occurred. I get why it was created as a joke against believing a construct that one can or cannot prove the existence of.

 

It's not semantics, atheism is objectivity, and objectivity is not fairness or even-handedness. Objectivity is the search for the truth regardless of where that will take you. It is true there are examples of people who find science and faith compatible, but i know i am not one of those people and that i'm better for it. Our comprehension of our ancestry as well as the history of our universe is irrefutable, so if a handful of scientists find wish-making profitable, then that is their prerogative, because there are clearly no other aspects of religion that they would truly believe, if they did understand the things we know now and understood objectivity.

 

It was created in 2005 as a protest against the Kansas State Board of Education's ruling that intelligent design theory could be taught in public schools alongside evolution. The founder and "prophet", Bobby Henderson, wrote to the school board:

I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

 

Are you guys talking atheism as in a lack of belief, or as a specific belief in the distinct absence of deities? I'm not gonna go on the whole agnostic vs. atheism definition debate, because atheism can and often is used to describe what is otherwise known as agnosticism (despite the clear etymological implications of the word itself as a kind of faith in itself). I'm just curious because it seems like, even within this thread, the word is being used for both purposes.

For example:

That really depends. In the strictest terms, atheism is absolutely a belief.

Were It so easy (Halo3) - YouTube

 

Agnosticism doesn't necessarily mean "unresolved" either, though. By the definition, agnosticism posits a positive belief, that knowledge of god or gods is unobtainable, given our capacities and limits for understanding.

I've been wondering if there actually was a word for a religious position that meant the same thing as "unresolved", but not in a tentative sense. Like someone who is happy to be unresolved forever. Things like this just go to show the weakness of forcing beliefs into categorical language.

 

Atheism can't be a belief. Atheism first and foremost is disbelief in any claims without evidence, and it is the search for the truth regardless for what you want it to be. Atheism and objectivity are one in the same.

 

Atheism both describes the passive state of absence of belief in deities (which would include newborn babies too young to have the faculties to form an opinion) and the active state of rejection of belief in the existence of deities.

Confusion over.

 

we are our own wicked gods. the things we do/say/think/feel in our lives, affect the
immediate world around us, and often the immediate worlds of others around us as well.
therefore, i am god.
you are all my minions.
i command you all to ignore this comment and continue to discuss me and my many faces.

 

Something that sticks in the back of my head:

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning." -CS Lewis

 

I didn't read every post, so I hope that I'm not repeating anyone here,
but I don't see how thinking that someone is right and another person is wrong is bad. You wouldn't say "I respect your opinion" if you had everything in your life suggest that you had good eyesight when someone said that a table was right in front of you that you didn't see. Isn't it better for people to try to find truth? The existence of an all-powerful god isn't subjective, it can be supported by evidence or not- it's not like finding the most pleasing color or best music. Theists who I have talked to completely abandon the idea that we should try our best to find out what actually exists. The only reason why people don't want to find truth about religion is because it would destroy the beliefs that their family or community gave them from birth; it would make them feel better to say that anyone who thinks they know better is unkind. I wouldn't talk to someone who didn't want to talk about it, though.

What I'm interested in is how people came up with religion, specifically morals, in the first place. Tribal societies may be superstitious, but how did monotheists end up thinking that something supernatural taught them morals? We know that we have governments set up laws for our common protection; were people back then so stupid that they needed to be told not to murder only because they would suffer after death? Still, the bible did not discourage warfare, so people grasped that if you killed for any reason, you need not fear unless someone can enforce a law- that is, unless another human provides the disincentive. I have not read the bible myself, but people today and those who have interpreted it in history (i.e. crusaders) think that the murder commandment only applied within a society, much like any society that instigated war has civil laws against murder. Why? Because the people who make the laws agree that they do not want to be killed, but if they think that they can win a war they throw away the concept of the sanctity of human life. In other words, religious societies' morals reflect civil goals of communal self-protection, and are devoid of morals. If I thought about the Iraq war with the same conscience and respect for human life as Christians pretend to have, I'd go insane with misery.

 

It's promising that religion was created out of fear and anxiety and lack of understanding. The human species is more than 100,000 years old, and about 95% of that would have been spent in misery and death. Famine, tribalism, natural disasters, genetic disease, all of this impossible to understand. Before we upped and left the savannah we think or numbers dropped to less than 1000. That is how close we came to never leaving a mark. I believe out of this desperation in survival and knowing what we do about how flawed we are genetically as well psychologically (both supporting evolution), we tried to invent a reason for what is going on around us. Religion is our first attempt at trying to understand our purpose, just like alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry.

 

Within the context of sight as a means of perception there's not much scope for discussion, or at least very little that we haven't addressed in pretty simple medical/scientific/whatever terms.

That's a pretty simplified view, imo simplified to the point of being incorrect. You can't empirically disprove the existence a god or gods, and the existence of one or many isn't predicated upon validation through observable evidence in the terms you're talking. My rough definition of religious faith, or even general spirituality (though again this is reliant on my reasonably rigid definitions for what are pretty vague words) would be treating emotion as means of perception, rather than an entirely internal phenomenon. In a completely different way from, say, sight, but with a comparable weight given to it within the conscious mind when assessing the nature of the outside world. I feel this is, at least for me, the root of the divergence between my own understanding of existence and perception of the world, and that which I perceive to be at the root of religious faith. I do not feel emotional perception to have a strong enough sense of self validation (in the long term, subject to reflection, obviously in the moment it can often be the very definition of self validating) within my mind for me to trust it, nor does it provide reasonable proof of reliability through cross-referencing as other senses or methods of perception do. However, I can understand that such a trust in emotion as a form of perception is not only possible but even defensibly reasonable (if only because, at that stage, you have no real context in which to consider what is and isn't reasonable) from an analytical rather than practical perspective.

Thus, in these terms, there is "observable" evidence by the bucketload, otherwise what is a believer perceiving when they feel faith (since to feel in this profound way is to perceive)?

The only reason? Aw hell naw. Plenty of people (some of them very thoughtful people by all accounts) come to religion not just later in life, but quite drastically, even abruptly (though how much such things may actually lend weight to your argument rather than hurt it is debatable). As above, I cannot identify with trusting emotional perception as a principle, but plenty do, and exactly why they do is much more complex, and involves stripping back how you understand things way more than you're accounting for.

Do you not think that having such a staunch opinion on a book that you've never read is at least somewhat comparable to a creationist who refuses to try and understand the theory of evolution before dismissing it? I'm not saying it's going to convert you, I've read it and clearly I don't believe it, but I'd argue that your attempt to understand it is coming from the wrong direction. You seem to be working backwards from a position based on the assumption (however correct) of religion already having been proven wrong, redundant or whatever. I'm not talking about whether this is justified or not, I'm simply saying that if you're attempting to understand something, coming at it with a predication of it making no sense isn't going to yield a greater understanding of another perspective. The idea of working up from base principles to try and reach the point where religion was deemed to not only make sense, but be the only explanation, is the only way of attempting to both discern the difference between it and your own understanding of the universe, and also see more points of identification between the two (the nature of the human mind that you can see in both). I know your paragraph begins in this vein, but you don't seem quite committed to it.

EDIT: As for the wider argument of how religion (more specifically, organised religion, ie. spirituality extrapolated to a social structure) works out in practical terms. Humans are assholes, a scientist knows this and also knows why. I suppose if you consider original sin in the 'evidential' terms I mentioned before, then so does a creationist. Them having faith doesn't necessarily change that, especially since emotion is a) often self contradictory, inherently so and b) even if you trust it, a lot easier to ignore at your own convenience than the agreed forms of perception. People who fall prey to this are, in my experience, less prone to introspection and, if I might hazard a guess, working more from emotional perception being self validating, in the sense that they've barely (if ever) reflected upon it with doubt. I find them easier to argue with, if less likely to actually listen. But honestly, this is just humans being human again. Can you honestly look at the majority of the atheist/agnostic population and say that they're any less lazy or instinctive in that understanding of the universe? It's 'normal,' in a similar way to the root of religion in many people that you talked about above, and it's only going to get more so.

I mean look at it like this: if religion is baseless than it is inherently borne totally out of human nature, any appreciation of it being formed or even influenced by an outside force inherently proves some kind of spiritual validation. Therefore, such atrocities are manifestations of nothing more than human nature as, I think, can be nicely understood in scientific terms. As for the practical differences between how said laziness/manipulation of the laziness manifests itself (ie. how much worse they tend to be in religious cases), as ever I feel that saying "look what religion did" is over simplifying. It's really more of a historical and social question.

 

So many logical fallacies. Meaning does not have the same properties as light. Theism does not have a monopoly on, or prove, meaning. That the universe has intrinsic meaning, that can be found because it has intrinsic meaning. It exists because we can determine whether or not it exists because it exists.

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