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Freeman Dyson Wins Templeton Prize For Religion
Cy Guy writes "Quantum physicist Freeman Dyson, (father of the Dyson Sphere and Esther Dyson) who has written about religion's role in modern culture, won the $940,000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. 'Religion has a much more important role in human destiny than science.' Here's a link to the wire story."
YEAH PREACH IT BABY ...
CRACK IS MY GOD
MARY MY BITCH
crazy
Esther Dykson is a lesbian
If I remember correctly the word "religion" comes from the latin "religare" == to link (??). In the sense that it is supposed to link people together, get them in intimate touch with each other, and with what's truly important in life.
Religions should concentrate on this role, and be judged solely on their success in this respect, and leave the attempts at explaining the physical world and hypothesis on its origin to science, which is better equipped for the task (unless you like to believe in a flat earth mounted on a tortoise, or an almighty creator with a white beard sitting on a cloud somewhere, or other such nonsense).
In this sense, I agree with the point that religion has a vital role to play for mankind, and that "interfaith" initiatives and finding a common ground between the various religions is the next step in their evolution if they are to get this right... (and avoid further religious wars and discriminations).
I believe the price given, was from such an "interfaith" organisation, am I right?
Haha! That's what I love about Slashdot. News for Nerds and Smart Crabby People Who Are Often Right.
You can prove negitives. It's simple, and often done in Mathmatics.. Look at FLP.
All you need to do, prove that Y could not exist if X existed, then go find a Y.
Really? And all of those Saints - their lives were ruined?
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Marx.
You probably can't see it from where you're standing, but you're a pretty stupid person.
Remember kids, if it doesn't say GRITS on the package, it's not a slashdot-approved product.
does anyone know where i can find, online, a copy of asimov's story "The Thousand Names of God"
(mods - it is about computers and religion)
thank you
Excuse me, but you're a whorebat.
Actually, yes.
I have it on good authority from the lord of the pit that almost every single catholic saint went straight to hell ( and for that matter, all the Pope's and most of the monks, nuns and priest's as well ).
The reason why is simple. Their retiring away from worldly matters "for the good of their souls" was nothing more or less than a betrayel of the faith that they claimed to follow.
Foolishly they though that they could gain merit in the eyes of the tyrant in heaven by empty displays of pious virtue rather than serving their fellows in acordance with the principle of "love one another as your father in heaven loves you".
They failed to do so and now dwell in the halls of the damned.
Worse still - most of them never got laid or had a good time while they were alive, so they are definately "two time losers".
Far better would they have been to be happy pagans. Then they would not only have enjoyed the pleasures of life but they would also now dwell in the open realm of limbo, beholden to neither the tyrant of heaven or the tyrant of hell.
That's plain silly. Religion has had just as much impact on human existence, from the Puritan work ethic to the weekend (whose parent is Shabbat, the Sabbath) to exploration of the new world, to musical expression to our built environment etc etc etc. Religion has had and continues to have a huge impact on our life. Some of that is positive and some negative, just as with science.
Whats is this? News for Religous Nerds now? give us a break.....
Yes it impacts me. I got lots of religous nutters knocking on ym door annoying the fuck out of me. Trying to give you leaflets in the streets. I wish they would stop ramming religion down my throat and ram it up their arses.
Because religion has been the direct or indirect cause of much of human suffering. Advancing the spiritual cause is NOT religion. There seems to be a sharp distinction between faith and religion to me. What is the difference? Dogma. I'm tired of God, people talking about God like they know everything about God, and like everything that they believe is sanctioned by God because They are Blessed by God with Understanding. These people are religious. The people who have empathy, understanding, and try to give of themselves to lessen the amount of pain and suffering in our world- These are the people that I respect. These people have faith, and do not need to preach, or prove themselves. Doesn't it seem odd to you that "spiritual progress" is something that is rewardable by money? This prize is the ultimate in hypocracy. A spiritual person (in this case Christian) shouldn't need tons of money to reward them for being spiritual. As a matter of fact, according to bible teachings the acquisition of wealth is decidedly non-spiritual. (and could perhaps be characterized as anti-spiritual) And my last beef with this prize- The founder(s) made sure that it wouldbe a bigger prize than the Nobel prize. If this doesn't seem incredibly hildish to you...
Well nor was DUNE, but I still really enjoyed reading it. It doesnt always have to be totally correct to be a good story.
He didn't say "let's kill all the religious people in the world", but something more to the effect of "let's all wake up and smell the coffee and use our brains for a change".
It really is long past time for the bulk of humanity to begin taking some responsibility for their lives.
Yeah, Ive never had a jew telling me I should be closer to god, its always these bloody christians.
Sorry friend, Stalin didn't go after the Jews until the Purges. From 1918 to 1933, it was Jewish Bolsheviks murdering Christian peasants and middle management. At least 20 million, before the Purges started. In any case, at most a few hundred thousand of the 40 million were Jews. You guys hijacked WWII, saying it was only the Jews that suffered [Holocaust(tm)] without even mentioning, say, the 27 million dead Russians. Now, you're trying to hijack the Bolshevik Terror, which the Jews PERPETRATED! And you wonder why everybody hates the Jews! Oy!
5 Billion people, all arguing over which name they should call a supreme being, that we can't prove even exists, and dying for it too. Humans are fucking stupid.
Well, for much of the last century, people across the globe lived in fear of the knock on the door from someone coming for them. And all too frequently, that someone was working on behalf of a government that claimed it was "scientific". This was true of both Russian Communists and German Nazis.
Funny how hitler took the swastika as a symbol. It's either napalese or tibetan (can't remeber which one though) and is one of their mystical symbols. If that aint some religous inclination , I don't know what is.
yeah, hardly anyone goes to chruch in the UK.
So I was mistaken then when I read the Rambam (renowned commentator on the Torah who lived in the middle ages) categorically state that parts of the Bible were clearly allegorical, was I? Literalism is, in its way, a modern phenomenon. And, just to be clear, the Modern era started about the same time as Natural Philosophy took off, in the C16. Can I suggest reading any of the dozens of textbooks on the history of science and religion before spouting off on how there "really was a conflict between science and religion".
Hey, I just listened to the NPR interview and I'm astonished how a self-professed agnostic could have won the prize. Dyson says he's an agnostic, and he says that he doesn't deserve it. So, why the hell did they award him the prize. This must be the work of the devil!
Dear Sir, FUCK OFF. Yours, Terry Fuckwit
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
Well a certain mosquito has evolved now in the London underground. Its more aggressive and is nothing like others categorised. They have just suddenly appeared. If that aint a mutation, i dont know what is. God created diddly squat, more than likely, the universe created god.
when you're dumb, all you can understand is religion
when you're a little smarter, all you can understand is science
when you're smarter still, you realize they are the same thing
>One very good definition of religion is "faith in action."
/., but your attempt at making the church out to be some distributed, collaborative project is laughable. What other institution in the history of man has succeeded in centralizing and maintaining its iron grip on power as effectively as the various branches of the Christian church have?
Oh, and when faith dictates that one should, say, deny the right of other cultures, schools of thought, etc. to exist, is that "faith in action"? How many cultures has Christian missionary work destroyed because "the natives needed to be saved"? Yes, it's all well and good to talk about Christian charity, but let's not ignore the fact that it is basically an imperialistic tool.
>I admire a person who is unwilling to claim absolute truth; a creed which claims to be false, on the other hand, is not even worth looking at.
Are you concerned with claims to truth, or actual truth? Maybe you just said this because it sounded pretty. What is the difference between claiming to be false and claiming to not be absolutely true? Are we talking about fuzzy logic kind of truth values? ( I claim that the truth value of my belief system is no less than 0.8 (where 1 is True and 0 is False) )
Religion isn't needed to establish a philosophical basis for discussion. You might say, well, not for, say, philosophy of science, but what about ethical problems? To this I answer, Christian ethics are grounded on the teachings of the words of the alleged son of a sky pixie. What you describe is a philosophical basis of discussion amongst Chirstians. Everyone else is excluded, because there can be no common ground for discussion if the word of your god is ultimately the only Truth you will accept.
As for religion's defense against cultism, Galileo, Newton, Darwin all elaborated philosophies without (or rather, in spite of) the peer review of the church (the Christian church, to be specific); it is our good fortune that they (and those who agreed with them) stood up to the church. I know you are trying to pander to the open source zealots on
dmd
It seems there must be a group of ex-scientologists who read slashdot. Every religious post seems to degenerate to scientology for some reason.
let me guess...you're a penny pinching jew, right ?
that is a great story, especially for engineers -- cynicism abounds.
A belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence may still be reasonable. Where is the logical proof or material evidence for the existence of "thoughts"?
Fait in clean drinking water? No ive seen the water purification plants. I assume my water is clean, because as a tax payer, I EXPECT and DEMAND its clean, I dont worship my taps.
Start with a simple one: is Christianity true or not true
My answer is - no, it isn't. I don't accept the basic premise of christianity. I don't believe in an after life.
and you can't decide purely by looking at Christians.
I don't need to. Without proof, by Occam's razor, it's mere coffee table chit-chat. For me, there are far more interesting topics of conversation when I'm sharing a coffee with a friend.
Having started with the questions at the end of your posting, lets proceed to wind back up towards the top.
Look at the way you live: if you seriously believe you only have 80-odd years on the planet then oblivion, does your life make any sense?
Who said it has to make any sense? Your trying to argue that a religious perspective is the only valid one, that life must make sense in order to be worth living. That it must ascribe to some "higher purpose" to have any justification.
The point of life is to *live*. From my perspective, religion if for people who haven't worked that much out yet. To me, the very process of asking "what is the meaning of life?" means that you aren't really alive. If you were, then you wouldn't need to ask the question because you would already know.
This is an inner perception. It has nothing to do with a dogma or a belief system. In this regard, religion is a con game. It deliberatly encourages people to think "just buy our A1 insurance policy and everything will be just peachy keen".
So people go through the motions. They read "The Book" ( whichever book it is ) and keep telling themselves "any second now and it will all become clear to me, I'll finally understand!".
It doesn't work like that. The reason that you have for living has to come from inside you. It's something that everyone has to earn for themself. There is no "proven and effective" method. Religion tries to act as if it has a monopoly on the subject of self-realisation, that you *can't* do it without religion.
My experience and the experience of many others says that you can. You don't need religion to give you a meaning to live. And religion ( and religious people ) hate that. They can't tolerate the possibility that people can get there outside of their control and without following all of their rules.
Given what's at stake, I'd consider quite carefully.
You tried very carefully to present a reasonable front in this debate, but you just couldn't stop that from slipping out, could you?
The implied metaphysical threat of "if you don't agree with me, then terrible things are going to happen to you".
Which brings me to the point where your posting started. You've tried to refute my snide comment, but the only thing that you seem to have done is to simply serve yourself up as the perfect example of the mentality that it was meant to criticise.
Your own position would have been far better served if you had aimed your attack at my intolerance rather than parading your own for all to see. In doing so, you have done nothing except to prove that your an even bigger asshole than I am.
Better luck next time sucker.
You are just plain wrong with this one. The United States is nowhere near over-religios (wrong word, religion is something similar to sking colour), there is just a small faction that likes to be heard. In fact as far as following religion goes i'd say the US is one of the lowest countries in the world, and it is a source of their problems. Please stop making false claims with no evidence. What you said is something like this "All spanish people are stupid because they speak spanish."
Well wasnt Joan of Arc burned? I say that was a fucking teribble day for her...... I'd say that ruined her life.
Its fucking shit. Lots of money grabbers leading the weak minded. If most of hollywood are into this, then they are indeed weak minded fools. I wouldnt mind startign a religion up like that if it made me rich. If your stupid enough to give your money to this bullshit, you dont deserve it anyway. My congratulation on a stunning business built on a real ropey dogma.
By this line of "reasoning" then, we would be equally justified in saying "the problem is the people, not the political philospophy". This is precisely the kind of cop-out used by Stalinists and Nazis.
"It wasn't the movement as a whole, it was a small minority of power hungry individuals who perverted the real cause of the party".
"It wasn't the faithfull as a whole, it was a small minority of power hungry clerics who perverted the real cause of our church".
Nothing more than glib and convenient rationalisation after the fact.
The doctines of christianity speak very explicetly in this regard. There are the saved who believe and everybody else is damned.
The damned are suppodes to suffer for all eternity and the faithfull have shown repeatedly that they have no objection to starting on the un-believers while they are still in this life.
The bottom line is simple - christianity is fundementally flawed. It is an elitist philosphy of "I'm saved, your fsked! Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!". As such, nobody is suprised when christians act like barbarians.
An atheist who prays to satan ? That's a cool oxymoron if ever I saw one ;)
twi
[ ] xtianity
[ ] Judiasm (Jesus was a Jew right?)
[ ] Hindu
[ ] Buddhism
[ ] Shinto
[ ] Satanism/Scientology
[ ] None! Dammit! I'm atheist!
[ ] about:mozilla
[ ] Kibo/Discordianism
[ ] Xibo
[ ] The Shub-Internet
[ ] What? I *am* God!
[ ] The Erotic Church of the Goddess Natalie Portman
[ ] Worship THIS!
[ ] Jefus
It is a kind of interesting notion though. Christianity, has at its heart, a desire to 'Love your neighbor'. To think that bringing the Internet and/or technology of some sort to a third world country could change their society for the better seems interesting.
l00z3r.
> You'll notice that the most brilliant of scientists -
> particularly, physicists seem to have the most
> thought provoking ideas (and respect for, IMHO)
> about religion and science...
Sure, whatever. Asimov was a very proud and -very-
loud atheist. He viewed religion as an important part
of historical human existence, but in the context of
modern utility, religion is now unnecessary.
Religion is now a complete waste of time...
M (posting AC since he doesn't remember his signon...)
This is esentially nothing more than a semantic argument that simply begs the question - why do people keep propagating religion?
Answer : religion conditions them them to do so.
Once a group of people come to some kind of theological conclusion, they try to vector it to as many other people as possible. In order to facilitate the propagation of their memetic condition, they will organise power-structures.
Once these are established, they become self-perpetuating, even if means tossing out most of the ideals that they were based on in the first place. This is a process common not only to religion, but also for polotics and a whole host of other social phenomena.
The crux of the issue is - will the values of the power structure promote tolerance or intolerance?
In the case of many religious and political philosphies, it's generally intolerance rather than tolerance. So no, I'm sorry, but you can't just say that the problem "is people". You also have to look at the factors in their life that made them that way and in this respect, religion does not get to weasel of the hook. It's just as guilty as Nazism or Totalitarian communism in this regard.
Where can I get a copy of Dyson's prize winning essay? Is it online? If not, where is it published?
Anyone else agree with this guy? I think both sides can go WAY too extreme, and the best solution is somewhere inbetween! - Tramii Only idiots have sigs... um, wait a minute...
In the evolution of thought, religion way back
there.
Science with some logical methods of trial/error along with math have brought society many advancements.
Religion, OTOH, does not try to find truth, it assumes that some old great people already found the truth.
Here is a condensed Bible:
Old testement:
"How Zeus created the earth"
"My God is bigger than your God"
New testement:
"Martyrdom 101"
"A dream coded spcifically for the destruction of Rome can easily be interpreted to mean anything if you ignore strategeic words"
"The Bible is true because the Bible says so"
"progress" in religion is analogous to
"progress" in slavery in the south 100 years ago.
Certainly there are trolls and flamers on Slashdot just like anywhere else on the net. But I have been very happy with the number of really good, informative comments I usually find here.
I approached this article and the comments on it with some apprehension. I am an atheist and I have hung out in the atheist corners of the net. I used to be one of the first to flame people to a crisp for preaching to us over in the atheist newsgroups, not because of what they believed, but because they had no business preaching to us there. It was our place.
Here I won't ask anyone to check their beliefs at the door. Many of us are here in part to discuss some firmly held beliefs and opinions about technical issues. But letting this degenerate into the sort of name calling that it has is awful, and quite off-topic in many cases.
Specifically, Amphigory, you were off to a good start until you had to take a shot at Huxley as a "pseudo-scientist". If you want to make an accusation like that, back it up. Personally, I think your comment would have been better without that little jab. And some of the people responding to you certainly could have chosen to take the high ground by backing up their counter accusations.
The only way you can believe that there are things that exist that your mind simply cannot grasp is by taking a leap of faith! That is not true. We may not be able to understand something that is outside our experience, but it isn't difficult to grasp why we can NEVER fully understand it. Take the following simple thought experiment... Before you, you have a piece of paper on which live TWO dimensional people. They can move any direction on the piece of paper, but the concepts of UP and DOWN (above or below the piece of paper) do not exist in their world. In fact if there were two friends on that piece of paper, you could trap one of them by drawing a circle around him with a pencil. The thickness of the graphite would imprison him with no way out. But you, being a THREE dimensional creature could use your tiny tweezers and pluck him from his prison and drop him beside his friend outside the circle (to whom he would have simply appeared out of thin air). The formerly entrapped friend would be unable to describe what he had just experienced. Moving our thought experiment up a dimension, it would be similarly simple for a being of 4 (or more) dimensions to get a hamster into and out of a fully inflated basketball. Calling an argument impossible simply because it doesn't agree with our empirical "understanding" is laughably conceited. Curious George
"Whoah!"
This guy has scared me.
Religious political structures gained power. People will gravitate towards a power source if they can learn to abuse it. All power structures have abusers. Its unfortunate that they abused such a system that should have been promoting things like the golden rule.
Now where can I download the littleton/Hellmouth Doom II wad?
the nobel prize was worth 250K last time I checked
Where is this proof that you so loudly tout?
Actually the swasitka is an ancient Indian (South Asian)symbol. It can be seen at Buddhist temples throught Asia. There are temples in Japan that are covered with it. However I can't recall the exact significance of the symbol. But the swastika symbol used by the Nazis was tilted about 45 degrees or so.
Scientology has nothing to do with science or religion. The clown uses Scientology to get people to fork over their money on books and study materials so that the money can be spent on methods to keep me awake fearing the clown. L. Ron Hubbard was a bad science fiction writer going nowhere fast when the clown sent aliens to abduct him and brainwash him into thinking that they were God through anal probes. By the way, for those of you who know that my father was abducted by aliens in 1962, he was not anal-probed and his cattle were not mutilated, they were just scanned with some kind of light rays.
Our church does hold people together, but you're right, it's not the only "community" we belong to. There's the office community, and the "parents of our kids schoolmates" community, and the "family spread across the nation" community. But that's about it. Putting on my libertarian hat for a minute.. imagine what the churches could do to support the community (meaning the whole town, not just members) if we didn't pay so damn much income tax ! The tithe woudn't be any problem at all. As it is I give only 1%.
A fitting article for this thread...
RELIGION, HYPNOSIS, AND MUSIC: AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
dictionary.com ? An invaluable resource. And by the way, it searches the American Heritage '96, and Webster's Unabridged '96 among others. They are authoritative, in the US at least.
So what are you talking about? A purely non-existent, hypothetical religion? Your doing a mathematical analysis of a unified theological theory?
I'm sorry, but you deserve a good belt of sarcasm for that one. If your talking about a hypothetical religion, then your talking about something that has, by definition, never had an effect on human though.
I'm not, in fact, a Christian or Catholic.
Hey, no problem. You have plenty of other fallacies that I can pock fun at. I'll get to them in a minute.
I'm simply trying to point out that religions, ..., have had an *organizational* role in the development of Man's civilization over the years.
That's a pretty broard generalisation. I'd have though that it had a lot more with keeping food on the table and a roof over peoples heads. As far as we can tell, most of the organisational efforts of human beings for the last six thousand years or more have been the result of simple practicle need.
Much of the rest of it ( pyramids, stone circles, etc ), were also based on practicle reasons ( building a better calender ) and endorsed by the ruling elite on the grounds of ego magnification.
I would even go so far as to posit that the modern practice of pure rejection of religion for the sake of rejecting religion is naive and misguided...
Well your entitled to your opinion and I'm entitled to mine. My opinion is that the decline of religion has a lot more to do with the growth of universal literacy and the subsequent development of better BS detectors on the part of the general populace.
So, please get a religious clue.
Ah yes, the main reason why I'm being so sarcastic. I can't speak for the poster your responding to, but in my own case I "got a clue" about religion a long time ago. I developed a definate appreciation of directly observable phenomena and a vast contempt for those who direct evidence because it doesn't agree with what's written in their favorite book.
For the record I hold this attitude to all people with this kind of mentality, not just the religious ones.
indistinguishable from science ....
So what's the point? This statement as much as admits that religion is "the old model" that has long since been super-ceeded and that it therefore only has value as cheap entertainment. Elephants on Turtles. That sort of thing. Claiming that we must retain all of this in the modern world is basically being like the character of "Peter Pan" and refusing to grow up. It's indicative of an excessively neurotic attachment to the things of childhood.
Look closely, ignore the Christian stigma, and you will see that there is more to religious contribution to the culture of Man than meets the eye...
Yeah. Irrationality. Superstition. The arrogance of fools who think that they are superior to everyone who disagrees with them. The pressumtion of fools that they can tell me what I can and can't think. Where do you think I got my cynisism?
I think the best person to ask would be a ninja.
- A Ninja
Frank Herbert had a comment on this in one of the Dune books :
"Power attracts the corruptible"
(or something like that...)
"the southern US prior to the 70's (its still happening there, but it has gotten much better since then" What exactly did you mean? KKK? Be careful of broad generalizations, you'll shoot yourself in the foot. :> Sorry about the AC - forgot my password.
Such vast conceit. What you are essentially saying here is "vast monolithic power structures that are not based on religion will allways main torture and kill people, while vast monolithic power structures that are based on religion will avoid such excesses because they are guided by divine will".
Tell that to those who died in the crusades.
Tell it to all the dead "heratics" that the inquisition put to the stake ( Well Duh D00d! You guys are only just getting around to admitting what a mistake Galilleo was ).
Tell it to all the women who die every year in so many different parts of the world as a result of induced miss-carriages/abortions gone wrong because of religious leaders opposition to contraception and sex education.
Tell it to all the people sitting in prison for the violation of a "moral laws" promoted by the religious faithfull such as smoking mary-jane in the privacy of their own home.
As much as you might try to rationalize it, experience clearly shows that religion promotes intolerance, irrationality and a hypocritical double standard.
How often has man been made happy by dethroning God and putting another in His place?
I'm not interested in divinity - it's an irrelevent subject to me. My only interest is in undermining the political influence of pompous twits like you to a point where you only get what your entitled to - one vote, just like everybody else.
You are free to believe whatever fantasy you wish to. You have no right to manipulate and exploit the political system to impose your values on everyone else.
"Your own position would have been far better served if you had aimed your attack at my intolerance rather than parading your own for all to see. In doing so, you have done nothing except to prove that your an even bigger asshole than I am." I see - he's a Christian, he tells what he believes (doesn't spew hate, doesn't "flame", just offers his opinion). And he's parading his intolerance? And you have a much more "enlightened" viewpoint? Excuse me while I puke.
If god is not all-knowing or omnipotent then he is not god. God by a logical definition is a self-existant entity that created everything. Without being all-knowing and omnipotent then there are forces outside of god's control, if there is anything which god can not control then he cannot have created everything and thus god is not self existant but matter (or energy or some higher form that we don't know about yet) is self-existant and god is a product of chance (not chance as defined as a mathematical possibility, but chance as a force in the universe that has power.) Then what we would call god is simply a more powerful being, and is not really god, but just a powerful being.
According to "Scientific America" around the middle of last year, the level of church attendance in the USA has *risen* from about 40% in the 1960's to about 60% in 1999.
I have no idea as too how much of that was "end of the millenium" panic, so you will have to draw your own conclusions on this point.
The same article mentioned that with the exception of Northern Ireland and Italy, religion is declining at a fairly steady rate in the rest of Europe, Australia and New-Zealand ( in a lot of places, less than 10% of the population regularly attend church and in some places it's lower than 5%. That seems to pretty much agree with my other data, including personel experience ).
So the basic indication for the USA ( and Canada ) is - no, religion isn't declining at all. In fact it seems to be growing.
When you combine that with other events in the USA such as the recent descision in Kansas, well, what can I say? It makes people in the rest of the world *very* suspicious about the directions that the USA is going in and the reasons why it's going in those directions.
Yeah, it's a good thing that people who have faith based convictions and beliefs would never stoop so low to issue a blanket attack against all "open-minded" people!
What a pity it is that His/Her/It's followers will not extend the same courtesy to us in day to day life.
Hell is the absence of God.
No. Hell is a really great place with a fantastic rock-and-roll band but lousy air-conditioning. Other than that, it's a pretty good place ( except for all of the ex-Mormons who keep boring everyone stupid with their stories about how hard they worked to propagate their faith during their mortal existence. Normally you can shut them up by buying them a drink and introducing them to one of your succubus friends, so even they arn't that much of a problem ).
so now there is only a problem with Christianity? you must be a fucking jew. i hate you dirty kikes.
How long has it been since you read the Old Testament, which is the basis upon which much of Christianity and virtually all of Judaism is built? Their god commanded them to slaughter millions of people - whole tribes of them (virgin women only sometimes excluded)! And then there are the homosexuals, witches, blasphemers... plenty more, whom god says you have to kill! But christians aren't alone - Allah had a lot to say in much the same vein... just read the Koran.
When your god commands you to kill, what are you going to do? This isn't "in the abstract" - just read the words, and pay attention!
I have to admit to a certain prejudice against religion - it happens to have severely damaged me. I grew up in an extremely religious household; nothing was more important than my parent's religion! And because of the things they did and taught us kids, all for the sake of making sure we were "saved," I suffer from a dissociative disorder.
Religion has totally fucked up my life, and the lives of the rest of my family. And we're not alone in that - I see it all the time. But then, I'm not afraid of looking... because I'm not afraid of any gods. It was me or god, and he died, not me. And now I'm free.
No, don't give me any religious crap - I'll take science and philosophy, thank you. They're a little more humane.
Yep. By the very definition God is perfection. He is all things good. Those who want nothing to do with him will have their choices honored, as we are always given choices. Hell is the absence of God.
Hehe, religion is dead :).
The bottom line is simple - christianity is fundementally flawed. It is an elitist philosphy of "I'm saved, your fsked! Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!". As such, nobody is suprised when christians act like barbarians.
I disagree. The true Christian will want nothing more than to see others saved, and not because that makes him feel his beliefs are justified (safety in numbers), but because that's another person saved from hell. God does not want to see anyone perish, but we have free will to reject him if we please.
When Christians act like barbarians, they are sinning. No excuses. But if Christianity is truth (as I believe it is), then the behaviour of the bad Christians is irrelevant.
The real question is: true or not true. You must decide. Given what's at stake, I'd consider quite carefully. Look at the way you live: if you seriously believe you only have 80-odd years on the planet then oblivion, does your life make any sense?
And I don't want to hear any rubbish about religious wars proving it's all wrong, or the various proposed "concepts" of "god(s)". Start with a simple one: is Christianity true or not true - and you can't decide purely by looking at Christians.
ac.uk
Disprove it: God
Here's my selection:
[X] xtianity
[X] Judiasm (Jesus was a Jew right?)
[X] Hindu
[X] Buddhism
[X] Shinto
[X] Satanism/Scientology
[X] None! Dammit! I'm atheist!
[X] about:mozilla
[X] Kibo/Discordianism
[X] Xibo
[X] The Shub-Internet
[X] What? I *am* God!
[X] The Erotic Church of the Goddess Natalie Portman
[X] Worship THIS!
[X] Jefus
Also known as agnostic.
More importantly, no religon is more correct than another.
To a certain extent this is true but only if all things are equal. However not all things are equal because of all the world religions, Christianity is the only one that has such a large number of historical events (as related in the Bible) to back it up. And most importantly, it has the historical figure of Jesus Christ. It is for these reasons that you cannot honestly say that all religions are on equal footing. The reason that Christianity is considered by most of the world to be the true religion is the strength of the evidence for it. This is not to denigrate other people's faith, but it is just facts. Remember that not all religions can be correct.
The Bible and Koran claim in Creationism, which has been disproven by Evolution.
Oh, it's Darwin's Law of Evolution now is it? Could you post the proof for all those here who foolishly thought it was still just a theory, and a pretty threadbare one at that.
Disclaimer: I am, in case you hadn't guessed, a Christian. I believe God created the Universe and everything in it. I do have trouble understanding the exact nature of this creation in relation to the somewhat simplistic description in Genesis; but that's just fine detail. Until someone categorically disproves the Genesis account, I'm sticking with it. The disproof could be tricky - what's to stop God creating a Universe that appears to be 15 billion years old?
ac.uk
I have to agree with this guy.....in some spots. I am a whacko fundy Christian.....it is not my religion ....but my LIFE. I believe......God has given us life, this universe....he has not explained all of it [big God] ...but that will come......who knows. mrwhite@collectivethoughts.org
but this guy is a total fucking sellout. the only way religion affects human destiny is to fucking ruin it.
you religious moderators can go down on me when you mark this post down...
How many of your scientific beliefs have you personally empirically verified?
It's called laboratory practicle work. It's about many an afternoon in high school and then university performing experiments, tabulating the results and then comparing the results to what is predicted by theory to determine how good or bad the theory is.
It's a long and tedious process that takes many years of work and dedication. This is one of the reasons why scientists often are dismissive of some ideas. We have spent the time verifying what theories doe ( and doen't ) work. This is not simply a matter of "the theory is correct". It is a matter of "within these bounded regions, the theory is correct - outside of these it breaks down".
Did On the Origin of Species tell you so?
Actually, no. As a kid I was interested in rock collecting. I had a fairly decent collection and it included some fossils. When I asked people what they were, the answers were most unsatisfactory. My own wish to find the answers included the works of Darwin and others. Likewise, Darwins hypothesis was consistent with other data that I had encountered ( comparitive embroyology and what not ).
In comparison, the alternate "hypothesis" ( creationism ) was not consistent. It relied upon a huge edifice of contrived and contradictory explanations.
"Nature does by few things rather than many". In the end, I chose the much smaller, more consistent approach of Darwin over those of his critics.
How do you define faith, and how do you define reason?
For me personally,
Faith - a belief in something without proof.
Reason - the belief that if I stick my finger in the light socket when the switch is on, it will hurt. This belief is based on the observation that this is what has happened every other time I have carried out this experiment and that until someone can provide well attested, documentary evidence that it won't happen, I intend to keep my finger well away from the light socket.
Heil Jon Katz!
THE HAUNTING OF COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL
EPISODE 1: STRANGER IN THE SUBWAY
(it is late at night in the columbine high school library in mid-february 2000. the ghosts of eric harris and Dylan klebold materialize.)
eric: at last, i am free. i am immortal. now to continue my killing spree. dylan, are you ready?
dylan: what are we going to do tonight, eric?
eric: the same thing we do every night, dylan. kill people in littleton.
(maniacal laughter)
dylan: shit, they sealed up the library. we're trapped.
eric: no we aren't. we're ghosts, remember, dumbfuck?
dylan: right. hey look, the swat team forgot to take the guns that were hidden in our kick-ass black trenchcoats.
eric: yeah! sieg heil, bitch! we're gonna go kill some more jocks!
(they walk through the walls, out of the school, and come upon a shopping center. everything is closed except subway, which is just closing down.)
eric: i see some columbine students in here. let's kill them.
(they go in)
(suddenly shots ring out and the two columbine students in the store slump over, dead.)
dylan: did you shoot them? i didn't.
eric: no man, what the fuck?
(a shadowy figure emerges from the darkness. he is wearing a black leather trenchcoat and carries a smoking sawed off shotgun.)
eric and dylan, together: jon katz!
katz: yeah. don't tell anyone i did this, okay. i needed a story. by the way thanks. without you guys i could never have written the hellmouth stories.
eric: no problem, my fellow nazi. sieg heil!
katz: heil hitler! can i help you cause more mayhem? you guys are my heroes!
eric and dylan: you're in! heil the new trenchcoat mafia!
THE HAUNTING OF COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL
EPISODE 2: A PLAN HATCHES
(the ghosts of eric harris and dylan klebold are in the old columbine high school library. jon katz is just outside in the hallway. they communicate by esp.)
katz: wow, that was great. it was so much fun to kill those kids. i especially enjoyed thrusting my 1.5 inch member into that guy's asshole right before he died. it wasn't as good as the 8 year old kid i snuffed and left in the nearby dumpster a couple months ago, not enough friction, but it was still not bad.
eric: you did that too? how long have you been in littleton anyway?
katz: i live here now. i got a job at the elementary school so i can rape little boys whenever i want. i love making them lick the blood and semen off my cock...
dylan: enough, thats fucking sick. we're not into that shit, if you want to help us, we have a better job for you.
eric: we need guns. lots of guns. and parts for pipe bombs. can you get them for us?
katz: its a deal. how many you need?
eric: as many as possible. go, now. we need to plan.
katz: okay, i'm going. by the way, how come the school doors were unlocked?
dylan: we're poltergeists, we can do whatever we want.
(jon katz leaves. eric and dylan begin to plan.)
eric: remember the first time? wasn't it great?
dylan: yeah, i remember. my favorite part was when there was that chick hiding under the table, and i said peek-a-boo and blew her shoulder off?
eric: yes, that was well done. remember i shot lance kirklin in the face? and who can forget isiah shoels? i was like, wow, so that's what nigger brains look like.
eric: it was truly wonderful. i only have two regrets. one, that the bombs didn't go off. if they had, we wouldn't have to finish the job now.
dylan: and two?
eric: we should have raped those girls, repeatedly forcing them at gunpoint to accept our shafts in their warm, moist cunts! and then shot them in the cunts and watched them squirm! that would have been fun! what a missed opportunity!
dylan: i agree.
(katz returns)
katz: i have enough shit here to assault a government building. it should be plenty for a high school in quiet, suburban america.
eric: excellent. we shall finish what we started on four twenty. kill the preppies! kill the jocks!
THE HAUNTING OF COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL
EPISODE 3: GOD MODE
(it is early on a monday morning at columbine high school. school is just about to start. the ghosts of eric harris and dylan klebold are just outside the cafeteria. a black van pulls up and jon katz gets out. he starts to unload the guns and propane bombs. the ghosts use their poltergeist powers to plant the bombs and grab the shotguns. while this is going on, we can see in jon's car the nude bodies of several young boys, covered in blood and semen. katz quickly closes the doors, grabs some weapons, and gets ready.)
dylan: you're late.
katz: sorry guys, i was busy fellating rob malda and lost track of time.
eric: you're gonna join us?
katz: yeah, might as well. i got fired after they found out it was me on goatse.cx, and the police are investigating the disappearance of those kids. better to die honorably, by killing some jocks.
eric: amen to that. now, the plan is to start killing at about 11:30 mountain time. when we run out of ammo, the bombs blow. got it?
dylan and jon katz: yeah. it'll be just like doom.
(several hous pass. jon katz passes the time by taking one of his young corpses and fucking it up the ass again.)
eric: that smells. throw it away.
katz: oh, ok, if you insist. it's time to start anyway.
(they grab their guns and enter the cafeteria where about 100 students are eating)
eric: heil rammstein!
(they open fire. the fucking popular kids are dropping like flies. katz throws several grenades, wiping the room clear of all trendy assholes.)
dylan: move ahead, it's showtime!
(they advance through the halls, gunning down everyone they see. soon they come to the temporary library that was built to replace the old one.)
eric: all jocks stand up! we're gonna kill you all!
(all are executed with head shots that rip apart their meager brains and cause them to crumple into convulsing heaps lying in puddles of their own blood.)
eric: now for the girls.
(he comes up to one of them and pistol-whips her, presses his gun against her head, and tells her not to move. he rips off her clothes and discovers that she has an incredible body.)
eric: hey dylan: remember what i said we would do?
(he thrusts his ghostly member into here warm, moist pussy. of course since he's a ghost, she only feels a little chill and no other sensation. she is barely conscious and can't think about what is going on.)
(meanwhile on the other side of the library, katz is doing the same to a freshman boy, fucking him up the ass. because katz's cock is so small, there is no friction.)
eric: dylan, give me the shotgun!
(dylan finishes off the cheerleader he was torturing with a shot to the head, which results in most of the skull being blown off, and gives the gun to eric.)
(eric inserts the shotgun into the girl's pussy and pulls the trigger. she blacks out. she lies there with blood pouring from her now considerably larger vaginal opening.)
katz: i'm out of ammo!
eric: me too
dylan: as am i. we need to go detonate the bombs.
katz: not to worry. i made a remote detonator. look, it runs linux!
eric: you realize, jon, that when this building blows you'll die too. and dylan, that we will have been exorcised and no longer exist.
dylan and katz: do it! destroy the hellmouth!
(eric presses the button on the detonator)
(the detonator does an audible countdown. 5-4-3-2-1)
(0!)
(a huge explosion engulfs columbine high school. everybody inside dies. the mission has been a complete success. littleton has been cleansed of jocks.)
(but there are still other towns, and now that jon katz is dead, his ghost can travel from hellmouth to hellmouth, fighting the oppressors of geeks. so the saga is not over. jon katz will return.)
*THE END*
so has technology...religion may have been the driving factor for a lot of wars/conflicts/etc, but don't forget that technology has often provided the means to do so, by way of everything from the stirrup and hardened steel to nbc warfare...and, in some cases, religion has been the cause of technology/scientific advancement (gregor mendel was a monk, etc..)
Your view on religious people seems to be informed by your geographical location. American Protestants who thump Bibles or ring your doorbell are in no way representative of religious practice that "has been going on worldwide for millennia."
Try telling that to his new porsche while he blows by you next time. Why does the money always have to be so unimportant?
Jon Katz rapes little boys! THE HAUNTING OF COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL EPISODE 1: STRANGER IN THE SUBWAY (it is late at night in the columbine high school library in mid-february 2000. the ghosts of eric harris and Dylan klebold materialize.) eric: at last, i am free. i am immortal. now to continue my killing spree. dylan, are you ready? dylan: what are we going to do tonight, eric? eric: the same thing we do every night, dylan. kill people in littleton. (maniacal laughter) dylan: shit, they sealed up the library. we're trapped. eric: no we aren't. we're ghosts, remember, dumbfuck? dylan: right. hey look, the swat team forgot to take the guns that were hidden in our kick-ass black trenchcoats. eric: yeah! sieg heil, bitch! we're gonna go kill some more jocks! (they walk through the walls, out of the school, and come upon a shopping center. everything is closed except subway, which is just closing down.) eric: i see some columbine students in here. let's kill them. (they go in) (suddenly shots ring out and the two columbine students in the store slump over, dead.) dylan: did you shoot them? i didn't. eric: no man, what the fuck? (a shadowy figure emerges from the darkness. he is wearing a black leather trenchcoat and carries a smoking sawed off shotgun.) eric and dylan, together: jon katz! katz: yeah. don't tell anyone i did this, okay. i needed a story. by the way thanks. without you guys i could never have written the hellmouth stories. eric: no problem, my fellow nazi. sieg heil! katz: heil hitler! can i help you cause more mayhem? you guys are my heroes! eric and dylan: you're in! heil the new trenchcoat mafia! THE HAUNTING OF COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL EPISODE 2: A PLAN HATCHES (the ghosts of eric harris and dylan klebold are in the old columbine high school library. jon katz is just outside in the hallway. they communicate by esp.) katz: wow, that was great. it was so much fun to kill those kids. i especially enjoyed thrusting my 1.5 inch member into that guy's asshole right before he died. it wasn't as good as the 8 year old kid i snuffed and left in the nearby dumpster a couple months ago, not enough friction, but it was still not bad. eric: you did that too? how long have you been in littleton anyway? katz: i live here now. i got a job at the elementary school so i can rape little boys whenever i want. i love making them lick the blood and semen off my cock... dylan: enough, thats fucking sick. we're not into that shit, if you want to help us, we have a better job for you. eric: we need guns. lots of guns. and parts for pipe bombs. can you get them for us? katz: its a deal. how many you need? eric: as many as possible. go, now. we need to plan. katz: okay, i'm going. by the way, how come the school doors were unlocked? dylan: we're poltergeists, we can do whatever we want. (jon katz leaves. eric and dylan begin to plan.) eric: remember the first time? wasn't it great? dylan: yeah, i remember. my favorite part was when there was that chick hiding under the table, and i said peek-a-boo and blew her shoulder off? eric: yes, that was well done. remember i shot lance kirklin in the face? and who can forget isiah shoels? i was like, wow, so that's what nigger brains look like. eric: it was truly wonderful. i only have two regrets. one, that the bombs didn't go off. if they had, we wouldn't have to finish the job now. dylan: and two? eric: we should have raped those girls, repeatedly forcing them at gunpoint to accept our shafts in their warm, moist cunts! and then shot them in the cunts and watched them squirm! that would have been fun! what a missed opportunity! dylan: i agree. (katz returns) katz: i have enough shit here to assault a government building. it should be plenty for a high school in quiet, suburban america. eric: excellent. we shall finish what we started on four twenty. kill the preppies! kill the jocks! THE HAUNTING OF COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL EPISODE 3: GOD MODE (it is early on a monday morning at columbine high school. school is just about to start. the ghosts of eric harris and dylan klebold are just outside the cafeteria. a black van pulls up and jon katz gets out. he starts to unload the guns and propane bombs. the ghosts use their poltergeist powers to plant the bombs and grab the shotguns. while this is going on, we can see in jon's car the nude bodies of several young boys, covered in blood and semen. katz quickly closes the doors, grabs some weapons, and gets ready.) dylan: you're late. katz: sorry guys, i was busy fellating rob malda and lost track of time. eric: you're gonna join us? katz: yeah, might as well. i got fired after they found out it was me on goatse.cx, and the police are investigating the disappearance of those kids. better to die honorably, by killing some jocks. eric: amen to that. now, the plan is to start killing at about 11:30 mountain time. when we run out of ammo, the bombs blow. got it? dylan and jon katz: yeah. it'll be just like doom. (several hous pass. jon katz passes the time by taking one of his young corpses and fucking it up the ass again.) eric: that smells. throw it away. katz: oh, ok, if you insist. it's time to start anyway. (they grab their guns and enter the cafeteria where about 100 students are eating) eric: heil rammstein! (they open fire. the fucking popular kids are dropping like flies. katz throws several grenades, wiping the room clear of all trendy assholes.) dylan: move ahead, it's showtime! (they advance through the halls, gunning down everyone they see. soon they come to the temporary library that was built to replace the old one.) eric: all jocks stand up! we're gonna kill you all! (all are executed with head shots that rip apart their meager brains and cause them to crumple into convulsing heaps lying in puddles of their own blood.) eric: now for the girls. (he comes up to one of them and pistol-whips her, presses his gun against her head, and tells her not to move. he rips off her clothes and discovers that she has an incredible body.) eric: hey dylan: remember what i said we would do? (he thrusts his ghostly member into here warm, moist pussy. of course since he's a ghost, she only feels a little chill and no other sensation. she is barely conscious and can't think about what is going on.) (meanwhile on the other side of the library, katz is doing the same to a freshman boy, fucking him up the ass. because katz's cock is so small, there is no friction.) eric: dylan, give me the shotgun! (dylan finishes off the cheerleader he was torturing with a shot to the head, which results in most of the skull being blown off, and gives the gun to eric.) (eric inserts the shotgun into the girl's pussy and pulls the trigger. she blacks out. she lies there with blood pouring from her now considerably larger vaginal opening.) katz: i'm out of ammo! eric: me too dylan: as am i. we need to go detonate the bombs. katz: not to worry. i made a remote detonator. look, it runs linux! eric: you realize, jon, that when this building blows you'll die too. and dylan, that we will have been exorcised and no longer exist. dylan and katz: do it! destroy the hellmouth! (eric presses the button on the detonator) (the detonator does an audible countdown. 5-4-3-2-1) (0!) (a huge explosion engulfs columbine high school. everybody inside dies. the mission has been a complete success. littleton has been cleansed of jocks.) (but there are still other towns, and now that jon katz is dead, his ghost can travel from hellmouth to hellmouth, fighting the oppressors of geeks. so the saga is not over. jon katz will return.) *THE END*
does anyone disagree?
THE HAUNTING OF COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL
EPISODE 1: STRANGER IN THE SUBWAY
(it is late at night in the columbine high school library in mid-february 2000. the ghosts of eric harris and Dylan klebold materialize.)
eric: at last, i am free. i am immortal. now to continue my killing spree. dylan, are you ready?
dylan: what are we going to do tonight, eric?
eric: the same thing we do every night, dylan. kill people in littleton.
(maniacal laughter)
dylan: shit, they sealed up the library. we're trapped.
eric: no we aren't. we're ghosts, remember, dumbfuck?
dylan: right. hey look, the swat team forgot to take the guns that were hidden in our kick-ass black trenchcoats.
eric: yeah! sieg heil, bitch! we're gonna go kill some more jocks!
(they walk through the walls, out of the school, and come upon a shopping center. everything is closed except subway, which is just closing down.)
eric: i see some columbine students in here. let's kill them.
(they go in)
(suddenly shots ring out and the two columbine students in the store slump over, dead.)
dylan: did you shoot them? i didn't.
eric: no man, what the fuck?
(a shadowy figure emerges from the darkness. he is wearing a black leather trenchcoat and carries a smoking sawed off shotgun.)
eric and dylan, together: jon katz!
katz: yeah. don't tell anyone i did this, okay. i needed a story. by the way thanks. without you guys i could never have written the hellmouth stories.
eric: no problem, my fellow nazi. sieg heil!
katz: heil hitler! can i help you cause more mayhem? you guys are my heroes!
eric and dylan: you're in! heil the new trenchcoat mafia!
THE HAUNTING OF COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL
EPISODE 2: A PLAN HATCHES
(the ghosts of eric harris and dylan klebold are in the old columbine high school library. jon katz is just outside in the hallway. they communicate by esp.)
katz: wow, that was great. it was so much fun to kill those kids. i especially enjoyed thrusting my 1.5 inch member into that guy's asshole right before he died. it wasn't as good as the 8 year old kid i snuffed and left in the nearby dumpster a couple months ago, not enough friction, but it was still not bad.
eric: you did that too? how long have you been in littleton anyway?
katz: i live here now. i got a job at the elementary school so i can rape little boys whenever i want. i love making them lick the blood and semen off my cock...
dylan: enough, thats fucking sick. we're not into that shit, if you want to help us, we have a better job for you.
eric: we need guns. lots of guns. and parts for pipe bombs. can you get them for us?
katz: its a deal. how many you need?
eric: as many as possible. go, now. we need to plan.
katz: okay, i'm going. by the way, how come the school doors were unlocked?
dylan: we're poltergeists, we can do whatever we want.
(jon katz leaves. eric and dylan begin to plan.)
eric: remember the first time? wasn't it great?
dylan: yeah, i remember. my favorite part was when there was that chick hiding under the table, and i said peek-a-boo and blew her shoulder off?
eric: yes, that was well done. remember i shot lance kirklin in the face? and who can forget isiah shoels? i was like, wow, so that's what nigger brains look like.
eric: it was truly wonderful. i only have two regrets. one, that the bombs didn't go off. if they had, we wouldn't have to finish the job now.
dylan: and two?
eric: we should have raped those girls, repeatedly forcing them at gunpoint to accept our shafts in their warm, moist cunts! and then shot them in the cunts and watched them squirm! that would have been fun! what a missed opportunity!
dylan: i agree.
(katz returns)
katz: i have enough shit here to assault a government building. it should be plenty for a high school in quiet, suburban america.
eric: excellent. we shall finish what we started on four twenty. kill the preppies! kill the jocks!
THE HAUNTING OF COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL
EPISODE 3: GOD MODE
(it is early on a monday morning at columbine high school. school is just about to start. the ghosts of eric harris and dylan klebold are just outside the cafeteria. a black van pulls up and jon katz gets out. he starts to unload the guns and propane bombs. the ghosts use their poltergeist powers to plant the bombs and grab the shotguns. while this is going on, we can see in jon's car the nude bodies of several young boys, covered in blood and semen. katz quickly closes the doors, grabs some weapons, and gets ready.)
dylan: you're late.
katz: sorry guys, i was busy fellating rob malda and lost track of time.
eric: you're gonna join us?
katz: yeah, might as well. i got fired after they found out it was me on goatse.cx, and the police are investigating the disappearance of those kids. better to die honorably, by killing some jocks.
eric: amen to that. now, the plan is to start killing at about 11:30 mountain time. when we run out of ammo, the bombs blow. got it?
dylan and jon katz: yeah. it'll be just like doom.
(several hous pass. jon katz passes the time by taking one of his young corpses and fucking it up the ass again.)
eric: that smells. throw it away.
katz: oh, ok, if you insist. it's time to start anyway.
(they grab their guns and enter the cafeteria where about 100 students are eating)
eric: heil rammstein!
(they open fire. the fucking popular kids are dropping like flies. katz throws several grenades, wiping the room clear of all trendy assholes.)
dylan: move ahead, it's showtime!
(they advance through the halls, gunning down everyone they see. soon they come to the temporary library that was built to replace the old one.)
eric: all jocks stand up! we're gonna kill you all!
(all are executed with head shots that rip apart their meager brains and cause them to crumple into convulsing heaps lying in puddles of their own blood.)
eric: now for the girls.
(he comes up to one of them and pistol-whips her, presses his gun against her head, and tells her not to move. he rips off her clothes and discovers that she has an incredible body.)
eric: hey dylan: remember what i said we would do?
(he thrusts his ghostly member into here warm, moist pussy. of course since he's a ghost, she only feels a little chill and no other sensation. she is barely conscious and can't think about what is going on.)
(meanwhile on the other side of the library, katz is doing the same to a freshman boy, fucking him up the ass. because katz's cock is so small, there is no friction.)
eric: dylan, give me the shotgun!
(dylan finishes off the cheerleader he was torturing with a shot to the head, which results in most of the skull being blown off, and gives the gun to eric.)
(eric inserts the shotgun into the girl's pussy and pulls the trigger. she blacks out. she lies there with blood pouring from her now considerably larger vaginal opening.)
katz: i'm out of ammo!
eric: me too
dylan: as am i. we need to go detonate the bombs.
katz: not to worry. i made a remote detonator. look, it runs linux!
eric: you realize, jon, that when this building blows you'll die too. and dylan, that we will have been exorcised and no longer exist.
dylan and katz: do it! destroy the hellmouth!
(eric presses the button on the detonator)
(the detonator does an audible countdown. 5-4-3-2-1)
(0!)
(a huge explosion engulfs columbine high school. everybody inside dies. the mission has been a complete success. littleton has been cleansed of jocks.)
(but there are still other towns, and now that jon katz is dead, his ghost can travel from hellmouth to hellmouth, fighting the oppressors of geeks. so the saga is not over. jon katz will return.)
*THE END*
Here's another important work:
The inner workings of religion and man
shut the fuck up with that bullshit. how else is he going to buy drugs and prostitutes, stupid?
'Nuff said. The belief systems that revolve around cultist worship of invisible space pixies are a sickness upon humanity. One day we will look back at them with the same sort of disdain with which we regard the Black Plague today. IMHO.
Its typical of the old (who doesn't have long left to live) who start to hedge their bets. Even when it comes to believe in something insane.
The killing in the 20th century has been without parallel.
First Bismarck's effort to remake the world, then Hitler's efforts for the higher man. Stalin "knew" the world would be wonderful without the Kulaks (Jews, for those of you with a government degree) and didn't stop until he killed 40 million. Mao purified China, adding another 80 million to the toll. Not to mention Pol Pot and dozens of other reformers.
And not a single one was religious. All of them blamed religion for killing, and thought if they could just eliminate the religious, the killing would stop.
I think these stats prove you are wrong about this:
Religion: Just Rewards
It's Religion !!! Soylent Green is Religion !!!
I have to be critical here... the only reason he got the award was because he is a world-renouned scientist. Being an eminent physicist does not automatically make him an eminent philosopher. What he says is nothing particularly special. 'Religion holds communities together', and 'religion is important in human life' are hardly new ideas. And a great physicist saying them hardly makes them any more valid. I would suggest that Dyson read some Nietzsche, a REAL philosophical thinker, if he insists on posing as one.
However, all religions can be incorrect. Simpleminded Christianity, for example, often says that the bible has historical accuracy. However, so does Gone With the Wind. Accuracy in some parts does not mean that the whole thing is accurate. And, the issue of the "...historical figure of Jesus Christ..." is open to substantial question.
Remember: any attempt to validate the Christian bible by using the Christian bible as a reference is automatically suspect.
it was quite funny.
Scientologists believe that God is an alien life form who "developed" life here on earth as an experiment and will reward those of us who make the most money. that's why a lot of people in Hollywood are Scientologists.
That being said, please visit the holy Church of Satan and rejoice in His glory!
I know what christianity, islam, and greek mythology are. But what is Scientology and does it have anything to do with Science or Religion, and if so how?
by giving them their wish, to withhold the feelings of his presence.
I am not at all trying to question your faith, not in the least. But there are those who hold the Bible to a higher standard and believe it to be the wholly inerrant word of God. If that is the case, then there are indeed differences between science and religion that you cannot reconcile with a simple wave of the hand. If parts of the Bible are supposed to be interpreted as "metaphor", as some of the more "liberal" (for lack of a better word) theologians say, then how do we know what parts are metaphor and what parts are real? If the Creation and original sin (and therefore the need of mankind to be saved) are metaphorical, doesn't that pave the way to portrary all of Christianity as metaphorical? If so, what is its worth? I know that this cannot be the case. I want to thank you for a thoughtful post and assure you again that I'm not trying to question your faith. I'm sure that you'll probably get attacked by some of the more juvenile element here but that is to be expected.
i wasn't joking.
...If God is omnipresent (absolutely, positively everywhere, right?), how is hell the absence of Him?
the southern US prior to the 70's
You know why we have the bible belt today? Slave owners wanted a way to justify slavery. This is exactly what I mean by an irrational belief system allowing you to justify whatever you want.
The Bible says to release slaves after 7 years. At the time, there were missionaries feeding foriegn hungry. Because both of them proclaim to be acting under the same banner, does this mean both are evil? No. The problem with the label of Christianity in todays world is that it generally paints a dark picture of a large group of people for the actions of a noticable few. The bulk of Christians I know generally don't run around, burning people at the stake. Rather, they donate thier personal time and money to allieviate the poor. Is it fair to label the Spanish Inquisitors and the Salvation Army with the same word? Of course not, but many people do it anyway.
Is there a difference between the "Christians" who fought to keep their slaves, and the "Christians" who died to free them? Of course there is. I don't know if the common concept of Christianity should be attacked or not. I do know that there are many Christians out there whose struggle to end poverty, sickness, homelessness, and other ills tend to go unnoticed by the same people who will see some hate-and-condemnation-spewing-TV Preacher and lambast them. A whole group of people attacked for the actions of a few.
The ironic thing is that this no different than calling a black man a thief because a few steal. It is really nothing more than ignorance. The scary thing is how many people promote this ignorance, and then claim themselves to be enlightened because of it.
did you see the site? there is a difference between using the source code for ideas, small bits, etc. and making a complete fucking copy.
in some respects anyway....
;) ).
:) .)
:)
Some religeons are designed in such a way that power can corrupt it's orginal meaning...and programming languages can be designed to do good things but can be used for evil (can we say 'pointers'?
Other religeons are a lot looser in their attitude towards life and reality vs dogma, and what is considered EVIL diminishes, and people are free to BE good rather than act how they they are told they should act (and think and talk etc)
(thats why i like Taoism [though its not really a religeon], really its anything you make of it, and the only thing to be sure of is that you're probably not right...remember you can believe anything you want; the universe isnt obliged to take you seriously
Really, its all about the people involved, at which point the religeon becomes irrelevent and people's behavior is based on the virtue of compassion (not to burn other people or at the stake, or likewise not to write virii etc)
Talking about faith, the average concept of faith is believing maybe in some higher power or silly materialistic things like living in the clouds after you die and angles with harps etc. Faith doesnt mean BLIND faith, just I guess trying to do what you feel is right... just act natural and things will fall into place
Okay im done... i know this is news for nerds, not news for theologians or philosophers (altho based on the posts im sure there are quite a few amatures and professionals of the latter set)
"There is no spoon"-Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!"-The Tick, The Tick
Since religion is can pretty much be defined as
a group of people who get together and decide
to zealously believe some stuff, despite evidence
to the contrary, then I suppose you are correct.
It's not religions fault, is the fault of the
people who believe in that religion.
Religion sucks, there is no god, use your brain
to discover and observe things about the world
around you.
Natalie Portman hot grits thank you.
I just read his new book, timeline, which deals with quantum physics in a science fiction/historical setting. Good read, but not very scientifically correct.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Esther Dyson would pour hot grits on me or appear in playboy naked and petrified...
--trollbastard
Ok i wish you to submit your results. Oh come on, testing a scientific theory where you expect a tangible event to occur or a number to appear is fuck all like religion. What did you do with your religion? Do a quadratic equation on the book of genesis? See how much electric current a bible can produce? Bullshit
People will try to do this with any belief system, but an irrational system (i.e. not using the scientific method) will make it much easier. People still abuse the social interpretation of scientific theories (extreams of social darwinism for example), but the fact that people understand the distiction between a scientific theory and a social interpretation of it makes this harder to do.
I hate to break it to you, but the scientific method is both (a) a fallacy--no one really uses it (see Kuhn and a bazillion other philosophers of science) and (b) an irrational system, as physicist Paul Feyerabend brilliantly demonstrates.
It's called "the public library". There you can find books on just about any subject, including cosmology and *gasp*, even religion!
Even other physicists with another speciality wouldn't necessarily be able to judge competing cosmological models.
Talk about a point going straight over someones head. The poster that your responding to was making a point - science does not actively bow-beat the public to learn science. Evangelical religions do. Still, if you want to keep digging this hole by trying to insist that *your* interpretation is the only valid one, feel free to continue.
In any case, cosmology is not transcendant to most people.
That rather dpends on how you choose to define "trancendant". For many of us, the contemplation of the universe, even as a blind and impersonel machine, is still awe-inspiring in terms of the questions that it raises. Just because it doesn't do anything for you doesn't mean that it doesn't do anything for anybody else.
But, like it or not (and you obviously don't), religion is transcendant to most people.
No it isn't. Except for the USA/Canada/Northern Ireland and Italy, religion is nose-diving. In Europe, Australia and New-Zealand, it's definatly on the way out. Likewise in the rest of the world with the dominant religions in those places. Are we supposed to assume that "trancendence" is a function of geographical location? Just because religion is taken seriosly where you live doesn't mean that we take it seriously elsewhere.
To a believer, what happened in gas clouds 15 billion years ago is not nearly so important as following the will of God in your everyday life.
So you believe that "ignorance is a virtue"? That seems to be the whole point of your posting. I'm not in the least bit interested in dog or frog or whatever you call this vapourous entity that you fear is keeping an accounting balence sheet of your supposed moral credits and debits. Your paranoid delusions of persecution really arn't of much concern to me.
What is of much more importance to my mind is the way that you seem to be actively encouraging members of the public to not take an interest in intellectual matters, the way that you seem to be slyly insinuating that people should forget reason and logic and rely on religion to make up their minds for them.
Please try not to be so snotty. You're giving atheists a bad rep.
How gratifying it is to know that we still have a reputation left to ruin. After all, the church lost what little it had back in the 14th century and still hasn't regained it - a point that you conveniently overlook.
but very rarely, if ever, do I get real spiritual input from the mainstream media.
;) If there's one thing the mainstream media has taught me, it's, "Don't believe everything you read."
Heh, if you believe what the media tells ya, imagine how many people will be killed by this $940,000. Or, my favorite, the limited sum of money theories, since this guy gets $940,000, bunches of poor families will get $940,000 taken away.
and
and so on, but would still let you enter formatting cues.
Anyhow, your reading can't possibly be correct -- "plain old text" is supposed to be the way to leave HTML tags as text.
Pardon the strange formatting above -- the extrans doesn't seem to be working anymore. Odd.
Well, memo to self: always preview before you post.
This is all part of the corruption modern
liberalism does to both religion and science.
I appreciate that modern liberalism weakens
religion, but unfortunately it weakens science
as well. Like it or not, there's no real reason
to prefer christianity over islam, scientology,
or greek mythology. Further, they conflict with
each other, so no, they 'cant all just be friends'
Expecting them to agree to disagree is an insult
to them all. In effect, it's expecting them to
make more important the will to agree than the
will to follow what they see as true. Science and
religion also conflict. It may be appealing on
some level to say 'everybody is right, lets go
home', but that's just wishful thinking.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Well, maybe there are practical reasons, but
.. well, he just flooded :)
it doesn't seem very intellectually honest to
prefer one religion over another because it lets
you do A or gives you X days off for holidays.
Actually though, I think I'd rather piss off
Jehovah than Zeus -- according to greek mythology
zeus actually killed a lot of people for pissing
him off, where Jehovah
the whole world once according to christian
mythology. I guess christian mythology had him
mellow out quite a bit.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
You are saying that religion usually(ever?) incorporates some ethics. In my unknowledge, I could say that early Islam is really ethics and law system for Arabians. That's why you need scholars for things such as money-lending banks.
But, as I read, I couldn't help thinking that the GNU manifesto also heaviliy promotes some ethics. And it also has overzealous promoters. Is GNU a bit of a religion (and RMS its prophet)?
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Ha, multiply all the trouble and strife that goes wiv a wife by four! This is an argument against Islam. And all that food and drinks you are not allowed to have! But Islamic banks have 0% interest rates.
I remember reading about a Chinese immigrant to the US who chose Protestantism because its followers were richer!
And there are the massive conversions because it is a better living. 13th-century Bosnia, 8th-century Spain, Marx' ancestors,...
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Well, to steal a quote from a hostile source, "If $bignum people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing." STR.
This doubt of the existence and historicity of Jesus is mostly a post-Enlightenment(sic) thing. It arises not from any inadequacy of evidence, but from an ideological rejection of the message of Jesus. In ancient times, this rejection took other forms, because to dispute the existence of Jesus in the third century would be like claiming to disbelieve in George Washington today. But the mere passage of 1500 years would not make a disbelief in the existence of George Washington suddenly reasonable.
This modern scholarship to which you appeal was once likened by one of its followers to a rugby game with 5 balls and 10 teams on the field, everybody tackling everybody, and everybody claiming to be winning. Doctorates are awarded on the basis of outlandish theories which are shot to ribbons 6 months after the dissertations containing them are filed.
I would recommend in my turn that you read Eta Linnemann's _Is There a Synoptic Problem?_. I didn't find this randomly; this is aimed fire.
HAND.
You are right about religions claiming absolute truth. How easily is faith destroyed when so called absolute truth is broken? Religion has done that time and again. But science has had it's share of absolute truths broken. So individuals with faith in science come to see that their faith has to include change, learning more. In fact, their reward comes from learning more, the advancement of knowledge. So why isn't religion like that?
Now don't mention software, that is another world of faith and fanaticism...
But I suppose it might be a useful analogy. That leads to some support for my position, that one places faith in the scientists that can understand and prove the models created from observation. Just as I can put faith in various types of software, platforms, programmers and methodologies.
Is a process of ideas and models built upon observations exclusive to science or could a religion borrow some of that? Is it possible for a religion to reject the demonstrably false while building on the provable?
Bleh!
Stick to the point of the conversation, please. You remark about the "rationality" of Mathematics, while cleverly casuistic, is completely off-topic. Unless you could describe a way whereby a dictator could base a violent system on Maths? Das Nazional Party des Fourier Transformazion?
Go back to that university and ask them about The Gnostic Gospels.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that it degenerates into an Esther Dyson bashing thread. : )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Probably a million of some other (ie, not the USA) country's currency that exchanges at 94 cents to the whatever.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Review what Christopher Hitchens has to say about Mother Teresa and you may decide they aren't so miscatagorized after all : )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Actually, two-thirds of the world's population does not buy into Xianity. Also, Islam is the fastest-growing religion these days.
I won't even go into your erroneous belief that history backs up the Bible.
Oh, it gets really enjoyable when they start yelling after me when I walk away from them because I don't feel like being insulted by some fanatical religious whackjob.. :-(
That is my problem with religion. All those people who think they're so important that they NEED to win me over. I don't care about religion. I'm fine, really. And I don't care about your religion either, whether it's christianity or furniture worshipping. Go ahead if you want to, just don't bother me with it.
Preaching-type on a street corner is going on about his wonderful faith: "Do you believe in God?"
Me: "No."
Him: "Then you're in league with Satan and you'll burn in hell."
Me: "Uh, no. I don't believe in him either."
Him: "That doesn't matter, you'll burn anyway."
Oh. Right. Somehow it makes sense to them that if I don't believe in one of the figureheads of their particular religion, that I'm automatically believing in the other figurehead of the same damn religion.
thi
Thank you so much for stating this!! It seems so obvious, but you see so many people blaming religion in general, not just Christianity, Judaism, etc. for many atrocities. It's NOT religion people. It's people! We are the ones that are screwed up.
I like that quote. I can accept that.
The problem is that many accept what religon says as the truth. And science acknowledging it faults, as the that it can't be.
I can't scientifically proved that god doesn't exist, or that he didn't just poof the universe into existance (although I'm sure some could try).
I can argue that GOD is not all-knowing and omnipotent More importantly, no religon is more correct than another.
It is much truer outside of heavily urban areas, but even in urban areas church communities are very strong. Our neighbors are really into their church community -- they socialize with them, do charity work together, and so on.
One of the things that gives Church communities a leg up on modern 'virtual' communities is that they're actual physical communities -- the people make a point of being in the same room at more or less the same time at least once a week. This type of fellowship does add an awful lot to the community experience that other experiences don't.
Hardly. If that were the case, religion would be incredibly impersonal, and who would care? My religion is important to me because I spent considerable time and effort studying it in all its many forms, and the many facets of its beliefs. No less a rigorous investigation was performed by myself than if I were testing a scientific theorem.
"...faith is the foundation of all religion"
You state that R implies F, does this mean that F also implies R?
"But morals and ethics ARE essential for a society to function."
Could not philosophy, psychology, politics, or goals-based reasoning do just as well as religion? Religions have been responsible for millions of horrible deaths over the years, as has science.
Some people will be psychopaths no matter what religion tells them, others will be benevolent no matter what religion (or religious authorites) tell them.
I meant the politics of human-human interaction. Not the politics of elected or appointed governing bodies. Thanks for answering.
Look guys: being religious (including, specifically, Christian) does not mean checking your brain at the door. And it never has.
:-) Not to bash on you, but it has been my experience that having "faith" in a religion usually means you don't have the brains to pour piss out of a boot. There are exceptions, but I've never met any in person.
:-)
No, it merely seems that way from the majority of preachy religious people you meet.
It means (broadly speaking) acceptance of a setup of principles, a world view, and a decision to devote your life to it. In Christianity, this is expressed by (to oversimplify) the Ten Commandments, Christ as the risen savior, and (of course) the decision to act on this information -- we call that decision faith.
You chose to believe in Jesus? What, did you shop around first? "Well, I liked the buddist ideas, but I didn't dig the fact that they all were bald, so I went with Jesus, because I really like those Southern preachers!"
Get real. Belief is not a choice. I don't believe in any god/s, for a very simple reason. The whole idea strikes me as absurd. I didn't wake up one morning and say "you know, I think I'll be atheist from now on." I've never believed in a god. My parents took me to church like any good parents would, and it just made me wonder why all these appearantly rational people could spew such obvious nonsense about reality. Even allowing for metaphor, it was ridiculous.
I'll give X-tianity its due, though. It provides a pretty good moral foundation, once you ignore the crap. It gives a pretty workable set of rules for getting along. Of course, they're not original to xtianity by any means, but hey, they're there. For a person who needs the rules spelled out for him/her, and would be nuts otherwise, it's not a bad way to go. But for the rest of the world, I feel that religion has caused more suffering, tyrany, and harm to humanity than anything else on the face of the earth. I just don't feel that its worth it's price.
However, that's just me. Feel free to feel however the hell you like.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You said: So while religion doesn't deserve to be totally bashed since it did have it's place, it does deserve to be removed from modern society.
And your sig is: "If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
Kinduv ironic that you're arguing against the utility of religion in modern society while paying respect to an important modern man who was very religious. :)
If you're wondering why religion is relevant to science, I'll quote (or possibly misquote) our hero Albert Einstein: "Science without religion is blind; religion without science is lame." [Lame has its usual meaning here, and not its slang meaning].
This is similar to space telling matter how to move, and matter telling space how to curve. This quote suggests that science and religion help advance each other.
Albert Einstein has often mentioned religion in relation to science. He is also said in relation to quantum mechanics: "God does not play dice with the Universe." He believed that spacetime had an underlying order, and consequently he found it hard to accept that at the lowest level, spacetime behaved more or less randomly.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
> Look guys: being religious (including, specifically, Christian) does not mean checking your brain at the door.
No, it means having to chose between checking your brain in at the door or else editing your religious beliefs to throw out all the superstition and other nonsense that comes with every religion.
But if you edit out the superstition and nonsense, you should probably call it an ethical system rather than a religion. A Stoic I could admire, but a Stoic who believes an invisible man who lives in the sky and rains misery on the just and unjust alike, except when by some whim he decides to hear pleas against rain during the church picknic, is not someone I can admire in the least.
Likewise for someone who practices christian ethics vs. someone who believes Christian superstition, however true to the ethics he also happens to be.
Sorry for my negative opinion, but bullshit is bullshit, whether it goes under the name of "religion", "cult", "vapourware", "science", or anything else.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Do I truly hate computers? Not completely, but for devices that are supposed to be so organised, they sure are bundles of discord. The internet runs on standards, yet there is no standard for submitting websites. There is no standard for dropping stale links out of search engines or combing for 404s. This is the part of computers I hate. But at least they get the job done.
Lowmag.net
One of the past winners of this prize, Charles Colson, really makes me wonder what the criteria are to receive it. Colson was one of Nixon's major hatchetmen during the portion of his administration when the felonies that later ended Nixon's presidency took place. By all accounts, he was a vicious individual. During his prison sentence he supposedly received a revelation and thus began his new career as a fundamentalist Christian. But all of his religious writings and newspaper columns that I have read paint him a a person filled with hate and condemnation. He definitely does not epitomize the better side of religion.
I can only hope that Colson was awarded this prize because of his public visibility and his popularity among a certain portion of people, and not for his views. To place him in the same category as Mother Teresa is almost surreal.
I think what was meant by "especially for religion" was that Math or Physics or other areas have awards out the wazoo from every organization you could think of, but work Religion is never rewarded in the same way as a major contribution to math or whatever would be... This is exactly the reason that the Templeton prize was set up. Read the first and second paragraphs on this page.
The key difference is, with science, one can always investigate the beliefs for themselves, and confirm or deny them based on the evidence at hand.
With religion, you're still stuck with "the Bible tells me so, and it feels right, so it must be true."
Blind following of dogma and the words of your respective church is a mistake. One should think for oneself.
Aric Guite
Which I can see. If you need someone to tell you how to worship or what to believe in, then there's a problem. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with believing in a higher power. I hate when a religion (which has been, for most of my life, Catholicism) tells me "You MUST go to confession!"
Basically, the best religion is one of belief of not harming your fellow man.
Feel free to flame.
Aric Guite
and they're always prepared to change such assumptions.
The reality is that if the laws we come up with aren't universal, life would be so much harder for scientists that they'd get nothing done, so in the abscence of evidence otherwise, the universal nature of the laws is assumed. But, and this is the important thing, the assumption is not taken on faith - scientists are aware of the possibility that the assumption is false, and they ignore that possibility for practical reasons.
And that's vastly different to building on faith . . .
himi
--
My very own DeCSS mirror.
All religinions collapses if they realize they are just one religion among others, which is why all others are dismissed as "cults" or "sects".
The 10 commandments? Give us all modern people a break! It is so simple minded.
Experiment: A man with a knife aproaches you at night and asks in which direction that blond woman ran. What do you do? Follow one of the ten commandments and doom the woman by pointing in the direction she ran, or do you lie to the guy since that is the reasonable thing to do?
It is time to grow up and realize that the ten commandments were written for people that needed hard, cold and simple rules for how to behave.
> Thirdly, yes, religion WILL have a bigger impact on the future. Science has no power in the moral and ethical realms. It may never have. It was never built to.
What on earth makes you believe that morals and ethics has any impact on the future? Laws are hardly created with them in mind. Money, politics and technology shapes it much more than ethics and morals.
Religion certainly has an image. But more of an impact than science? Without science, we'd still be living in caves an occasionally getting eaten by large cats....
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
Now this next bit might sound offensive, and I appologize. You sound more angry than you need to be about this. Is it even remotely possible that you continue to feel upset with the religion which you abandon and anyone who advocates it? Did you feel alone when you lost religion? I did, but I try hard not to let it cloud my opinions. I'm sorry, that whole final paragraph sounded way too condecending, but I really think that even very intelligent people may have reflexive responses to religious people because they feel alone and bitter without it. And that last sentence sounded way too pro-religion. FUCK GOD! There, I feel better. =) Sorry for the whole last paragraph.
-rt
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Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!!
Upon thinking about it a little (very little), I stand by my position that religion has and continues to play less of a role in our every-day thinking than it used to. How long ago was it that you last heard someone use the phrase "That wouldn't be Christian". It used to be common. :P Furthermore, most of the people I know who attend church these days are doing so almost entirely as a gesture. Earlier last century, people didn't necessarily feel they needed to attend church to re-affirm their beliefs. Perhaps the increase in attedance is attributable to a sense of religious decay? Anyway. :P :P I'm still hung over (see most recent post above) and I don't want to argue any more. My wrists hurt and my eyes are sore.
-rt
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Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!!
-rt
======
Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!!
Yes, religion had it's place in society. Mainly to scare people into obeying laws when it couldn't be done directly, give people who didn't understand the world around them an excuse to continue not understand it, and give people a sense of 'meaning' without actually having to do anything with their lives.
Those things Were important to a developing society, but we don't need them anymore and the only place they have is to hold us back. An average human is now self-aware enough to make their own choices based on societal values in terms of morality without a religion telling them what's right and wrong.
So while religion doesn't deserve to be totally bashed since it did have it's place, it does deserve to be removed from modern society. We needed stone tools a long time ago to advance our society, but we don't use those anymore..
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
I can respect religious people while not sharing their beliefs. Most people would agree that socrates was a great thinker, but nobody (that i know of anyway) still worships greek gods. Same with the subject of this article.. i respect Dyson but that doesn't mean i've always got to agree with him.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
On the other hand, some religious claims could be verified. For instance, some new-agers claim that they can levitate. That seem fairly easy to verify. Oddly enough, they seem unwilling to demonstrate outside of their inner sanctuaries, and to an audience other than faithful members of their group. Do you really blame someone for being skeptical of such claims?
....*Strained whisper*=There is no God!...
*Puke*
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Especially for Religion :)
I'm going to assume, by that little smiley face of yours, that you didn't mean anything against religion in your post - and neither do I in mine (i'm certainly not going for the flamewar side of life...) but...
I feel the urge to ask: why not for religion? I mean, for pete's sake, there are awards for all sorts of other fields, which are as valid for an award as religion. I wish that religion (among other fields, I'm sure... since I usually leave something out) wasn't such a "taboo"/uncommon field that we'd be tempted to say things like "especially in religion." In the name of investigation and intellectual pursuit (without, of course, detriment), I'm all for it. Go religion!
Insert mind here.
Yup.
there is a difference between using the source code for ideas, small bits, etc. and making a complete fucking copy.
So, tell me, when you use apache, do you use the source for ideas for your own server, or do you just use it as is without paying 'the author'? Free software is free software. Part of the point (often) is that it's free because the author doesn't want others to have to write it again to do the same thing.
Sorry to hear that. Yeah, I guess that kinda behavior does fall into the forbidden category.
Maybe ease up a bit? Let's say, hypothetically, that I knock on your door and ask the following questions: "Do you know God? Have you asked Jesus to be your savior?". What's the issue there? Maybe where your from they insist you're going to hell, are damned forever, and you're generally evil, but that's never been my experience, and the former approach seems pretty clean to me...
Last I checked, Slashdot source was opensourced so that it could be used freely. Free, as in (also) used by anyone because it belongs as much to them as it does the owners.
What other communities are there that hold people together for more than a decade? More than 2 decades? More than 3 decades?
Even regular churchgoers in my acquaintance consider their church only one community to which they belong... they do not consider the church to represent the entire community.
'Church' is a community - what is 'an entire community'? In 10 years ask these friends what communities exist that they belonged to 10 years ago. Maybe they will move away and/or leave their church community (I have), but I can't think of any community I was a member of that long ago that even exists now... And anytime I go back to my old church I'm still welcome in that community (though I don't fit in as well with my long hair :-)
... isn't really that important. Its more of getting this whole issue into the public eye.
Thats worth more than the money.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
No I haven't read Gibson, but I enjoy being stereotyped nonetheless. :)
I'm not saying the point of view is completely invalid, however, just because Dyson is a recognized physicist does not make him an expert in social problems.
a creed which claims to be false, on the other hand, is not even worth looking at.
This is not really true. You have probable heard of the Church of the Subgenious or the Discordians. I am not really shure of the details, but my impression has been that these "farcical believe systems" can be real religions. They do not take themselves seriously in the same way as a normal religion, but that is part of the point. They provide the social aspects of a religion, the philosophical aspects of a religion, and they mary people.
What about that Anglican sect I was talking about, would you say they are Atheist just becuase they do not believe in a god? They consider themselves religious. Almost everyone accepts that some parts of the bible are true and some parts are fables / made up.. this is the case with every other mythology so there is no good reason to expect otherwize of the christian mythology.. the only question is which parts. These priest just beleive that the God parts are made up. We have a pretty good idea that the one god idea and virgen birth were copied from the Zorastorians.. why not include the omnipotent being too.
I believe that no moral progress is possible
Moral progress should (very loosly) be defined as "the research into and evolution of those scial protocols and aditudes which have a significant influence over the people surrounding the implementer of the protocol." The concern over the enviromental impact of your activity is a moral concern which has progressed a lot, but the concern over the adoption oif a new word into the langauge is not a moral change.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
the big difference between logic and newtonian mechanics is that logic is provably correct
Nope, methods of transormation (what are popularly refered to as logic) are used to prove something correct from your axioms. These methods are NOT provably correct for any specific purpose. They are provably consistant for some very simple theories, but they are not even provably consistant for the integers (Godel). It should be pretty clear that our logic *must* be the result of physical experence / evolution, i.e. our logic might have some universality properties but we can not show this execpt via experence, so there's no reason to think logic is prior to experence.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
An empirical logician? You sure you're a graduate student in math? :-)
:)
Not just math, but Mathematical Logic.. or Algebraic Geometry.. I don't need to descided for a couple of years. Regardless, I am not going to end up doing anything directly related to physics (I suppose there is some non-zero chance I would end up working on Quantum Groups or Cohomology, but I doubt those have any direct relation to physics).
Most of my professors are platonists, but none of them have any good reasons. I think they chose to be platonist because they did not really consider physics as a part of the question. IMHO this is a big mistake in the history of mathematics.
A set of religious values, contained, perhaps, in a holy text, may provide the tools for a believer to seek happiness, heaven, whatever.
My point was that no one is activly working on these tools. They are just discussing interpretations or something which is on the egenering side by my analogy.
I am not compleatly convinced by my argument either, but I do not think you have found the flaw here.
I believe the relationship you're describing is that between facts and objectives. Science and engineering are a special case. And raising scientific fact above religious tenet isn't going to be very easy, either. You can't praise it as rational... you choose to define rationality as a physical theory based upon our experience. The argument becomes circular.
I agree it is dangerously cirular, but all these arguments are dangerously circular.. and we all must go home and make our philosophical decisions based on practical physical experence at some point.. Oh the irony!
Seriously, I would probable advocate raising science above religion to exactly the degree which it allows us to do things which we could not do before (moshots, vecro, penicillin, birth control, printing press, internet, etc.). This dose not solve the circularity of the argument but it dose heat your house when it's cold.
The above cicularity seems pretty typical of philosophical arguments which is why I beleive physics is prior to philosophy.. that and the fact that it just makes a lot of sence evolutionarily speaking. Now our idea of rational though and the scientific method may be universal for some class of problem solving, but that is a diffrent question.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Amen!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Actually according to the Witnesses, from text that I read, the 144,000 chosen ones are the ones spared from Revelation and due to their innate "goodness" will enter Heaven. The rest of the virtous (including the resurrected dead) get to enjoy a physical Paradise on a remade Earth. (presumably with enough living space to handle the extra load) The Chosen ones as I understand it are to asisst Christ in governing the new Earth.
Most urban communities fall into one of two types.
1. Mine where people two doors down from me don't know me, and I don't know them.
2. Close knit small subsets of people who know each other and can get together in massivd areas.
What Dyson's point was is that churches are a frequent ingredient in creating #2. Case in point: East end of Paterson, New Jersey, a nowhere, rundown area if there ever was one. In the last few years, an Islamic church set up shop and actively recruited the locals into an ongoing program of social change. The area's not paradise, but it's considerably, noticeably better from where they started.
A biographical book I highly recommend if you can find it, is a title called "The Starship and the Canoe", a work on the evolving relationship between Freeman Dyson, the up and coming theorectical physicist, and his son who settles in Alaska to live off the land. I don't remember the author's name, but I first read this in the Paterson Public Library in the late 70's during high school, and it's never left me.
You've probably read Gibosn, haven't you? There's a point to Dyson's irritation about "tech toys for the rich". Right now, I have more computing power in my apartment than NASA would have dreamed about during Apollo. I consume more electricity and resources than a whole swath of Egyptian villages. I've lived my entire life in the New York/NJ urban zone, and now with technology advanced 30 years later, the poor are more evident out in the streets, and the middle class are being squeezed several sides at once while Wall Street brags about the economic upsurge.
From all vantage points, we're headed for Bladerunner, or Snowcrash, not Star Trek. At some point we as a civilisation, a nation, a society have to ask ourselves, with all we know, with all we learned, why HAVEN'T we made the world a better place.
plain old text works the way you think extrans should work. it's been that way since I can remember...I think.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
what is extrans supposed to do? it says it leaves html tags as text, which it did to your post. what were you expecting?
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
I think that he was a bit off. Power attracts a lot of people, but it can only be achieved by the corruptable.
Some time ago, I had the most enlightening conversation I've ever had. With a homeless girl on the streets of Vancouver, BC. My recounting of the encounter is at www.ufies.org/~bofh in case anyone is interested, please leave your comments to the addy at the end of the story if they're not related to the quoted bit.
:)
Anyways, for the ease of discussion, here were her throughts on religion:
Eventually, as many conversations like this in my life have gone of late, the subject of religion came up. I myself am a confirmed fence sitter. I'm agnostic. After having recited a common saying, it occurred to me to inquire
as to her belief system. She said, "People need something to keep them going. It can be anything. If believing in a God does it for them, more power to them, it could be a doorknob they believe in, and that would be fine too." So
I asked, "And what keeps you going Angie?". Her response was, "I want to see where this train stops. That and taking care of my little sister."
As aluded to in that paragraph, I'm agnostic. Moreover, I'm an extreme agnostic. My personal belief is that we operate at a different level of abstraction then God, the Goddess, the Alien Scientest or the Cosmic Coincidence. And that trying to interpet it from where we stand now would be like the cave man in 2001.
Having said that, religion serves an important part in some peoples' lives, and I wouldn't for a second try to argue they are wrong. I just know I don't know.
Thoughts?
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
No, I just can't resist:
l /historical_jesus.html l /jesus_search.html u s.htm
>The historicity of Jesus of Nazareth is in no more dispute than that of Julius Caesar.
Sorry, but you are very much in error in making that statement. Many scholars (biblical and otherwise) have doubted the historicity of Jesus for many years. As a brief overview, perhaps you might be interested in consulting the following URL's:
1. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_stil
2. http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/home.htm
3. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_stil
4. http://religion.rutgers.edu/jseminar/jsem_b.html
5. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96dec/jesus/jes
6. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/jesus.htm
7. http://www.qtm.net/~trowbridge/NT_Hist.htm
8. http://www.concentric.net/~Mullerb/
These are presented in random order, as I discovered them. Currently, a great number of theologians concur that Jesus might have existed as an amalgam of historical personages, and this is the opinion that I have formed after 20 years of study.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
I think that we are losing track here.
1. You asserted that, specifically (and paraphrasing), that accepting Christ as the "risen savior" did not mean "checking your brain at the door."
2. I disagreed, and as an aside stated: "We have no reason to believe that a resurrection of any kind has ever taken place, or even in the historicity of this Christ," which I still maintain to be true.
3. You countered: "The historicity of Jesus of Nazareth is in no more dispute than that of Julius Caesar." I disagreed, and supplied many examples of such dispute.
4. You countered again, and it is here that the track veers sharply. First, I don't know whether your quote regarding "$bignum people" and "foolish thing[s]" was intended as "aimed fire," but the remark is irrelevant. My marshaled URL's were not an attempt to show you that the number of dissenters is significant, but merely that such dissent exists. Indeed, all of your statements, except the last (and yes, I am familiar with Eta and her Q analysis) were not advancing any substantive arguments at all.
If you want to debate the historicity of Christ, I am more than willing, but this is not the right forum. However, know that I consider the question basically unanswerable, and, for myself, entirely moot. It is interesting from an academic position only.
If you wish to continue our discussion, e-mail me.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You don't get paid for being a pessimist. :)
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
FYI Wyrd is Anglo-Saxon and not connected at all to people commonly referred to as Celts.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
> Personally, I think things like "and", "or", "not", and modus pones are realitivly universal, i.e. you need them to build your theories of the world, but the quantifiers are a whole new critter.
You're assuming a binary logic system. Tertiary (and higher) logic systems do exist.
I'd vote for the New Order song, personally. :)
"Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst."
When it screws up, religion should be bashed for it. There's nothing wrong with bashing religion, some of it is ridiculous to me, but that's alright; the problem is religions which are blatantly pathological... take scientology. This cult has caused more trouble than comes to enough, and there are many clam fronts around whining about the lack of religious tolerance for their ridiculous beliefs... I would consider ridiculous any argument which says I should respect the quackery of a dangerous psycho-group such as Scn'gy. Sure, respect the people based on their own actions, not by their beliefs; but religions, like political beliefs are Fair Game. People are not, but unfortunately Scientology hasn't grasped this fact. (Scientology's Fair Game Policy)
However, before I piss everybody off totally, where religion does work, it should be congratulated for it. Yes, religion, and Christianity has done a lot of damage to a lot of people; but they have changed over time, and have come to do a lot of good -- look at liberation theology, widespread social programs, etc. I'm still going to bash churches and religions for bigoted behavior, they deserve it because their position is rationally indefensible; I'm still going to bash the RC chuch for its position on contraception because it causes great suffering through increasing poverty and aiding spread of disease; but I will also acknowledge the good that they do as well. Not to do so would be a very sorry form of hypocrisy.
www.xenu.net
Lisa McPherson
Can you sum it up in a word? *No.* In a noise? *Whuuuurghhhhh!*
Jon Atack writes in "The cancellation of Fair Game":
Tolerance of religion must always be curtailed by reason. Religion is not provable using reason; it is based on faith. Therefore, where religious expression exceeds the boundaries set by reason, ie by attacking other people unfairly, that mode of religious expression must be considered harmful, and should not be tolerated.This extract taken from www.xenu.net
Can you sum it up in a word? *No.* In a noise? *Whuuuurghhhhh!*
that religions are lies
and the sooner we quit believing lies, the better off we will be.
-I go to Rice, so figure out my email address
The following is my vision of the world. I *do* respect other views of it but don't respect people with an other view who don't respect other views. If I, in the following, upset anyone with my views, I am truly sorry. You have the right to see it another way but please remember that I have that right as well. I use the term religion here as a believe which involves a God. I know that is not accurate but I do this for the sake of the argument.
The way I see it, religion started out as a way to organize things and bring some order. They used things like values for that. Religion was also a way to explain things we could not explain at that time. A way to releave yourself of your responsibilities at times even (it is God's will).
Also it was a way to keep the masses dumb and restricted. Just threaten with a higher power you can't fight and they'll obey.
Ofcourse religion has evolved, but with the governments that have taken over the care (that religion provided as well) and control and science taking over the explaining part (though a *lot* of work still needs to be done) there seems to be no need to me for religion anymore, other than being an alternative to the current society, which of course is a good thing(tm), because people need to have a choice. But to me religion is an irrational thing and isn't needed any more.
As for the basis of values: that is something that we as a society take care of now. Yes, they are becoming different from what they were, but that does not nescasarily mean they are wrong. The reason for having values is not a religious thing: it is a human thing. Just like the meaning of life... If you look at it from a distance there is no reason for the human race to survive. So what if we polute the earth and dolphins die? And after that everything else including us? Would that be a loss ? To whom or what? Only to us. We make up reasons to do things and to live.
A human is a selfish being. That is why we will always make up values. Not because they are right, but to preserve the human race... Just because we're selfish and think that we are important... Yes we are... But only to ourselves.
MarsDude
I guess that part where Christ says to "go forth and preach to all nations" and to spread his Gospel to the four corners (so to speak) of the Earth -that part is just a misprint?
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Not funny.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Yeah, it's a good thing that people who have faith based convictions and beliefs would never stoop so low to issue a blanket attack against all "open-minded" people!
Essentially it's an attack on what people perceive as individuals who would erode the house of cards that they have build for thousands of years. Also consider this. Wonder why hundreds of years ago people were so pissed off with Martin Luther for religious matters? It wasn't because of religious conviction (well not totally) but because a great deal of wealthy princes were skipping out on dues for the Catholic church.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
"You took God and made him into clipart.""We took
clipart and made him into God"-Ivan Stang
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Dyson spheres need great big walls
To keep the world from spilling out
They make them out of buckyballs
And use gravitons for grout
_________________________
Even if Bob didn't exist,Stang would have created him.
:)
/. is? Hmmm... now that would be an interesting poll (though perhaps it's already been done).
Hail Eris!
I wonder what the religious makeup of
Remember everybody: make sure you don't commit the ultimate sin*!
* For the uninitiated, that would be eating a hot dog bun.
Not to start a war, but I attend a Catholic university, and we've got to take religion classes. In those we learned some things about the Bible specifically, namely that no evidence of Jesus' existence exists except for the Bible. And when you get right down to it, don't other religions like the Mormons and I think Buddhists have better grounding in that there is a wide array of evidence of existence of Mohammed and John Smith (I think that was his name).
The biggest gripe I have with Christianity, and it does not invalidate it or anything, is that not all the books of the Bible have been published and that the ones that haven't are being held by the Catholic church, I would think protestants would try to get them released. But I understand why they hold them because I've read about some of their content (stories about Jesus as a child striking playmates dead when he got beat at a game, etc). But, they were found on the same scrolls as the other books, so shouldn't they be released as well?
Esperandi
HELL, let's try and use science to justify killing a bunch of people because Our God Said So!
Perhaps, but I doubt that you have ever seen/touched/heard the origin of life. Yet you probably believe that there was one.
Yes, I have heard several arguments of how the work came to be based on reason. You see, people look at the world as it is, and try to think up of a way of how it could come to be. Then they create a "theory", which is a possible explanation for how/why things are the way they are. The theory that best explains and predicts future events is the most reasonable theory. Now an unreasonable theory is "the earth was created in 7 days by God" on the basis of a several thousand year old book. Not only is there no evidence that supports that argument, but there is evidence against that argument (talkorigins.org). To believe in it then, would require faith. A more objective method would require examing alternatives theories a choosing one that seems to best explain things.
Actually, I was referring to the often-heard argument that "God is unknowable, and therefore we can't use reason to understand God". This argument is a cop-out, an excuse for not thinking and despicable IMHO. But more generally, any good explanation should be simple enough to convey its message to most people without having to resort to technical terms. For example Big Bang / String Theory / Evolution / Relativity. I don't understand them entirely... but they can be explained to me in simple terms that can be conveyed via analogy or verified in some manner. If a scientist (or theologian) was to say "I have a theory, but I can't explain it to you" it has little or no value.
**If you want to continue this discussion, email me.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
You are partially correct: I have no personal experience of the volcanoes on Io, yet I believe that it is very likely that said volcanoes exist. Why? I'm going into depth to prove a point and demonstrate reasonable process.
I know that volcanoes in general exist (I've been volcanic craters at Mt. St. Helens and Maui). I also understand the principles of photography, so accurate (non-doctored) pictures of Io would be easy to obtain: go to an observatory and you can look at Io from there. There is a remote possibility that every observatory in the world could go through a complex conspiratorial plan to create illusions of Io, but this seems unlikely given lack of motive and the amount of effort required for this. Further, I know that NASA does in fact launch missions into space, as I personally seen one lift-off and have talked to friends who have seen others. As well, I know an engineer at Boeing who works in some aspect of aerospace design.
To recap, I know: volcanoes exist, photographs can be easily taken from earth that show volcanoes, spacecraft that take pictures are launched from Earth. Now as I alluded to earlier, there is a remote possibility of a giant coverup, which would include launching empty spacecraft into orbit, fakes from observatories over the whole world, all without motive. However, I weigh the odds in my head, and decide that most likely the pictures are real. Of course, if a top NASA scientist comes out and says: "there are no volcanoes on Io, we faked those" then I will quickly re-think my assumptions, and re-evaluating the whole process (bearing in mind the possibly that said scientist is lying). Do I need faith? No! I just use a combination of probabilities and personal experience to get the most likely result (always subject to change).
One aside point: the laws that apply to Earth (Newtonian Physics) actually don't apply to the much of rest of the world (everything tends to break down at the extremes). That's why more advanced technical theories such relativity and string theory were developed... because reason required them.
Saying that you only believe what you can see/touch/hear/measure/understand means that you don't belive in science in a field where you are not an expert. We believe in science because it is consistent and open to change. As Karl Popper has said, things can only really be scientifically true if they could also be false with different data, but that is not the reality of most work in science. You don't see much published that says some experiment didn't prove our hyposthesis. But more great science has come of experiments that failed than those that just confirmed prevailing wisdom (Michelson-Morley, Darwin's finches etc.)
I stand by my statement that I only believe what I can see/hear/touch/measure/understand. Yet I believe in a lot of things where I am not an expert in the field! This is because they don't contradict what is part of my personally verifiable experience, and provide analogy that is logical and not internally contradictory. You are absolutely correct that much knowledge can be gathered from failed experience and failed hypotheses... it's an important part of understanding! But that failure demonstrates that the scientific process is working... even if the failures does not get published (because who wants to hear a theory that is proven not to explain reality?).
Science has faith in Occam's Razor, science has faith in the laws of thermodynamics, science has faith that mathematics can adequately describe physical phenomena.
Ockham's Razor is not a faith, or even a belief. It is a "razor", or a way to simplify a belief system. Basically Ockham's Razor says, if there are two explanations for an event, choose the most simple one. For example, "Why is there a yellow dotted line in the middle of the road by my house?" there are two explanations: "(1) someone from the government painted them on there, like every other street in my city" or "(2) they are the blood of space aliens, who died upon entry to Earth when they burned up in the atmosphere, but left a trail of yellow blood which co-incidentally fell on my street". Each once is theoretically possible... but Ockham's Razor says: "believe in (1) because its more simple". Now, if new evidence comes to light (say the space aliens come to earth for vengeance over their losses over at Blanca St in Vancouver), then the razor would not apply, because they are not equal explanations of the evidence any longer. It does not take faith to use this razor: it's just a really good method for approaching the world, you can take it or leave it.
As for the laws of thermodynamics: those are based on empirical evidence. Didn't you take science classes in high school? If anything new came up, they aren't laws any more. It's that simple, no faith required.
Regarding mathematics: obviously math can't describe all physical phenomenon. But it does help up model physical phenomenon to help us understand and explain the world around us so that we can better predict the world in the future. For some phenomenon, charts might better model phenomenon, or some other method that doesn't spring to mind. That's all we can really ask from science, we don't need faith to accept modeling techniques.
The difference between scientific faith and relgious faith is that science is willing to change its dogma if it finds a counter example, but most religions will deny the counter example if it disagrees with dogma. But even religions gradually change belief over time, witness the Catholic churces acceptance of evolution.
But the real point of that story is that for over a hundred years, religious leaded persuaded followers (quite a term eh?) to trust faith that the literal creation story was to be believed (btw still preached by many religious fundamentalists). The pope says "believe in this because I say it's true" and it remains "true" until decades later the new pope changes his mind and say "now I say this other thing, and you should believe in it because I say it's true".Alternatively, Darwin said "after looking at empirical evidence, it seems likely that evolution is the process life was created on Earth". Now this was hotly debated as scientists looked at available evidence and tweaked the theory until it could explain how we came to be the way we are today. With science, a change in belief will only occur when new evidence is presented that contradict a theory, or if a better explanation is come across. For example, if a flaming pillar of light and wind came down to Earth and spoke to the world, and claimed to be God, and promptly started creating new species... then I could see some new theories being developed by scientists that would include the new flaming God creation.
So again, I don't see how reason requires faith. It requires compiled intelligence, but nothing that contradicts observable data, and nothing that cannot be changed upon the arrival of new evidence.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
faith and reason are not, by nature mutually exclusive. There is nothing special about religion that precludes the use of human reason to discover the world. Likewise, there is nothing special about reason which precludes faith.
I would argue the opposite -- that faith and reason are in complete opposition at all times. If you have a reasonable argument for believing in something (as in: there it is, I can see/touch/hear it), you don't require any faith. And if you rely on faith to believe in something, it is only because you have no good reason (I can't see/touch/hear/measure/understand it, but the bible tells me so).
Again, faith is the opposite of reason, and are always in direct contradiction.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Oh I guess he is smarter than me about 1 mill smarter.
That is a philosophy, not a religion. And yes ther is a signifiacant diferance.
and No I can't spell.
murder, genocide, conformism, otherism, and horror, then yes, religion has had a much greater impact on humanity.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
I attended Eastern Nazarene College, which offered a Templeton Foundation sponsored course on Issues in Science and Religion. For those interesting in the topic, I recommend the works of (The Reverend, Sir, Doctor) John Polkinghorne (here's an interview), a respected Quantum Physicist, and Anglican Priest, and a Knight of the Realm. Particularly for the Christians out there, Faith of a Physicist is a fantistic work, as is Reason and Reality. Both books deal with science and religion from a standpoint of respect, and most impressive is Polkinghorne's discussion of faiths other than Christianity, often handled badly by members of the church.
He also has (yet another) book on the Quantum World for laypeople.
Last but not least, I must mention the definitive work on the topic, John Hedley Brooke's S cience and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives a scholarly text with some serious historical meat.
JA (ps... forgot to plug Worlds Apart: The Unholy War between Religion and Science, written by Dr. Karl Giberson. He'd kill me if I didn't mention his book here. )
---
Just to clarify a couple of things. You don't follow Christianity to become a better person, you do this because you realize you're a sinner (you, me, Mother Teresa)... what people don't get (including me) is that God is so much purer than us. *We* may think we're good, but compared to God, it is like us seeing someone covered in crap. Somehow, I just can't see this, but that's what they say. Once you realize who God actually is, then you'll be scared out of your wits and then you'll ask for forgiveness and he'll give it to you. That's the process. Being good is more like a post-production thing. You try to be good to get closer to God and you want to please him so you do what he says (the Bible). You become completely grateful that He saved you. Once again, the goal of Christianity is *not* to become a good person.
You don't have to submit to higher powers, leaders or governments to be religious or spiritual. You don't have to spam people showing up at their door, just to score extra points for an eventual afterlife. Karma does not mean you will be punished for your misdeeds. Religion does not necessarily imply intoleration to the views and life of others. You don't have to accept authorative views, give away all your money, live in poverty or anything you don't want at all. Everyone has the right to choose their own way of life, and everyone eventually live life based on their choices. So let's make those choices better. It's only a matter of shifting your focus, away from things that makes you unhappy or dopes you down (in front of a computer).
There are many paths to a better life. A site that takes up the issue pretty broadly can be found at: http://www.eu.spiritweb.org/. There's much misinformation about new age/spirituality floating around the net, but this is one of the best sites around IMHO.
Ultimately, whatever resonates with your mind, is right for you (believe me you will FEEL it when you encounter it!). Not everyone is supposed to become a guru or something, that is a misbelief. There's more than one truth, the trick is to extract out your truth. Ie, what is necessary as truth today may become totally false tomorrow. That doesn't make the previous truth false yesterday. We're basically children in our playground Earth, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're not destined for greatness (whatever that means ;). It's all up to ourself. We have to learn to assume responsibility, cooperate and love without expecting anything in return.
What makes you happy? New technology? For how long. Searching for externals, ie money, fame etc, will never fullfill anyone completely..
Btw, have you listened to the text of popular music lately? The world IS changing now!
- Steeltoe
What do you do to limit yourself today?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
"Sorry, but it's the One True Way mentality of world religions that causes those wars (along with witch hunts, judicial murders, and imprisonment of pot smokers). It's hardly unfair to lambast a system for the effects arising directly from its fundamental principles."
Yes, that mentality is causing wars. But it could just as well cause war among "scientific" people. Basically, _people_ starts wars, _people_ that torture, murder and rape, not religion, science, cultures etc. People. Our leaders. Us, the consenting and ignoring masses.
If no such thing as religion existed, I doubt we would have lived peacefully for all these years. Why blame something else, when it's clearly our own fault? Why do we distance ourself from it when sticking our heads in the sand clearly doesn't help the situation? It didn't in the past, and it won't in the future.
We just need an excuse for going to war, and religion is a very convinient way to move people. But you have so many examples of otherwise. You have the Holocaust, mongolian invaders, Vikings, vast amounts of conquerors like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, the Conquistadors, the Romans, etc, etc, etc.... The list goes on and on and on. Many "religious" wars was just started because people hated their neighbours and needed an excuse, or just wanted more land, values and foreign pussies.
If we're going to do something about war, we'll have to accept the fact that it is inherent in us as humans. And we have to do things to counter it, not blame external things and other people. Many of us would kill if our country went to war.
- Steeltoe
What do you do to limit yourself today?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I wouldn't call myself "religious", but I recognize religion is much more than a law-keeping incentive. What you refer to as laws, are more like moral codes in most religions btw. But in certain societies, religion has/had so much power that they are/were considered Laws.
;-)
The big fault of you and many others is to look at the Ten Commandments and think this is Christianity, and that Christianity is all there is to religion. Both religion and Christianity is much more than that, even more than the Golden Rule and Hinduism combined!
People REALLY need to educate themselves about this!
The way I see it, everyone needs something to believe in, a personal religion. Science by itself only tells you HOW things work, it doesn't tell you WHAT to do about it! Eg, science doesn't tell you to keep slaves or not, exploit the earth or not, steal, kill and rape or not, live with in monogamous relationships or not, etc, etc, etc.
Thus the Laws in our society is NOT based on science and will never be, since it can't tell us how to live. It is based on a mixture of experience (trial- and error, a sort of science) and religion.
The big danger is people that don't want to be religious and cuts away those pieces of their hearts that has to do with beliefs, morals and love. You don't have to look further than Hitler Germany, for how extreme beliefs in science can do damage.
Basically, religion has never harmed anyone. It's people that go to war and kill. Don't blame the smoking gun-barrel!
We need some guidelines, and we need them more than ever. Wether you define this as the word 'religion' or whatever is _totally irrelevant_. The most important thing is to recognize that science alone won't tell us everything.
In fact religion goes beyond mere practical value in a society. It's about evolving yourself, the individual, to become something better. What that is depends on yourself however. It can be done with many others, or it can be done utterly alone. There's so many different religions out there as there are people.
- Steeltoe
What do you do to limit yourself today?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Consider nuclear-, biological and wave-technological (HARP) warfare. Not to mention future warfare like nanotechnology and lasers. Now what's dangerous?
Science and religion doen't hurt anybody. It's people that torture, murder and rape.
We should stop blaming external things, and assume responsibility to our own choices and actions. Science doesn't tell you HOW to live. People that doesn't think for themselves and develop a belief-system on how to live, will become puppets for leaders who may not have those good intents they display on TV.
- Steeltoe
What do you do to limit yourself today?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Doesn't searching for the truth involve looking in all the places you can? How can modern science defend their attitudes towards religions and other faiths of mankind (not to mention New Age)? How can anyone claiming to search for the truth defend cutting and chipping away at the Big Picture?
;-)
Oh, well continue dancing, that's what you do best. We'll just harvest your efforts
- Steeltoe
What do you do to limit yourself today?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
One thing is to be sceptical, another is to lose your job and professional reputation just because you want to study some more exciting stuff than exciting atoms, like telekinesis or telepathy. Many scientists shy away from such projects as fast as they can because of punishments for doing such research and publishing them. You have to believe in the current religion of science, or else your results can't be trusted. So ultimately scientific people goes into the same trap as religious people. It's about arrogance and power stiffling the potential for new discoveries. A very human trap you can't blaim other than the humans themselves.
Science should be sceptical. Religion should be built on faith. This is because science is built on the mind, and religion is that of the heart. To have a balance of these two is a very healthy way of living life. This means the two shouldn't oppose each other, but complement. You can't build a society on either pure science or religion.
It was never supposed to be easy though. It's much easier to come up with pure scientific or religious claims, than trying to grasp the whole picture.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
[To correct myself, the example I was thinking of was Mark 4:35-41.]
You are being a little too pedantic! You can safely say that you have faith in the water department, or drivers on the roads. That faith may be shaken now and then, but it's nevertheless faith (which fits into items #1 & 5 below). faith [fayth] (plural faiths) noun 1. belief or trust: belief in, devotion to, or trust in somebody or something, especially without logical proof 2. RELIGION religion or religious group: a system of religious belief, or the group of people who adhere to it 3. RELIGION trust in God: belief in and devotion to God Her faith is unwavering. 4. set of beliefs: a strongly held set of beliefs or principles people of different political faiths 5. loyalty: allegiance or loyalty to somebody or something Encarta® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
There be more of us Heinlein-thumping wackos than you think. Please note the sibling post with the "every man be armed" sig.
Amphigory: I find your posts are generally reasonable and well thought out, so I was interested in seeing what kind of discussion I'd find on "Geeks for Christ." Frankly, I was a little disappointed.
By that I don't mean to criticize what you are going for, but I do want to let you know it's just not my thing. The religious topics seem (to me) extremely evangelical-oriented. I would be much more interested in discussing daily life and neighborly human interactions, rather than plans to convert Spanish speakers to Christianity. I was especially turned off by the article speculating about whether current events in Israel signal the Apocalypse. I really don't want to spend my time second-guessing God's plan. If other people are into this, I'm cool with that, but I just don't feel comfortable in such an environment.
--me (serious for once)
Thanks for the reminder. It's sometimes hard to keep a proper perspective on the history of knowledge. We developed theories for evolution in the 1850s, ice ages about 125 years ago, continental drift in the 1920s-30s, and we only really found out about the big bang in the 50's. So keeping in mind the time needed for evidence to accumulate, most religions seem to have kept up to date fairly well.
If I recall correctly, Galileo did almost this thing. He very obnoxiously and abrasively proclaimed that the Church was screwed in the head (which, in truth it was, but it's hard to argue with or change centuries of tradition). So the Inquisition got medieval on his butt.
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
How true this is...Could only be improved by mentioning the far right gun wielding Heinleiners at approx 2% of posters. The first post to make me LOL in a long time !
Life is just a bowl of All Bran - Small Faces
Religion has a great impact on society today, whether we see it or not. This article is right on.
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It wasn't Darwin, it was Galileo. Faith entails belief without reason and thus is the enemy of science, there are no two ways about it. Most (all?) religions make distinctly scientific claims, like that Jesus existed, or people continue to live after their brain has decomposed. These claims are generally false, and even worse, unsupported. Science demands that all assertions be supported, and that when the support of a assertion fails, it be rejected. Faith demands no support; only that evidence against an assertion be ignored. It is absolutely irreconcilable with science.
You're calling me pedantic? Obviously none of those definitions apply in context. The first is the closest; it works a lot better if you remove "especially". I have "faith" in the above mentioned in the same sense that I have "faith" that two and two make four, which is a distinctly different thing than religious faith.
it would be no excuse for you doing it. That I might use a fallacy doesn't make it any less fallacious when you use it. Tu quoquo, they call that.
That's absurd. There are many among us who use science as a tool for truth, not because they enjoy science -- indeed, they may even despise it, though that is no doubt rare -- but because they need truth for some other reason, like designing a CPU or airplane.
What was it that Tertullion said? "It is impossible therefore it is certain"? (In reference to the resurrection) Whatever the word "faith" meant, belief without reason has existed in religion since the beginning of its history. The word for belief without reason in our current language is "faith", but even if you call it something else, it is still not compatible with science.
dictionary.com isn't the author of any dictionary: it displays entries from various other dictionaries which (one assumes) it licenses from their respective authors. The definition cited was actually taken from "The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition", of which I'm sure you've heard.
What are you smoking? Faith is belief without reason, DEFINITIVELY. They're only not mutually exclusive in that you can use faith for some things and reason for others. But in that sense, no two traits are ever mutually exclusive.
I do not have faith that I will not get hit by a car walking down the street -- I have good reason to believe that (i.e. that such events are fairly unlikely). I do not have faith that my water is safe -- I have good reason to believe that too (i.e. that the people responsible for keeping water safe are generally capable of doing so, and the instances otherwise are rare). Faith is not making statistical predictions, because those are based on reason. Or, if that's faith, there must be some other word for what Christians do.
Disclaimer these are the writing of a thinking Christian. In this discussion I stipulate the majority Christian dogma as true. I am willing to debate many of them and enjoy a good and interesting discussion in this point. However, that is not the focus of this post. If that is what you wish to discuss, my email address is NateCuster@Nospam.Hotmail.com. Now to begin my rant.
... etc."
The question of what parts of the bible are metaphorical is a good one! I would answer with St. Augustine's line:
"Take the literal parts literally, and the metaphorical parts metaphorically."
This implies too important points:
1) There are parts of the bible that are literal.
2) There are parts of the bible that are metaphorical.
If anyone disagrees with the second statement, ask them this: Are they an eunuch? To quote "If you hand causes you to sin cut it off
The bible is a historical document. That is not often debated. But it is a document, that means that the normal rules for literary analysis still apply. For example some parts of the bible are poetry, they deserve to be read as such, not literal fact.
To answer the question you posed at the end:
"Can I have my cake and eat it to?"
Yes! One may note that while the timing is a bit off, the general order of the creation story matches up almost exactly with the big bang. To quote John for a second "In the beginning was the word" A word is a thought, mental neurons firing electrical impulses. Energy. To paraphrase the Big Bang, during the first moment an infinite amount of energy was confined in an single point. Creation ex nilho if you ask me.
Lastly I would ask if one inconsistency void forty plus chapters?
Nate Custer
P.S. While I have not read Freeman Dyson's book, his mentor, Feynman's book is quite good.
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
"The difference between scientific faith and relgious faith is that science is willing to change its dogma if it finds a counter example, but most religions will deny the counter example if it disagrees with dogma. But even religions gradually change belief over time, witness the Catholic churces acceptance of evolution."
While the origanal rejection of Evolution claimed to be based on dogma, it was not. The Church, blately realized this and changed their stance bot their dogma. Please be clear in this diferance. The Church also disagreed with science on determinism, that was dogmatic, that was shown to be false.
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
Please look up the dictionary defonition of axiom. Then grok Godel's imcompleateness therom, then join in the discusion as an educated person.
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
Any person who honestly holds that in exactly 144 hours the world was created deserves to be a eunuch. "If your hand causes you to sin cut it off..." Yeah.
You have created a paper tiger and then destroyed it, wow. Axioms the basis for reason require faith. Please read Descartes about the validity of the senses before you continue to post in this thread.
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
Brilliant, however one small nitpick:
"[The Holy Spirit] S/He's"
God the Father is specificly refered to as male, as is Jesus. However, in the origanal Hebrew and Greek both nouns are female. Just refer to her as such and stop the confusion, please?
Best regards,
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
1999's Nobel Prizes were each worth 7900000 Swedish Krona which is about 900000 US$. Check out the Nobel foundation homepage at: http://www.nobel.se
I don't know about you, but I'm mildly irritated as the Nobel Prizes are awarded for achievements in fields which I would personally rate as more important than religion. Still, at least there's a lot more prestige attached: I confess that I'd never heard of the Templeton Prize before today.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
You fail to understand. You have faith all the time. You have faith that you won't get hit by a car walking down a street. You have faith that your drinking water isn't poisoned, etc. Reason and faith are extremely closely connected.
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
To quote Boethius, a sixth century Christian scholar, "as far as you are possible, join faith and reason" (Letter to Pope John I). Fides et ratio, or faith and reason are not, by nature mutually exclusive. There is nothing special about religion that precludes the use of human reason to discover the world. Likewise, there is nothing special about reason which precludes faith.
In fact, Christian theologians and philosophers from the days of St. Paul to the present have been trying to answer the same question --- how do we give the two a seamless joint. St. Anselm of Canterbury and St. Thomas Aquinas are two of the most famous scholastics, who's life work was to perform that synchronization.
Unfortunately, not all Christians chose to build on the developments of tradition, and choose to ignore them to go back to the "Bible." Those who fail to learn from history...
wow! you small minded, angry atheists suprise me.
obviously god exists. time is simply a function of physics in this universe. there is no "time", it's just a kind of trap we're stuck in.
evolution clearly shows, that in such a trap, one evolves from the primitive to the advanced. we are the knuckle-dragging primitives of tomorrowland. there will be points in the future when people look back on our time as being horrific (stalin, hitler,pol pot), cruel and unfair (excesses of capitalism, sexism, racism), as well as stupid (squandering fossil fuels).
taken to the extreme, some animal (perhaps human, perhaps bonobo, or even the rare tunneling gerbil) will evolve to the point where they transcend time and possibly meet/become "god" -- and all the other beasties that have made the trip.
i don't see how anyone can realistically view the situation as being much different from i have just described.
and i will say this about jesus christ -- even from a strictly scientific/historical perspective, there is more going on there than a lot of people want to admit.
with you strip all the bs off, a lot of evidence from the fields of linguistics, archeology, etc. support the existence of some kind of divine being known by that name, at that time.
something special *did* happen...i was very skeptical of jc til i spent some time reading the "quelle" or Q and comparing the texts to the various letters of the apostles, as well as the stuff they've been digging up from the trash heaps around egpyt in recent years. no other event is as well supported by hard science than the existence of some type type of special being we call "jesus christ".
don't get me wrong, a lot of people have twisted that phenomenon into all kinds of strange things, and used it as a stick to whack a lot of people. but remember, that's what intelligent animals do -- manipulate/control whatever they can to increase their personal power. in general, i am strongly repulsed by the ignorant, whether religous or scientific.
maybe jc was a visitor from another place/time? dunno! would like to know, though. hard to find more than scraps of text/images from that long ago.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
It is interesting how many physicists turn to religion of some sort, or at least write about it to some extent. A lot of people have a tendency to bash on them. Others don't actually read enough to know that they do ;-) This argument is actually interesting and valid however. I hope that this doesn't turn into a lame religion bash, but rather actually helps to lend perspective to the article at hand.
For those who haven't seen SOME talk of religion in physics, please read Leon Lederman's book The God Particle in one chapter called, "The Whirling Moo-Shoo..." somethingerother, I forgot how he finishes it. He talks about how some physicists make some rather... silly... attempts at explaining eastern mysticism with physics.
Eh...
I know this'll never get seen, but talk about "Holy Wars(tm)"
Any belief system is dangerous. We as humans require a feeling of total acceptance in society. It does not matter what the belief is. A group of people will rally and become unreasonable whenever one system is the "superior" system. Pol Pot was a self described Atheist. I would not consider any belief to be optimal. The simple state that one system is optimal begins a path to the inability to accept others. Unfortunatly it is human nature.
Einstein said, "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
We can't just have faith without any science to back it up. That would just be dumb. Religion and reason can - and must - coexist.
Personally, I'm Christian. I accept the fact that evolution does happen. It's a proven fact that species change over time. However, what I do not accept is the part of the theory that has not been proven - where the first living thing came from. I cannot see any way that life could just be randomly created. Some supreme being had to play a role in creating life and setting up the conditions so that that life could evolve.
"Let me open these blinds so the snipers can see in." - Kevin Giffhorn
Sounds just like science.
Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped.
Wow... again, sounds like science!
Like the man said though, the problem is the people who are too arrogant to admit that they could be wrong.
Hey... sounds like some (I said some) scientists!
After all, isn't science what's made possible the bloodiest wars in the history of mankind? Zyclon B, Thalidimide, the machine gun, heck, atomic weaponry! Say what you will about religious zealots... by themselves, they'd never find the means to make the human race extinct.
Let's not get carried away. Both science and religion offer positive and negative. I'd argue they both offer much more positive. But whatever the case, neither should be dismissed out of hand.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
I hold that we who are looking for reason behind life are using science and religion to do so. Between them, they can give us the answers we crave. If we want WHY, we ask religion. If we want HOW, we can ask science. These are all aspects of our humanity. We are body, mind, and spirit. These three parts of us have different questions and require differnet format answers. This doesn't mean that the truth is different, but my Body says, "How far can I jump?" because that applies to the body. My Mind asks, "How did my legs come to be?" because the the mind is there to think. My Spirit asks, "But how? Why?".
To be more direct, I would say that I would find the Bible a nightmare to understand without originally knowing the God it describes, I wouldn't even know how to explain it without that knowledge. A previous poster has commented on this conundrum. But we need the Spirit (the "character of God") to interpret (compile) the Bible for us. (Note: This doesn't dumb-down, just interpret, ie, help us understand).
For myself, I couldn't come to the Linux Kernel source with no knowledge of *nix and expect to understand it all. It'd be nice to have Linus by my side. With the Bible, I have that - that's why I called the Spirit the "character of God". S/He's always there whenever I read the Bible (and the rest of the time too, naturally!) so I have less (not NO ) problems interpreting what it means.
So for example, with your example questions about Creation and Original Sin, I'll give example suggestions:
Science tries to describe HOW our world originated. The Bible has a completely different goal - WHY our world originated.
(As an aside, if we wanted a fully detailed scientific description of the start of the Universe, how would we expect people 6,000+ years ago to have understood that well enough to pass it on, without the facility of written text?)
Okay, I don't see how we could have a conflict here since I can't see Science addressing this issue. Orig. Sin is a concept that we basically need to make a positive decision to accept God, that it's not the default. We're not forced into it, but that we have to make an active decision to accept God. I'm repeating myself already, it's so simple. I feel that the word "Sin" is the problem many people have with this concept. If we called it "Origial Freedom" it'd go down much better.
Sin is a very old word for not accepting God and God's values - in a nutshell. So Originally (before we don't make an active decision), we are assumed not to have made that active decision. To be "Sinners".
That's a very strong word, somehow. I think this must be cultural. All it means, is that as a "Sinner", I am not perfect. So, by default I am not perfect, in the same way that no OS IS perfectly secure. I am not assumed to be interested until I express an interest. This is the Free Will Defence in its simplest terms.
If it were the other way round, I would see a real problem with non-believers...
That means that a decision is made by our free will. The normal way this concept is argued against, is the idea of unborn or young children. For one thing, this is a small side-issue against the positive aspects of freedom against assumptions of acceptance. For another, it is difficult for any of us to know what a young child does understand - possibly more than we do!
So in terms of metaphor vs. literal, I find it often simple to see what is meant literally (If I wanted C18th people to understand the Big Bang theory (assuming that's correct), how would I go about telling someone 6000 yrs ago about it? And what good would it do them? And what would it mean now? Ditto C20th, C21st, C22nd?) So Creation is described in terms of what it MEANS, not HOW it was DONE. Pinning a man to a tree, however, is understood by the people of the time and those of use who live later in history. So make that a literal description.
As I say, understanding the Linux Kernel is easier if you're a friend of Linus. Understanding the Bible is easier if you're a friend of the Author. You don't have to believe and accept all that either of them say, just get to know what they have to say, and what they have to offer, then make up your own mind what to install.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Oh my God(TM)! I thought - here goes
Imagine my surprise when I read the responses and found the most of them rational and reasonable disucssions on Religion, Science, and the interaction between the two.
I am not a Scientist, but a techie (which could be classes as a subset of scientist, I guess). I am also "Religios" - As in, I claim to be a Christian and an am active Church member.
For myself, most people I know fall into one camp or the other - they're techies of they're Christians. The techs I know thru' work, the Xn's I know through Church.
Some of the time, I dread the two groups meeting. Sometimes, I think that it would do both groups some good.
A few years ago, some scientists (Uni lecturers, etc - it's a middle-class church) held a kind of conference on "The Cross and the Word", I think they called it. They wanted to discuss with other Christians their belief in Science. Explain to them that they weren't giving up their principles by following Science. In a similar way, I expected Xn's on
In both discussions, there have been irritably few flames.
From what I can conclude, there is no discrepancy between Science and Religion.
So all I can guess, is that it's media hype.
Sure, Emacs vs. Vi, BSD vs. Linux, Unix vs. M$, Big-Bang vs. 7-days-creation can all cause differences in preference. But the difference is, that the tech. "Religious Wars" are about man-made decisions; the Big-Bang and 7-days issues are both looking for answers. They are looking TOGETHER for the best answer for today.
I personally believe that vi is preferrable to emacs to me. I also prefer *nix over M$ for most things. In such issues, "What you believe is up to you - it doesn't affect the validity of what I believe" is fine. I was expecting the same kind of answers from
Therefore,
Call human life a file format, if you will. There is one document to be read and written to. It is in a format. Physics and Religion are working on that format - Reverse engineering. They have different takes on how to do that, sometimes, but they are all working on the one issue. There are many different questions to be asked about that format: Why does it exist? Why is it like it is? How can it be improved (eg, GM, Meditation)? What harms it and should be avoided? Indeed, should it be avoided?
Science and Religion are both investigating all these as we sit around and read weblogs......
C'mon, I must have inflamed someone by now!
Steve.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Specifically, don't be sorry for this one.
Find a religion which neither requires checking your brain out at the door (a good phrase, so I'll re-use it) nor accepting superstition and nonsense.
So long as you don't check out brain@door, you can be sure of not accepting nonsense.
Popular media has a strong habit of portraying the "limp vicar", "deluded X fanatic" where X is Christianity, Linux, you name it. I've met both, but it degrades X/nity no more than having a Win user taking on Linux degrades OSS.
As OSS advocates (I assume we all are), we are happy every time someone trashes their FAT to install Linux. Simiarly, as Christians, we are joyous evey time someone accepts something
- Proven
- Reliable
- Insert fave reason for Linux here, it probably applies to Christianity
and are similarly unhappy every time someone takes on something which is less than enough.Bullshit *IS* bullshit. Block it out.
Take the truth.
ONLY.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Kewl!
This sounds like mumbo-jumbo if you skim-read it, but it actually makes sense! (If you don't accept that, try reading the latest Linux kernel source!)
I know that techies rely on proof often - I've spent the past few days writing scripts to prove that a data service either is or is not active.
The scripts I wrote can prove it either way.
However complex the computer, they're not yet dealing with "is there a God?", they're still on the level of "Has Oracle started up yet?"
There *is* a difference between the two. That difference makes us human. That difference is that we are able to ask the question of our own accord. But we cannot answer it using our own mental abilites - we need to use our spiritual aspect, also.
If this sounds like crap, think about this:
I can REASON that I can or can't jump over a wall of a certain height. But I can't PROVE it without trying. So my reasoning is invalid by itself without experiential data. So my mind has limits. Some things I have to prove with my body. My reasoning may turn out wrong or right. But I have to try it to know for sure.
Simiarly, I can REASON that there is or isn't a God. But I can't PROVE it either way. Again, my mind has limits. Some things I have to prove with my spirit.
For myself, I jumped the wall.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
B) If we were, I'm not convinced by your line of thinking. I get much spam about technical and non-technical services, I've never had any about religious issues.
If you count Jehovah's Witnesses arriving at the door, try them with this:
How do you account for the JW claim that only 144,000 can enter the gates of Heaven, with respect to the fact that there are now more than 144,000?
Apart from JWs, who do a remarkable amount of work, (if you think about it, it's alt.jw.advocacy (no I don't know if that group exists) done before such things were thought of. It's also spam before that was named, too.)But I know that for myself, I get fed fanciful "scientific" claims through the mainstream media every day;
It is unfortunate that I have to actively seek that out. But I guess it's better than spam.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
I find that in my community, the Church has little impact. However, I left my original area some years ago, and still visit the church in my "old" community.
In that area, I see the church doing a lot for / with the local community (from Mums'n'Tots to Scouts, Youth Club, Charity investment, and Worldwide investment), much of which the local community takes for granted. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining that they take it for granted -they should! Someone (dunno who) once said, "The Church is the only organisation I know of which exists purely for the benefit of its non-members".
That, to me, summarises what the Church is for.
As an offshoot, when the Church does that right, it's great PR and helps to generate more members, thus furthering its ability to achieve its goal.
It could be said that Open Source works on a similar basis
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
I would sure prefer "intellectually underprivileged/passionately psychotic" having a
god to tell them it's bad to fire at me.
But what if there is some clergy between this god and that fool? What if a clergyman think I am politically dangerous to him and tell the fool I may be killed, even if god said it was bad to kill? That sort of things happened. That happens. And I fear it will happen again.
There's better than religion+clergy: religion alone.
Sorry if I'm unclear, but english's not my mothertongue...
Snark
Bring the internet and technology, how about food and medicine? These are the things that are needed in third world countries, starving kids in africa couldn't care less about Linux, but if they had a real fish...
Would you shut the hell up? I'm getting sick and tired of reading about xlem, and if it doesn't stop, I'm going to have DoS the whole damned site so you won't have any garbage to link *to*. Now go away.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
No, worker bees and the like work together as a community not because of religion, but in the hopes that one day they will get lucky... and aren't about to act anti-social which would surely reduce their chances to near nil.
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Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
And so much more dangerous.
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JavaScript tutorials scripts
Aren't the Nobel prizes for $1 million each?
-sean o. "when the power runs out, we'll just hum"
>More importantly, no religon is more correct than another. Well, I can't say I agree with that. The Bible and Koran claim in Creationism, which has been disproven by Evolution. So you can take religions like Budhhism, which cannot (at least yet) be proven to be incorrect.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, are asking for proof that Evolution is correct or incorrect?
The disproof could be tricky - what's to stop God creating a Universe that appears to be 15 billion years old?
What's to stop God to have created us a few minutes ago and implant all this evidence and memories making us think it's so old?
If you find that interesting, check this out... http://xlem.hypermart.net
Actually a majority of them. But does it mean that death is "better", and all others should kill themselves?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I can't imagine what you're talking about. My best guess is that your preacher neglected to tell you how much of the supposedly Christian value system actually predates Christianity by centuries, if not millenia.
... wait for it ... an anti-Christian perspective that's been carefully cultivated (as well as being a direct result of people wrongly calling themselves "Christians" while engaged in harmful acts, i.e. wars) over the last few hundred years.
Sigh. Such a shame that you are so effectively programmed as to instantly assume I was talking about Christianity.
What on earth gave you the idea that I'm talking about Christianity, or in fact *any particular* religion at all?
Hey, here's a though, try and get this novel new idea into your head:
"Religion" != Christianity.
Here's another one:
"Religion" != Worship of God.
I'm not, in fact, a Christian or Catholic. My religious ideals and practices do not in fact have *anything* to do with this - that's strictly my business. If I wanted a flame war, I'd have stated what my religious preferences are, but frankly I'd prefer to keep that to myself, as is my right.
I'm simply trying to point out that religions, as a whole, from Christianity all the way back to Paganism and beyond, have had an *organizational* role in the development of Man's civilization over the years.
I would even go so far as to posit that the modern practice of pure rejection of religion for the sake of rejecting religion is naive and misguided, mostly due to
So, please get a religious clue. There is more to religion than the worship of one god/deity, more to a religious body of knowledge than can be imparted in simple ritual. Christianity and its offshoots may have the modern religious limelight, but it by no means represents the entire show...
Early religions, such as those found in the cults of Mesopotamia, might even be considered to be indistinguishable from science by todays standards... its just a pity that the severely limited Anti-Christian/Worship=Religion perspective propagated in our modern culture is preventing intelligent people with a degree of literacy such as (I'm assuming, given your participation in this forum) yourself, from being able to learn this.
Look closely, ignore the Christian stigma, and you will see that there is more to religious contribution to the culture of Man than meets the eye...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Here's an example of the influence religion has on people's lives:
m /mm00a.html
http://www.paganteahouse.com/malleus_maleficaru
For Catholicism, try 1943 as the year that an allegorical reading became the party line. And for some Protestant groups, further back than that . . .
:)
(OK, and for some, not even close today
hawk
(As with the meteorite example, we take an enormous amount on trust every second of every day, but we don't usually obsess over it, or feel the desire to pray over it.)
Goals-based reasoning would work well if we were ants, but humans think using pattern-matching, rather than IF/THEN/ELSE constructs. This is why genuine AI research is getting nowhere, fast - it is very much easier to stick to rules, but rules complex enough to give the same power as fuzzy pattern-based systems would be impractical to utilise.
Philosophy is a better bet, and many philosophical systems have proven very effective, to the point that many "religions" are really a mixture of religion and philsophy. (Zen Buddhism, for example, has very little to do with actual religion.)
Politics are a fiasco. Current political systems are far too inflexible and dogmatic. They make the Roman Catholic Church look like the epitomy of dynamic, flexible, post-modern culture. (A quick example - know any British politicians who have acknowledged the truth of the General Belgrano? Or who confessed to the mistreatment of Peter Wright? Or who have worried about the alleged "Shoot To Kill" policy in Northern Ireland?)
Psychology is a mess. Most psychologists could write as many text books on their own problems as they have studied to become a qualified psychologist in the first place. Psychology attracts seriously dysfunctional, emotionally disturbed individuals. (It also attracts many religious cults, as it's a handy way to track escapees.)
Most of modern psychology is derived from, or inspired by, Sigmund Freud, who's work was more to justify his sexual addiction as "normal" than to study the nature of the mind. I don't have much time for people who need to invent an entire profession to excuse their habits. If they are THAT disturbed by what they're doing, there are easier alternatives - such as stopping whatever it is.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I should post more often.
;-)
Naw.
Thanks for your help.
-Billy
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-- Slashdot sucks.
To me, Faith is a certainty in something ultimately unproveable sufficient to provoke action. Especially in a Christian context, you cannot separate faith from action. I should also observe that everything is unproveable in the ultimate sense, so everything requires faith.
The question, even with your definition, is where one should put faith. You would appear to put faith in rationalism, and in the American Heritage dictionary. I put faith in my experience of interaction with an admittedly invisible entity I call God. God has never failed me -- he has changed my life and my character 180 degrees. I can see the results of his hand - in myself and in Christians I know.
Others, on the other hand, put faith in "Reason". They suppose that they can think their way out of anything, because of this rather nebulous quality of rationality they claim to possess. Like God, it is invisible and ineffable.
I put faith in God because I have seen Him work for the problems I care about. You put your faith elsewhere because it seems to fix the problems you care about. I honestly think that you are mistaken: but time will tell.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Both positive and negative. :)
Religion has sparked some of the longest, bloodiest wars in the history of mankind. Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped. Like the man said though, the problem is the people who are too arrogant to admit that they could be wrong. Why do those people always end up in charge?
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
And I submit that you have herewith exemplified a form of religious faith, in that you believe either that sufficient evidence has been provided to make this sort of statement, or (more likely) you simply believe that no evidence is needed.
The historicity of Jesus of Nazareth is in no more dispute than that of Julius Caesar. Though these days it seems to be a badge of distinction to disbelieve in something dear to the unwashed masses. Maybe that's why we get fellows that profess to disbelieve in William Shakespeare or the Holocaust. Whatever. Thought is free. Who says it has to make sense as well?
How many don't realize that their own beliefs are based on a sort of faith, that is, a faith in scientific results that they haven't personally witnessed or belief in events too far back in time to personally witness. To me, all of us have some degree of faith. Those who deny it haven't fully looked at their own faith.
Bleh!
People can be religeous if they like, doesn't bother me.
Christianity does bother me.
Morality and christianity are irreconcilable. Christianity turns morality into obedience, and makes true virtue impossible.
Christianity make vices out of virtues and virtues of vices. For the christian, pity, obedience, meekness, modesty: these are virtues. This is upside down and sick. Compare to aristotle's conception of virtue through moderation, which depends on no dogmas and no fantasies. How much healthier and human this is!
Christianity is anti life; it contains a latent hatred for reality. The real world is god's kingdom: the fantasy. The material world is actually false. What an absurdity! How does a person come to believe such nonsense? I agree wih Nietzsche that christianity is perhaps the lowest conception of the divine, ever.
Indeed, for many christains life is simply a curse to be endured. No wonder christains hate sex and other natural healthy human instincts.
The christian god is a vampire that sucks the life and strength out of humanity. It makes humans obedient and weak. The Romans did wrong by nailing him up, they should've driven a stake through his stinking black heart.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Although Freeman Dyson's known in geek circles mainly for his scientific pursuits, the story's about an award in the field of religion.
The story's not about science, so why use the Einstein-head "Science" icon?
Whatcha really need is an icon for "Religion." I'd like to propose the yin and yang, since it'll seem more innocuous to antireligious geeks than a cross, a crescent-and-star, a magen David, etc.
As I press "Submit," I have the horrible sinking feeling that this'll get moderated as a troll...
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Think what you like about Dyson and the religion v. science issue, but from what I know of him he deserves the recognition.
He spent the spring semester of 1999 as a visitor at my alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College. I attended a couple sessions of the weekly seminar he participated in. In that arena, and when I saw him (almost every day) in the cafeteria, he always struck me as being contemplative and humble.
I didn't agree with everything I read in his book Imagined Worlds, but you have to tip your cap to him for having the pluck to talk about religion and science openly, something that very few of his peers are wont to do.
That's a bit of an overstatement of Christ's statements on judgement. The oft quoted: "Judge not least ye be judged" is part of the Sermon on the Mount. It is immediately followed by the results of judgement: Mainly that the judgement used by you shall be used to judge you. Next comes the metaphor of the splinter and the mote, directing one to judge oneselve before judging others. This section of the sermon concludes with the statement "Cast not your pearls before swine." Fulfilment of that commandment clearly requires judgement.
An equally valid (more valid IMHO) interpretation of this section is not to avoid judgement, but to:
- Understand the consequences of it.
- Temper any and all judgement with understanding and mercy.
- Not avoid judgement when no other option is availible.
Clearly this is a better descrption of the actions of both Christ and the Aposoles.Finally, any Christian who would follow the example of the aposoles should try to spread the Good News. This in and of itself shouldn't be viewed as a wrong. Where many modern Christians fail in following the hospitality of Christ is not in preaching the word, but in understanding the meaning of 'NO.'
Herb
Again, feel free to sentence me to death if my questions annoy you. I'll come back in 5 minutes anyway. -Sythi
For all the good parts of that movie, the constant harping on religion irritated the shit out of me. I'm sorry, but I don't remember religion being a great part of the moon landing missions, nor do I think rabbies and priests are going to be mission critical in any future Mars landings. I grew up in a very religiously conservative household, so I've seen all the pros and cons. Frankly, people that take the strict scientific view of the universe (Big Bang, Evolution, etc) and still try to bring it in harmony with the Bible make me sick. Even sicker make me religious people that try to reinterpret the Bible in scientific terms.
You take the one or the other. The Bible says the Earth was created in six days, while science has a completely different view on that, period. All that creationist science crap is just that, people that are too repressed to recognize their religion as the crutch it is, and who with each transgression of God's law relive shades of the past where their parents would smack them over the head for blasphemy or other sins. Organized religion is the most successful example of Pavlovian learning ever. Achieving obedience through the induction of guilt.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
When we speak of religion, we usually imply the belief in some sort of Super Being, usually a god. I feel that religion is really a "handle" describing an underlying API in human behaviour, the need to belong and the willingness to follow. I find religion every day, in people that champion vi over emacs, GNOME over KDE, Ford over Chevy, Us against Them, etc etc.
People need to find a cause to champion, it helps them define their boundries of existance. Yes, religion plays a vital role in human existance, and yes, religion is a way of life, not simply a belief. Having said that, religion has little to do with a god, as much as it has to do with personal identity. Even athiests have need to champion a cause, perhaps the absolute denial of a god, or whatever else they find important to their existance.
Science, as with anything, can be turned into a religion; there certantly are opposing camps of thought in many areas of science. Whether or not the players see this as religion, is simply a matter of personal perspective. What it is, in my opinion, is a manifestation of a very real human need to belong to a seemingly well defined group, whatever that may be.
What I also find interesting is the human tendency to believe without fully understanding the belief itself. Very few practitioners of the various religions are true masters of their respective religion. Once people grab onto a belief system, they are reluctant to let go, despite any logical arguments. Humans are much less individual than we would like to think. We are slave to the herd mentality, it's just a matter of what herd you follow.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
There was a great interview with Freeman Dyson on NPR's All Things Considered last night. Well worth the listen.
The dictionary definition of "faith" says: "2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence".
cpeterso
Dyson opines that "In this country, churches are the organizations that hold the community together" but that has never been true anywhere that I have ever lived. Maybe in other, less urban parts of the country, and maybe among a different generation, this is true. Dyson's views are really out of step with most of the country, especially younger people today. Even regular churchgoers in my acquaintance consider their church only one community to which they belong... they do not consider the church to represent the entire community.
"Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped.
Wow... again, sounds like science! "
There's a very fundamental difference between the idea of a religion killing someone, and one of the products of science killing someone: aside from indirect influences (like people contracting HIV because contraceptives are `against God's word'), when a religion kills someone, it's by actually coming out and saying "kill this person/group of people". Aside from a _very_ small lunatic fringe, scientists _never_ say "you should kill this person because science says so". That's the difference - most religions have very little problem (though not so much these days) with condemning people to death on religious grounds, while science as a discipline says nothing about that sort of thing.
Please, don't think of science as a way of living or a code of ethics or anything like that - all that science is is a tool for learning about and describing the world. It's pretty much identical to the thing with guns - "guns don't kill people, people do". Science doesn't kill people, even though it may provide tools that allow people to. Religious leaders and their followers, on the other hand, _do_ kill in the name of their religion, and some religious sects actually require killing in some circumstances. That's what people mean when they talk about religion killing people - it's the conscious decision to take a life, rather than the indirect result someone developing a tool.
himi
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My very own DeCSS mirror.
I have a fairly serious problem with those people who argue that religion and science aren't incompatible. The thing is, pretty much all of those arguments basically reduce to "religion is just a way of living/code of ethics/whatever". And this is fundamentally wrong - religions contain those things, but they also have other baggage that they carry along, and which (arguably) form the core of the religion. I'm talking about things like the vengeful God of the Catholics, who'll send you to hell if you don't stop right now!, or the Jewish God who thinks eating pork is disgusting, or any of a million other almost completely stupid tenets of faith.
;-), the problem with linking science and religion is that religion without faith is no longer religion, and a scientific method which incorporates blind faith in anything is no longer science. It doesn't matter how much of a religion's morality is sensible and workable, the religion is still founded on something that is fundamentally antagonistic to the scientific method. Ethics and morality are orthogonal to scientific enquiry, but faith is not. Science and religion are fundamentally contradictory, and no amount of award money or `mind of god' books will ever change that.
Religions do provide some foundations for a system of morals, by defining some things to be acceptable and some to be unacceptable, and so forth. Those morals provide a framework for thinking about ethics. But at the most fundamental level, religion actually has very little to do with ethics in the sense that people think about them now, and just about everything to do with commandments - "Thou shalt not kill!" might be a foundation for the idea that it's unethical to kill people, but the religious side of it is nothing deeper or more meaningful than your parent's telling you to take you elbows off the table.
Science doesn't do anything like that - in fact, science doesn't tell you to do anything at all. Science is simply a method for learning about and describing the world - there are no commandments of science, no morality, no tenets of faith: all you get is a method for looking at the world, and if you're lucky the results of other people's work. Now, I know that the scientific community (the people who actually do science) is less pure than this, but that community and it's culture is still very strongly informed by the scientific method and it's lack of dogma. Good scientists take considerable delight in considering the possibility that the foundations of their understanding are completely and utterly wrong - this is about as far as it's possible to get from the tenets of faith that religions wave around like banners.
Now, by those descriptions you'd think that the `let's get all cuddly with religion' people are pretty much on the ball - after all, if science is so agnostic, where's the clash? Well, you have to consider the foundations of the two things. Science is founded on questioning the workings of the world - "Does this theory really work? If not, then what kind of theory would work?". Religions, on the other hand, are founded on that faith thing - you're not supposed to question these things, because if you don't believe them on faith, you're obviously not part of this religion. See the problem?
The point where scientists tend to screw up this kind of debate is where they either don't see, or just ignore the bits of whatever religion they're looking at which are dogmatic and completely reliant on faith. It's very easy to do, particularly in the western world today, because most western religions are really watered down and seem to minimise the leaps of faith required for membership. So a scientist looking at the Anglican Church would probably think "this God stuff's not important, let's look at their ethical thinking . . . " thereby missing the bit that makes the difference between an academic discussion group and a religion - faith.
Recapping (hopefully slightly more clearly
/rant
himi
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My very own DeCSS mirror.
If R.S=0 then R=0 or S=0. Now which one is it?
Oh, really? You mean the product does not work this way?
IMHO the whole allegorical vs. literal argument is a little bit silly. To take the Creation bit--which is often the most contested--the words used in the Greek and the Hebrew are not necessarily 'day'; it is more 'period of time.' Thus it could mean billions of years.
People who argue philosophical points based on close readings of translations amuse me. You can only properly argue from the original. In my opinion, of course. But so much of the Christian Scriptures and the faith makes much more sense when it is read in the original. Translators make mistakes, add their own biases and in various ways mess things up.
I'm reminded of the Congressman who said 'If English was good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me.'
This just isn't correct. There are very serious differences.
First, religions generally claim to know the absolute truth. Science does no do this. A belief in the validity of science is not a belief in anything beyond the idea that it's possible to form theories that can explain how or why things work. Any current theory is nothing more than a 'best guess' that will be revised as necessary.
Second, think of science as open source software. Open source software tends to be (or so the theory goes) more secure than closed source software because there are thousands of people who all have access to the source and can spot bugs. You benefit from this even if you have no idea how to program.
Science is the same. You can be reasonably sure that anything accepted as scientific fact is the best available model even if you don't understand it, because thousands of people who do understand it, accept it. And if you put the effort in, you could understand it yourself.
Religion isn't like that. Religion is usually based on unverifiable claims. When religion states something that can actually be disproven, it usually is (e.g. the world is ~6000 years old). You must accept the word of some person or text as truth, and there is no method by which you or any other person can test the validity of it.
Of course, you could go on about how it's possible past conditions were different, but you'd have no real reason to ever think they were if the conclusions drawn from thinking they were the same didn't conflict with your religion. That's not a logically valid reason. It's just as valid to accept that the universe was created five minutes ago and that all memories from any point before that were simply put into our heads at that time. There's no way to prove it, no way to disprove it, it doesn't explain anything, it doesn't allow for the prediction of anything. It's useless, even if it's actually true.
Science starts by assuming nothing (except, as I note above, that it's possible to build models based on observations), and builds from there, making no unfounded assumptions.
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If you want proven and reliable, why not go with Judaism instead. It has those extra three and a half thousand years of field-testing and extensive bug-reports (talmud).
;)
Of course they're both plagued with a monolithic kernel design....
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
This is not the first time a scientist has become famous and then starts spouting about areas of opinion and everyone listens to him, because hey, that's so an so. If you actually go to the Templeton site and read about what he had to say... well I'll show you:
Dyson opposed funding for the now-defunct $8 billion Supercollider atom smasher and has consistently spoken out against "big science" projects whose costs are out of proportion to their scientific value. In particular, he opposes the International Space Station, which he describes as a welfare program for the middle class.
...
he has chastised science for concentrating too much technology in "making toys for the rich" -- cellular phones, ever-smaller laptop computers, and the like -- rather than helping to spread knowledge, well-being, and wealth around the world so that one day "every Egyptian village can be as wealthy as Princeton."
This "long-range moral and social fallout of today's scientific miracles" which fail "to produce benefits for the poor in recent decades is due to two factors working in combination," he wrote in Imagined Worlds. "The pure scientists have become more detached from the mundane needs of humanity, and the applied scientists have become more attached to immediate profitability." New medical technologies, he adds, "too attractive to forbid and too expensive to be made generally available, will exacerbate the inequalities that now exist within and between societies."
I mean come on. Really. And this isn't the first scientist whose ideas have been held up because he is a famous scientist in some other completely different field.
Incidentally, I don't think most of the science vs. religioun posts on here don't really apply to what Dyson is getting at here.
You have a very narrow definition of reason, and an equally narrow definition of faith. What is reasonable to someone is largely a function of that person's presupposition. And what someone has faith in is not necessarily without reason.
Either one supposes that their is a God or one does not. There is not a particularly good evidential reason for believing either. So, whether one believes in God or not is largely a matter of what you call "faith" in either case.
If on believes in God, then it might be reasonable to believe also in miracles. Otherwise, believing in miracles would be quite unreasonable. Both conclusions rely on reason, but they are based on different presuppositions. Just because something can't be subjected to repeatable experimentation does not mean that there is no reason to believe it.
If you have a reasonable argument for believing in something (as in: there it is, I can see/touch/hear it), you don't require any faith.
Perhaps, but I doubt that you have ever seen/touched/heard the origin of life. Yet you probably believe that there was one. Perhaps the sum of your reason for believing this is the fact that there is life now, and the (perfectly reasonable) assumption that there must have been a time when there was no life. The logical conclusion is of course that, somewhere in between, something happened that marked the beginning of life as we know it. So what was that something? If you believe in God, then God could be that something. If you don't believe in God, then it must be something else; maybe it was random molecular recombination, or another thing. You're arguing that one requires faith while the other does not. Which is likely to be true is a matter of opinion and presupposition, not science, and not reason.
And if you rely on faith to believe in something, it is only because you have no good reason (I can't see/touch/hear/measure/understand it, but the bible tells me so).
I'm not going to belabor my argument. But I find it interesting that you included understanding in this second list. Do you perhaps reason that if you can't understand something that someone else believes, then they must also have no understanding of it?
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"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
Where are these laws?? Eh? Chapter and verse, buddy. I dare you. I do not think that knocking on doors is a very good way to convert people at all. But you invite criticism and laughter when you allege that Christ forbade his followers to win other people to Christianity. What did they do after the ascension but preach everywhere they went?
Allow me a quotation or two, you open minded people, you. Jesus Christ in fact condemned all other religions when he said "I am the way, the truth, and the light, and no man comes to the Father but by me." "Many shall say to me in that day, Lord, Lord...and I will say to them, I never knew you: depart from me, you workers of iniquity."
Anybody with a greek lexicon and a dictionary can figure this out. The greeks have three words relating to judgment, english just has one, the word "judge". In one place it says, "judge not!" in another place it says "Judge righteous judgment!"
In that ubiquitous verse (people know nothing about Christianity but they invariably know this verse) "Judge not" refers to pre-judging a person, passing sentence on his/her character. When a Christian witnesses to another person, he is not condemning them. That's a conclusion you leap to on your own. Consider the following example: your house is burning. I'm walking by and notice this. I'm a little nervous about interrupting your leisure time to tell you, but hey, your house is burning. "What?? Are you saying my house isn't good enough? You just think your house is better than mine. 'Judge not!' That's what I say mister, leave me alone."
-JD
Hmm...none of those have anything to do with witnessing. You are assuming that when a Christian witnesses, his primary purpose is always only to condemn someone's way of life. Witnessing has nothing to do with telling a person to shape his life up and everything to do with saving his soul. Every time I have seen a person become a Christian, their life changes for the better without any winking and hinting from anyone. Also, you are right that the judgment belongs to God, but that judgment isn't some holy mystery. He put it in the Bible so evryone would know.
"Couple that with the parable of the tax collector, and you see that your activities are not "sins" in the eyes of the Christian God, but your ATTITUDE. THAT is what the Bible is all about."
Ah, well, you're singing a different tune now. Before you were saying that the act of witnessing was a violation of a dozen commands of Christ. Now you say it's their attitude that matters, which goes without saying.
-JD
Does anyone remember a Babylon 5 episode called "Gethsemene" or somesuch? The central character was a serial killer that had been subjected to the 24th century's ultimate punishment; mindwipe and a new personality wired in, and committed to a monastery to spend his life bringing service to the community. He's a character who comes across as a nice guy, evoking honest sympathy when forcibly brought up to face his past by a vengeful relatives of his victims who hires a telepath to revive ghosts of his memories. Despite Sheridan's efforts the vengeance seeksers kill the monk. At the closing scene, Sheridan is introduced to the monk's newest brother, the killer from the last scene who's been tried, convicted, and sentenced, now also a monk earnestly working to serve.
The episode brought up questions of punishment and forgiveness which aren't easily answered. There are religions, including Christianity which don't close the possibility of forgiveness to ANYONE, given honest and sincere repentence.
There are lots of things and issues which go beyond the model of scientific logic. When it comes to the thorny issues of human cloning and designer genes? How are you going to view the "products" of these new technologies? The cloning of the sheep Dolly involved some 300 or more "failures". What are our responsiblities to the "failures" incurred when we try this with people?
Religion and science are tools in our individual searches for truth. But the truths we discover will reflect the effort we put into doing so. Sunday churches, Saturday temples, Discover magazine, serve those who aren't able or willing to make that effort and we should place them in proper context when judging.
The following post is controversial, but it is neither flamebait or troll. Further, it is entirely on topic.
>Look guys: being religious (including, specifically, Christian) does not mean checking
>your brain at the door.
I'm sorry, but I'll have to disagree here, at least regarding Christianity. I will quote you as evidence:
>It means (broadly speaking) acceptance of...
>Christ as the risen savior.
So a person who has NOT checked his or her brain at the door accepts that blood sacrifice was required to absolve him or her of something called _sins,_ and this choice is logical and sane? We have no reason to believe that a resurrection of any kind has ever taken place, or even in the historicity of this Christ, but we willing suspend our disbelief to make ourselves feel better? We choose to believe in a God who is so barbaric and impotent that His best trick is punishing beings whom He created for a crime that He staged?
Catholics believe that they are literally consuming the blood and flesh of this Christ in a mystery they name transubstantiation, but which the rest of the world would consider proxy cannibalism. And, protests from protestants aside (pun intended), Catholics ARE Christians. And they didn't check their brains at the door? Other Christians believe that unless you are immersed in water that you end up being tortured eternally, and these Christians didn't check their brains at the door? What about the Christians who believe that loving someone of the same gender is a heinous evil, and they didn't check their brains at the door, either? Every ridiculous belief can demand respect once it is labeled a _religious_ belief, regardless of the fact that most religions (Christianity especially) exist largely due to FUD much worse than any Microsoft has ever fostered.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
An insightful man who represents the 10% of us who see the forces of the cosmos as a combination of religion and science. Watch the matrix again, religion plays an important role in the beauty that is technology and science. From Taoism to Christianity, each belief seeks to speak of the marvel of life. For an interesting read pick up Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson and Genius by James Gleik.
It is a well known fact that all scientists proclaim themselves as atheists(bad spelling I know), but Freeman Dyson is a cut above the rest. True genius is not about conformity but about individuality. Remember that when its easy to incur that religion should take a backseat to technology.
The Ex Electrical Engineer
Please try not to be so snotty. You're giving atheists a bad rep.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
How many don't realize that their own beliefs are based on a sort of faith, that is, a faith in scientific results that they haven't personally witnessed or belief in events too far back in time to personally witness. To me, all of us have some degree of faith. Those who deny it haven't fully looked at their own faith.
Everything has a proof of some sort. Each and every discovery if you are verbose enough is can become extremely well documented. Take for example a discovery of various extrasolar planetoids. Various laws of gravitation that can be mathmetically proven influence these happenings. The math involved can also be proven right down the the smallest things. There are given things however these are not "faith".
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Don't forget that without religious groundwork, a lot of what we take for granted today would be without basis.
:)
I think you are being rather far reaching with a statement like that.
You have to look at what people have been able to think about. People like Voltaire wrote various works that were able to coutner the concept of letting everyting that was ever done be attributed to an unseen source and for said source to be accepted.
Later the concept of free will and other things have essentially countered the religious stance in many ways. Most of our current system is based on these philosophies not on current religious memes.
The principles of most modern humanities can find allegiance to a lot of the fundamental principles of most of the modern religion bodies that have dominated the world for the past few thousand years. Without these fundamental principles, we may not have come so far.
Yes and no. Essentially people developed religions and other systems because they were unable to use logic to solve any of their current set of problems (why did my wife die so suddently, my corps are doing poorly this year, etc). When people couldn't figure things out they developed a method of giving their problems a face. Bam religion was born.
Definitely, you must account for the destructive elements in religious movements over the years, but you cannot honestly do this without also asessing the positives.
Logically because for something to be defined as "good" something also has to correspondingly has to be "wrong" or "evil"
And I believe that this is one of the foundations for Dyson having been awarded this prize - that he was willing and able intellectually and morally to look at the issue of religion in modern life and present an honest view that brings value to those that read it.
How does allowing for more primal and base interpretations of various events we cannot currently explain give your life any value? That's about like talking about the tooth fairy, the boogyman, or saying that teddy will protect you. This really does nothing but give you warm fizzies.
Too often, various world religions are lambasted for the harm they have caused (holy wars, etc), unfairly and with shadowed intent...
And what exactly is "shadowed intent". It almost seems like someone is looking for the Anti-Christ
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Even if Bob didn't exist,Stang would have created him.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You're in luck. According to the rules laid down by Aristotle and expanded throughout the years, it is widely known that proving a negative is not possible. Prove that elephants do not exist. You can't do it, even if there are no elephants. The burden on proof is on the OTHER side, the people who claim that elephants or God DOES exist. The closest anyone has come was Kierkegaard I think, he just said you have to take a leap of faith and believe it. If you read his argument, however, you will realize that it takes a leap of faith to accept his reasoning! His reasoning is that since God is beyond the human capacity of reason to figure him out, you have to take a leap of faith. Well, think about it, how do you know that your reason is limited? The only way you can believe that there are things that exist that your mind simply cannot grasp is by taking a leap of faith!
Esperandi
Interestingly, the bible seems to contrast faith with fear, not with reason. There are many accounts in the bible of those who experience God in some profound way. In many cases, their reaction is to be really afraid. Good examples is in Mark 5 where Jesus performs miracles to save people from fearful situations. Many of those involved seem more afraid (of Jesus) after this than before, despite his advice "not to fear, but to believe". Interesting.. many non-believing friends of mine have said that they could rationally believe in the christian God if he would show himself to them. But not everyone written about in the bible seems to behaves rationally in the presence of God. Ian
That's funny...that is my problem with people who are anti-religion. All those people who think they're so important, smart, possessed with an "infinitely-meta"-understanding of the human condition, that they need to win me over to their position of rejecting religion.
As someone with a strong scientific bent, I understand many of their concerns about blindly adopting any set of religious beliefs.
But as someone with a strong moral bent, I also understand many of the concerns of the religious about the likely realities of any government or society that officially eschews religious beliefs of any kind.
After all, the most effective, concentrated killings of millions of peoples in this century alone have generally been perpetrated by those professing atheist beliefs against those they perceived to hold dangerously religious beliefs. "Religion is poison", and all. (Yes, I know that was -- presumably -- a fictional quote, from "Seven Years in Tibet", but it certainly sums up -- along with the corresponding actions of the Chinese government -- the attitude I see many atheist/non-religious people in the "free world" demonstrate.)
So, please, the next time an obnoxious, clueless "know-it-all" tries to ridicule your beliefs, impose his belief system on you, etc., and happens to be using religion to do it...
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
For Christ's sake, look at any atheist! You'll never meet a single one that doesn't:
- rape children
- shoplift
- eat the dead
- have pre-marital homosexual sodomy
- pray to Satan
(Once in a while will you find an atheist that hasn't been caught doing one or all of the above... YET. But can KNOW that he DOES. He has on reason not to.)As opposed to all those physicsts who are still doing work, unaware of the existence of quantum mechanics? For the record, "quantum physicist" is a silly, psuedo-science fiction sounding term. Nobody in physics calls themselves a "quantum physicist" any more than anybody would call themselves a "classical physicsist."
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* daring code hacker by night *
http://www.silent-tristero.com
One thing common to all religions is the inclusion of a set of laws which must be obeyed or a penalty will apply.
Religion was once the only method of convincing people to take responsibility for their actions, and to function as a member of society. If someone has the threat of eternal damnation over their head, they'll think twice before acting in a manner that would be detrimental to society.
Religion is not the power it once was, in western society at least, so we have had to come up with new ways to deal with 'problematic citizens', namely the court system. This presents a much more immediate threat than the possibility of hell, and so is a more effective weapon - the people who defy religious teachings are not going to care what the zealots think anyway.
So, on to my point. I agree (in principle) with the ten commandments, however I do believe that the more intelligent among us do not need to be told to follow them.
The principle of all the major religions I am familiar with is the same - to allow society to function in an orderly and safe manner. This is an admirable goal, and indeed one which has brought modern civilisation to where it is today.
However, there are far too many people who consider their laws to be the 'best', and will kill, like uncivilised savages, to prove it. Unfortunately, the ability to kill has escalated to catastrophic levels in the past few years - suddenly even traditionally non threatening nations such as Pakistan have obtained nuclear capabilities. My only conclusion is that religion has gone too far - what once may have been necessary for survival now threatens civilisation's very existence.
tsf.
...then is it safe to say that the mounds full of millions of termites are religous as well? Do wasp nests and beehives also worship their own deity?
But seriously, yes, religion does hold the community together. Sure. I can agree that it has done so for a very long time. But I can only agree to that because of the fact thats its difficult as a mofo to find an entirely athiest community.
And in the meantime, trying to be an athiest elsewhere sometimes results in that well-bonded community (held together by religion!) uniting against you, persecuting you, praying for you, et cetera.
Athiesm is not purely science. It doesnt take a genius to realize that science provides no moral code. That is why we have logic. As humans have the ability to think for themselves, we are able to discern what is the best way for us to survive and have as high quality of life as possible. A community forged on logic, common sense, and friendship can be every bit as effective and fulfilling as one "held together" by religion.
Or something like that.
Vorro
---------------------------
A wise man speaks because he has something to say.
A foolish man speaks because he has to say something.
____________________________
What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
"Make me one with everything."
OTOH, I must argue that the process is a good one, if an old one. I would argue that philosophy is a process more than a field of study. Finding the intelligent posts, considering them, arguing them and learning from them is one of the best uses of Slashdot. That there's not much original to it (including this post) doesn't matter much to me.
Anyway, I guess Ad-Banner-Revenue is a good thing, since it funds the site.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
You certainly can't investigate all of them. Or even all the ones which create the conceptual framework by which you're evaluating the experiment you're presently performing. There are quite a lot of them.
With religion, you're still stuck with "the Bible tells me so, and it feels right, so it must be true."
Oh, no you aren't. Don't be silly. Maybe with certain totally unphilosophical branches of Christianity. That this is not the case with most religions is pretty self-evident.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
How many of your scientific beliefs have you personally empirically verified? And how many of them have you gotten from books? Did On the Origin of Species tell you so?
And that's just scratching the surface of the problems with science and knowledge.
But I really think this argument is in danger of becoming a matter of semantics. How do you define faith, and how do you define reason? Those are the real questions which must be answered before you can make meaningful statements about them, or their relationship.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Christianity (ie, JC himself, direct quote) claims "No-one can come to the Father [ie, God] except through me."
Other religions (eg, Islam) quote JC as a Prophet, but not the Son of God.
Either this JC saying is correct or it isn't. There is no chance for them to be equally correct. JC must be
It has been said that "Ignorance is bliss". That saying is wrong.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
However, please allow me these two warnings before I begin: /.ers are familiar with.
1) To fanatics on both sides of the fence, read the whole darn thing before starting to flame
2) I picked up the christian religion as the default one for this text, since I believe it is the one that most
On religion and belief
It takes more than belief (read: faith) in the existance of God to make someone religious. That sole belief makes that person just that, a believer (as in "I believe that God exist"). A religion implies faith, a doctrine and a moral code of some kind (in our case, conformity in faith and life to the precepts inculcated in the Bible, respecting the conduct of life and duty toward God and man). The same will thus also apply to someone proclaming to be an atheist. This only informs us that this particular individual does not believe in God (or that he/she believe that God does not exist, as an important diffence has to be made here, though popular usage has ignored the latter) and only that. It does not imply the acceptance of any particular moral code, which is then left for that person to define (which is where --close your eyes kids, this may corrup your soul-- words like "humanism" may start to appear =).
With that in mind, lets move on to the next point I wanted to bring out.
Science is NOT a religion
Some posters stated that science was a religion, while replying to arguments from people making a clear distinction between these two (as one user so eleganlty puts it: "First, religion and science are two utterly unconnected fields. In mathematical terms, R.S=0" =)
What is their basis for such a claim?
In a word: faith. Before aguring against that statement, I need to say a few words about a very popular game called "the redefinition game". I could define "cat" as "something with four tires and a wheel", but by doing so I would make that term lose it's true meaning. The same thing apply in our case to "faith". If basic ideas such as, for example, the assumptions we make to make some sort of sense out of the sensory data we experience are called "acts of faith", then almost everything we know must be said to be based on acts of faith, and the term loses its meaning. When someone accept the Big Bang theory, for example, they don't do it "based on a sort of faith [...] in scientific results that they haven't personally witnessed or belief in events too far back in time to personally witness", they do it because that theory is the fruit of something called the scientific method. That method has proven itself, there is no need to have "faith" in it. Obviously, the results may be erronous, and no one ever claimed that theory couldn't be proven wrong (else it wouldn't be science). It is simply the best explanation we have for it yet. No faith is required here.
Religion, on the other hand, make the statements "God exist" and "The Bible is His words". Then go on from there. It is for those two firsts statements that faith is required. The evidence supporting the Big Bang Theory is freely available to anyone who takes the trouble to gatter it or read up on it. Anyone can study that evidence and examine the reasoning being the theory. But if there is a belief that is based solely on faith, one can't examine those reasons.
As an side note, most religions offer a cosmology and a biology, a theory of life, a theory of origins, and reasons for existence. In doing so, they demonstrate that religion is, in a sense, science, but it's just bad science. Which brings us to my next point.
Religion without science & science without religion? Religion without science? Let me be blunt: simply plain stupid. Trying to pretend things don't exist just because they don't fit it a particular vision of the world just doesn't cut it. The worst of these being religious pseudo-science.
Science without religion? Why not? But science without morals/ethics? No, I think not. That can very well come from a religious persective, but it doesn't have to.
"Religion has a much more important role in human destiny than science"
I'll try to rephrase this statement, to make the intentions of Dyson clearer. When put in context, this sentence shows that it is his opinion that religion, not science, should play a leading role in shapping human destiny.
Now, substitute "religion" for "ethics" and I'll definitively agree with him. That moral and ethical infrastructure can be religiously-grounded, but once again, it doesn't have to be. While it is science that opens us the doors of the future, it is us who must decide what to do with those discoveries and ultimatly shape that future, and not simply let it go ahead blindy. With things such as cloning and genetic engineering looming on the horizon, we must make our choice on how to use those technologies.
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
Doh, of course religion has a bigger impact. That's because of religious fanatics who push their outlandish ideas onto everyone in sight, and this practice has been going on worldwide for millennia.
When was the last time you were visited by a door-to-door astrophysicist insisting that you take a copy of his papers and attend some lectures so that you could be converted to his view of cosmology?
;)
Then, turn to Matthew, and one of Jesus' other semons.
"What goes into a man's mouth does not make him unclean... ...What comes out of a man's mouth can make him unclean. For what comes out of a man's mouth comes out of his heart."
These two tell the same thing -- you have NO right to tell another that what they eat or do, or how they live, is "unclean". That judgement belongs to God, not man.
Couple that with the parable of the tax collector, and you see that your activities are not "sins" in the eyes of the Christian God, but your ATTITUDE. THAT is what the Bible is all about.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
At some level of my thought, I can sense a solution. For example, let me take an assumption that you make and pick on it. You say:
Here, you assume that "metaphorical" and 'false' are equivalent. It is perfectly permissible, at least to me, to find great truth in something that is metaphorical. Did you ever see that Star Trek TNG (entitled 'Darmok') episode where they ran into a race that spoke in metaphor? If not, it is highly recommended reading.There are other ways to communicate truth than the propositional. Now, I would hesitate to say that all of Genesis is metaphorical: but if it is, I don't think we've lost much. How relevant are the precise details of how God created the universe to our day to day life? Answer is they're not. The story, which presents a metaphor for the fall of man from God's perfect creation, is still a valid source of truth.
An awful lot of philosophy and religion has been created using unabashed fiction (from Plato to Boethius to the Bhagvad Gita to Camus) and the thought has not lost any validity in the process. Why, with the Bible, and only with the Bible, do we assume that if it's propositional assertions are not accepted, we must reject the whole?
Of course, this raises other problems. How do we decide what is metaphor and what is not? For example, I am quite convinced that the Resurrection of Christ was not a metaphor. But upon what basis can I determine that it was not, and hold that Genesis is?
Can I have my cake and eat it to?
For the record: I'm not prepared to write Genesis off as metaphorical at this time. I give that issue a big "I don't know" and leave it there.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Look: being a Christian is not about getting better for your own sake (although we should all strive to be good). It is about joining the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God is not quite like the "army of God" you mention. Simply, it is an already achieved reality of all things that place themselves under God's controlled. And it is growing. I believe that it will eventually grow to subsume almost all creation -- at which time Jesus will return.
And it is worth joining because it is good and right -- and no other reason.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
> Don't forget that without religious groundwork, a lot of what we take for granted today would be without basis.
The principles of most modern humanities can find allegiance to a lot of the fundamental principles of most of the modern religion bodies that have dominated the world for the past few thousand years. Without these fundamental principles, we may not have come so far.
I can't imagine what you're talking about. My best guess is that your preacher neglected to tell you how much of the supposedly Christian value system actually predates Christianity by centuries, if not millenia.
> Too often, various world religions are lambasted for the harm they have caused (holy wars, etc), unfairly
Sorry, but it's the One True Way mentality of world religions that causes those wars (along with witch hunts, judicial murders, and imprisonment of pot smokers). It's hardly unfair to lambast a system for the effects arising directly from its fundamental principles.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The first thing is that IMHO religion is not a scheme for making anyone a better person. It is a set of statements of fact--true or false, but statements nonetheless. Following the advice of these statements may or may not help improve one's life, much like following the advice of the statement 'Don't drink the bleach' tends to improve one's lot, but that is not the primary point.
Concerning your second point--would a good nonbeliever still be allowed into Heaven--there's a lot of groundwork I have to do to answer that. Let me state that I do not believe in the common 'cloud and harp' view of Heaven. Rather, I believe that Heaven is being in the presence of God and enjoying it. I believe that Hell is being in the presence of God and hating it.
One's actions in life determine one's personality. After death, this personality determines whether one enjoys God's presence or loathes it. Life is the Tuesday-Thursday practice; the Afterlife is the game on Saturday. God does not damn us; we damn ourselves. He loves us, but He has given us the freedom to not love Him. It's our choice.
Sin is another topic of contention. There are two important things to bear in mind. The first is aptly illustrated by the Greek word for sin. Translated literally, it means 'missing the mark.' Sin is not so much the active doing of something worng (although it is), but the failure to be the best possible. It's like aiming at a bullseye and missing. But you don't quit shoting when you miss: you continue, and get better. No-one is a perfect shot. But with practice we can all be decent. That's part of how sin should be perceived. You fall short of the glory of God, you pick yourself up and try again. You do a little better, but still not perfect. You try again.
The second part has to do with the 'wages of sin.' What are the stages of forgiveness and redemption--for anything, secular or religious? Well, first one must be sorry and ask forgiveness. God has already forgiven us for our sins. But we cannot stop with being forgiven. If I break your window and you forgive me, I still need to fix your window. But that price has already been paid on the Cross. So God has already done two things for us. There is a third though: to repent. The word 'repent' comes from the Latin for 'rethink.' Repentance means rethinking your life. To use the earlier broken window example, maybe you should stop playing baseball near glass buildings. The spiritual life is like that as well. We need to rise above our failings, but with the knowledge that we cannot completely conquer them in this life.
And the reason for worshipping God? Well, partly out of thankfulness. Worship should not be focused on us (this is one of my big problems with many 'worship services'--they are entertainment for an audience); worship should be focused on God, out of gratitude. Partly we worship to learn what to do in Heaven. We're going to spend eternity in God's presence; might as well learn how to behave now.
Those are my opinions, anyway. I hope that I addressed some of your concerns. If you have more you may email me (remove the no-spams).
Hmm...the Wu Li Dancers seem to know a lot. The rest of us know that the true love of Wu Li dancers is coming up with witty truisms.
Science and reason are built on faith. Not faith in a remote intelligence that somehow orders everything, but faith that the laws and order that we observe on this small planet also apply over all time and all space. You have not been to IO to personally observe the volcano's. You have faith that the instruments that returned photographs's were not doctored. Saying that you only believe what you can see/touch/hear/measure/understand means that you don't belive in science in a field where you are not an expert. We believe in science because it is consistent and open to change. As Karl Popper has said, things can only really be scientifically true if they could also be false with different data, but that is not the reality of most work in science. You don't see much published that says some experiment didn't prove our hyposthesis. But more great science has come of experiments that failed than those that just confirmed prevailing wisdom (Michelson-Morley, Darwin's finches etc.)
Science has faith in Occam's Razor, science has faith in the laws of thermodynamics, science has faith that mathematics can adequately describe physical phenomena.
The difference between scientific faith and relgious faith is that science is willing to change its dogma if it finds a counter example, but most religions will deny the counter example if it disagrees with dogma. But even religions gradually change belief over time, witness the Catholic churces acceptance of evolution.
Did he read a story to his shell theory before tucking it into bed?
"Good night F = (GMm/2R)(1/2r^2)[sqrt(R^2-r^2+2ru)-(r^2-R^2)/sqrt( R^2- r^2+2ru)]_{r-R}^{r+R} "
_________________________
I know this is a sound bite, I would love to see the context within which this comment was made but since I don't have that info, I'll knee jerk respond:
Perhaps Freeman dosen't think that his work has had much impact, perhaps he believes that physics has not, and will not have much impact on human destiny.
How could he make such a shortsighted statement? First, physics is the ground rules for biology via chemistry. Biology is the study of all life and therefore is all impt for for human destiny. I will agree that religion has had a much greater impact on human life thus far but 100,000 years from now, Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) will have played a determing role in human destiny. It has/will provide the means to anhialate(sp?) ourseves, pollute our planet beyond habitability, or whether we manage to colonize human life beyond this planet before destruction. Religion itself dosen't help much here as it tends to promote wars through belief systems that cannot accept views that violate said religious dogma and thus tends to promote destruction.
OTOH Science itself is a religion, a belief system that changes according to what can be reproducibly demonstrated through experiment. A religion that rapidly adapts to current knowlege and one that holds the keys to the both the methods of destruction and the salvation of our species. Perhaps this is what he meant in that quote. Science is religion?!
no sig.
I'd use this space to bash religion, but I just don't feel like it. I simply don't agree with the notion of any type of religion. I do like what religion has done for us as a species in some ways. It has brought order in the world and has set up a set of morals. I see past this and I see the real world. I see no god, I see no after life, I see no heaven, I see no hell. Life is NOW. If you don't try and enjoy what we have now, you won't ever get a chane to enjoy it ever again. I think it's interesting that a quantum physicyst won a $940,000 prize for progress in religion. It doesn't mean much to me. Religion will eventually fade into the background and people will se what is really out there. Nothing. I do, and will continue to let people worship whatever they want as long as they leave me alone and let me be atheist. Oh well. Back to my little world.
- Stop praying for someone to save you, and save yourself.-
KMFDM
- Think for yourself, question authority.-
Don't forget that without religious groundwork, a lot of what we take for granted today would be without basis.
The principles of most modern humanities can find allegiance to a lot of the fundamental principles of most of the modern religion bodies that have dominated the world for the past few thousand years. Without these fundamental principles, we may not have come so far.
Definitely, you must account for the destructive elements in religious movements over the years, but you cannot honestly do this without also asessing the positives.
And I believe that this is one of the foundations for Dyson having been awarded this prize - that he was willing and able intellectually and morally to look at the issue of religion in modern life and present an honest view that brings value to those that read it.
Too often, various world religions are lambasted for the harm they have caused (holy wars, etc), unfairly and with shadowed intent...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Secondly, religion is not about "simplistic beliefs", no matter what anyone says. There are many millions of religions in existance, ranging from a basic faith that it's safe to walk out the door without being struck by a meteorite, through to more advanced systems, such as Christianity, Buddhism, the Celtic Wyrd system, etc.
(Yes, you can mathematically prove that the odds are very small that you will be struck by a meteorite, but unless you do the maths and carry out the observations EACH TIME, you're still relying on faith that your numbers are valid for that time. And faith is the foundation of all religion.)
Thirdly, yes, religion WILL have a bigger impact on the future. Science has no power in the moral and ethical realms. It may never have. It was never built to. But morals and ethics ARE essential for a society to function. Without those, you have no laws, you have no structure, you have nothing. We'd all wind up back in the Stone Age, pronto, with no way out, because with nothing to build on, there'd be no means of progressing.
Lastly, ANY "Christian" who knocks on the door to "convert" you has broken a dozen laws laid down by Christ, not least of which is the commandment to tolerate others and not judge them. Christians are STRICTLY forbidden from judging or condemning others, other views and other ways of life. If those religious sects involved -lived- the life they claim to profess, everyone would be a great deal happier. And the non-Christians would greatly profit from learning that commandment, too.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Er, Thomas Huxley, a "obnoxious pseudo-scientist" -- hardly -- he was probably the most important 19th century biologist next to Darwin himself. And it is a quite recent development that it was okay for religious people to consider the Bible merely allegorical rather than divine truth. There really was a conflict between science and religion. Scientists were persecuted and even in some cases executed by religious officials.
As for cults, the only objective difference between them and religions is size. Consider: in the 19th century Mormonism was considered a cult by most Americans, but now that it is more popular it is considered a religion. Heck, in Roman times, normal Christianity was considered to be a cult.
Let me explain why I do not follow/practice any religion but agree with a good chunk of what you are saying. From experience, many people share this view to some degree.
:)
First of all, let me make it clear that I am not opposed to the following of religious beliefs and I do not hold it against people when they say they are. I hold things against people when they are bull-headed and just plain assholes about their beliefs. You do not sound like that type of person.
You are correct that there are many strawmen in the science vs. religion debate. You are correct that signing up for a religion (Christianity) is not necessarily voluteering for the "Army of Jesus". You are also correct that there are many thought provoking theological, philosophical and scientific books written from a Christian point of view, that following a religion has you accepting a set of principles and devoting your life to them.
I grew up a Lutheran, going to church, getting confirmed - the whole bit. I was kind of forced into it and resented it because of that. However, maturity and reflection made me forgive my grandmother/parents for that (there's a complicated story I'll avoid here). I also believe that the morals instilled in me from my church-going youth are very good things. I think they are fundamentally sound beliefs that transcend most different types of religions and is something most humans tend to follow (don't kill, steal, hurt others, be malicious, take your neighbour's wife, etc.).
From what I got (and keep getting is that), following the teachings of Jesus Christ (or whomever is the spokesperson for the religion) will enhance your life. In this mix is the notion that worshiping a higher entity that created all the universe is needed. To me, this feels extremely "tacked on". I get great pleasure in helping others and being just-all-round nice to people. I really fail to see how belief in a higher being will make it any better.
If there is no God, per se, the point of worship is moot. It doesn't matter if you have faith in whether or not he exists - you won't be going to His Kingdom, as there is not one. If there is a God, then will I go to Hell if I am a general all round good person but just didn't believe in Him? If belief in God is required for enterance into His Kingdom, that sounds awfully self-righteous.
Perhaps this is the faith thing I'm supposed to have for God. Regardless, I still find this egotisical. Am I just very well grounded and happy with myself, not needing guidance from belief that there is something out there far more powerful than I could ever hope to be that can help, nay, is needed by me to feel better? I don't know - it would take a lifetime to answer a question like that. I've always noticed that for those who don't wish to think, a higher entity makes things easier to explain. For those who want to discover the workings of complex things outside our current knowledge, belief in a God makes it seem more attainable, that is, God can inspire and perhaps guide.
Quite frankly, I don't need that kind of inspiration or guidance. I do quite well with the belief in myself (not that religious people don't belive in themselves, just probably not as much as I do).
That's probably the real irony here - God is what you make of Him... and He's having a good laugh about it
Ok, first of all, in Islam you can have 4 wives, in Christianity you can only have one. Islam beats Christianity.
Homer's Greek is better than God's, but it's not God's first language. Hades isn't as bad as Hell, but it's more inevitable. Tough call. I'm going to give the nod to Christianity, because I'd rather piss off Zeus than Jehovah.
John Travolta is a Scientologist. Greek Mythology is better than Scientology.
There. You just can't take the shallow view of these things.
Further, they conflict with each other, so no, they 'cant all just be friends'
Greek Mythology conflicts with Scientology? Damn. I wonder if you can be a Unitarian Druid?
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Here we go again. Based on past stories, here's my breakdown of how the commentary will go:
.sig....
30% -- Comment threads defending religion's place in society, ranging from clever, well-spoken, impassioned defenses of spirituality and religion as necessary to a well-balanced life, on down through "GOD LOVS ME AND SIENTIST SINERS WILL GO TO HELL!" Interesting subflavors include "Some of the most reknowned scientists in history were religious," and "Scientific method isn't the only way to gain knowledge."
35% -- Comment threads alleging that any belief system based in faith is worthless because there's no empirical repeatability, ranging from graduate-level epistomological essays down through "SIENCE MAKES SENSE RILIGION DOSNT." Interesting subflavors include the issue that science is typically learned from elders with no empirical repeatability on the part of the learner and is therefore also based in faith, and oh-yeah?-yeah exchanges about the provability of (math|god|intelligence|grits)
15% -- Pot-calling-kettle-black posts, where someone makes an allegation about science or religion that's also true of the other. Typically starts with history of deaths, progresses through history of art, stalls out somewhere about the time the invention of Tang is being compared to televangelists.
10% -- Topical trolls. "Jesus was an idiot and so are you." "Scientists are all atheists." "Freeman Dyson naked and petrified."
5% -- Typical trolls. "First post." "Grits." Stupid repressed-homosexual Katz/Columbine stories.
3% -- Meta-posts. Commentary on the nature of the story. Ponderings about the makeup of Slashdot's readership. This post.
1% -- Posts that crept in from other threads. Slashdot bug? Posters losing track of multiple browser windows? It's a mystery. In any case, posts about Paying Bills Online, Chili!Soft, and whatever story gets posted next.
1% -- People karma whoring by posting mirror links, pasted text from the wire story, and other bloat that inexplicably keeps getting moderated up as 'informative.' See my
Predictions for final count of comments: 500-600.
Predictions for final count of comments that have anything new or interesting to say (and no, this one doesn't make that count): 5.
In any case, this whole story should be moderated (-1, Known-Controversial Ad-Banner-Revenue-Generation Flamebait).
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The net effect is that a whole lot of straw men have set up and both sides have a great time knocking them down. For more (from an unabashedly religious perspective) see http://www.cornerstonemag .com/features/iss112/baloney.htm.
Look guys: being religious (including, specifically, Christian) does not mean checking your brain at the door. And it never has. It means (broadly speaking) acceptance of a setup of principles, a world view, and a decision to devote your life to it. In Christianity, this is expressed by (to oversimplify) the Ten Commandments, Christ as the risen savior, and (of course) the decision to act on this information -- we call that decision faith.
It also doesn't mean (in most cases) that you are signing up for some militant crusade -- whatever Pat Robertson or the Pope would have you believe. You still have the one natural right God gave you: self-determination as a free moral agent. FWIW, I regard most "cults" (e.g. the Heavens Gate bit) as more a psychological experiment than a religious one.
Also, let me comment that anyone who thinks religion, esp. Christianity, is for the simple minded should read Karl Barth or George Fox sometime (to pick a couple of examples among many).
Also, if you're interested, check out Geeks for Christ. We're still in a fledgeling state, but one of the purposes of the site is precisely to be open to intelligent discussion of Christianity.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
I first read this book, by Gary Zukav, quite a few years ago. A quote:
"The Wu Li Masters know that 'science' and 'religion' are only dances, and that those who follow them are dancers. The dancers may claim to follow 'truth' or claim to seek 'reality', but the Wu Li Masters know better. They know that the true love of all dancers is dancing."