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Humans Hardwired to Believe in Supernatural Deity?
dohcrx writes "According to a Sunday New York Times article, 6 in 10 Americans believe in the devil and hell, 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and life after death, while 92% believe in a personal God. The article explores the possibility that this belief structure may be ingrained into our genetic makeup. 'When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success ... Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity?'"
Religion evolved?
:]
Sounds like a sure way to piss off the religious and atheists alike
"Wait, you mean religion might confer some survival advantage? And it's so widespread that..."
"First you're telling me I'm a monkey's uncle. Now you're telling me it was a religious monkey!? Okay, great ape or whatever, but still!?"
Something like this was in Newsweek almost three years ago. The matter poses no difficulty to either atheist or theist philosophers of religion, for while one side can argue that this must mean belief in God is some built-in override of reason, the theist can argue that the direction towards worship is part of the Creator's plan.
There's no "gene" per se that explains why humans believe in God and the supernatural. Humans believe in God because they want to believe that their life means something, that we are living for a reason. It comforts humans "knowing" that there is something bigger than them out there, it comforts them "knowing" that when one dies, they just go up to heaven to live a better life. Humans believe in God simply because they want to believe.
Just maybe.
.... and belief in a rosy afterlife will make you live longer and pass on that trait. I mean, what's the size of an average Catholic family compared to the lonely angry atheist?
From what I've seen this is all about nurture, and not nature. America's Christianity feeds itself, with a father instilling his faith in his son. I'm attending secondary school (high school) and the majority of us are atheists, and some of those who were previously christian or other faiths have become agnostic or more.
You can beleive something your childhood years without questioning it. If you fail to question it before you reach adulthood, the chances are its sunk into the way you reason. Hence, you'll be a little more stubborn.
Now let me get laid! What? It doesn't work that way?
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
It seems to me that if the conjecture of a genetic basis is right, then this probably does little to help agnostics like me decide whether or not God exists. Here's why...
If God doesn't exist, then a genetic basis gives a potentially adequate explanation for religiosity. So the genetic basis doesn't disprove atheism.
If God does exist, then this is consistent with the theology (Christian, at least) that God has built us to know Him. (Assuming for the sake of argument that God can and does work through evolution and genetics.) So the genetic basis wouldn't seem to disprove Christianity (and thus theism in general) either.
I dunno... what do you guys think?
Who's No and why do you worship it? :)
For example, if you belive in UFO's or some other phenomen you are labled a crackpot yet when you belive in god you are accepted socially (in most cases :))
And now onto a more real world example close to many readers here. If you think 9/11 was carried out by Israel's MOSSAD and their manipulation of those in power in the US and their control of various companies etc you are labled unpatriotic and a crackpot yet if you believe it was a terrorist on the run in the Middle East supported by Saddam H. then you are accepted socially.
Hardwired I doubt, socially conditioned (which could appear as hardwired after all its patterns in the brain right?).
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
I am probably much like most of the rest of you slashdotters; smarter than most of the population (at the 98th percentile), technically adept and grew up an atheist in a home where we did not regularly attend church. The people around me that were religious seemed only to be mental midgets that needed psychological crutches to help them hobble through the day.
That was my view for my first 25 years of life, the next 15 have been quite a bit different. If we have a genetic disposition to need God, why is atheism more common among the young people that I have known and still know?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
What is the sample population for the study? How many people were surveyed? Was it a self-selecting phone survey ("Hi, we'd like to ask you some questions about your religion...")? What questions were asked?
Is a survey of 1000 Christians (especially from fanatical sects) in the USA really going to be representative of the genetic makeup of humanity as a whole?
Is it possible that being exposed to religion during the first 5 years of your life -- and constantly being told, "God made it that way" or "God loves you even if you don't believe in him" -- would influence your belief system to the extent that you'd believe in a "magic box" that would destroy the property of non-believers?
Speculate that deity dependence is ingrained into our genetic makeup all you like, but until you can present a survey from a meaningful sample population it's nothing more than an interesting topic for discussion around the water cooler (or in the modern office, the automatic espresso machine).
This was one of the possibilities that Dawkins talked about in the God Delusion - according to the evolutionary approach, the belief in gods and the supernatural is really a 'spin-off' of a ingrained tendency to believe authority. Now, the reason this might be useful in an evolutionary perspective is that a child whose genetic makeup predisposes him to be a little more gullible, will probably heed his parents warnings about dangerous things. So if a child were to be told that he should not go down to a certain part of the riverside because of snakes - the more readily the child accepts this, the longer his genes will survive.
The side of effect of this whole process, is that the species may have a tendency to believe authority - some more so than others. Obviously, one has to be a little more specific as to what exactly is 'authority' - but thats a whole other thread.
As with all evolutionary explanations, one shouldn't push it too far - but it does sound quite plausible.
If a significant portion (in this case in the high 90 percent range due to the claim made), of the entire world's population bleived in these things the author might have a point. I doubt the figures will bear such an argument however.
This makes the huge assumption that American's are representative of humanity as a whole. I think the fact that religion pervades the average American life from birth might be an important consideration. Also the fact that people who aren't at least passively religious are more or less condemned in many circles might have something to do with how one answers these questions regardless of their actual beliefs...
stop insulting logic you piece of shit
I think it may be a bit different than just genetic hardwiring... The simple fact that we have thoughts and feelings that can't really be explained by science to me makes us think that there is something definitely non-physical about our nature. I can have thoughts that no one can hear, I can plan things in my head, come up with ideas, etc. I have a personality, feelings, and none of this is explainable through science... not yet anyway.
So because all humans have these characteristics of thoughts,feelings, etc, I think that lends itself to the fact that there is something else mysterious at work here. The mental jump to the fact we have souls, there is some type of after-life, etc, I believe is not too much of a leap, especially if you're in a society that pushes these ideas.
Meta, Meta, Meta
Lost me there. Just because there is something (the universe, I presume you mean) doesn't necessarily mean that there must be something which knows it completely. Try again.
The stupid ones are anyway.
Too bad being lazy doesn't include sitting around thinking logical thoughts. Religion would go away overnight then....
The belief is not universal only the fear of not being worth more than the sum of your parts, your existence will just end with no reward for all your suffering and so on. The truth is out there its just not Charlton Heston in drag.
9% of USA Americans are non believers in God. They are no more representive than Swedes (85%) http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_atheist.html .
Belief in god simply is not universal. The numbers above make that clear. If it is a hard wired function of our brains, then explain the variation in brain wiring between Swedes and Americans. On the nature vs. nurture line, this one is at the nuture end.
I know my brain isn't wired for belief in god. My parents ran the Sunday school and brought me up a methodist. My grandparents were religious. My genetic inheritance should make me religious if its a preset brain wiring. Yet as a young child I saw the teachings as a system of inconsistent threats (be nice or go to hell, believe and be saved etc). As an older child I suspected the stories and teaching of being untrue. By the time I was in comprehensive school (age 11, UK) I knew I didn't believe a word of it and knew I was an atheist.
My personal experience leads to the opposite conclusion. We may be wired to follow the logic we understand or are taught. If we are taught how to think rationally and scientifically, then belief in God is vulnerable to rational analysis.
Moving to the USA (from the UK) had transformed atheism for me. It used to just be a fact. Relgious people went to Church and wasted their Sundays. There was no issue. In the USA I find people scared to be frank about their atheism. They find themselves in the minority, and a mistrusted minority at that. The outward effects of religion on society is caustic to education (e.g. evolution in schools), civil rights (e.g. bigotry in law and elsewhere towards homosexuals), personal freedoms (e.g. illogical drug use laws) and public policy (e.g. supporting abstinence education over contraceptive education).
I see the 'war' described in TFA as being an outcropping of this politicized environment and the research around it skewed by the politics.
I wonder if I can find work and a visa in Sweden?
Evil people are out to get you.
By coincidence, I was just reading this paper yesterday:
Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religiousness: Findings for Retrospective and Current Religiousness Ratings.
They established that religiousness is somewhat inherited, with the hereditability increasing with age (as do some other traits, such as drug addiction and intelligence). The established this through twin studies.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
[If nobody knows everything then what knows everything?]
There is no requirement that there be a what that knows everything.
TT
I believe that the use of the deity concept is misused in this case. There have been many studies that indicate that the human mind is capable of gathering input from sources outside our normal realm of experience(5 senses). It would seem to me that this study does nothing more than give more credence to what would otherwise be considered extra-sensory perception. The idea that we as beings are genetically able to sense a "divine" presence or being should only prove that we as human beings have not begun to fully tap our sensory capabilities and our interaction with the world around us. If these genetic triggers can be identified, and it is only a matter of time, then we will be able to further understand another small piece of the bio-processor we call the Brain.
More likely it's social pressure - the Monty Python/'Every Sperm is Sacred' school of thought - if you've got the pope saying 'fuck like bunnies because god says so' vs. the atheists saying 'smaller families are better for the planet, and we can afford better education for our kids, and ...' stands to reason you're going to get more kids indoctrinated into religion - think of it as a memetic advantage rather than a genetic one ...
That was the stupidest thing I've read on the internet so far today. And I just got here from Hal Turner's website, so you had some stiff competition.
Its not secret that there is a negative correlation between IQ and 'religiousness'. Infact, less than 10% of people with an IQ above 120 have any faith/religous belief.
Im not going to point out the rather obvious deduction that can be drawn from this fact ;)
When you're a little kid you look up to your parents -- they are your creators.
You learn that your grandparents were the creators of your parents, and you think they're pretty cool too.
If you go back far enough you must accept one of two conclusions:
Human kind was started by a great all-knowing being, or, by two monkeys fucking and producing some genetically mutated offspring.
The former is a little less of a blow to your ego.
Why does anything have to know everything? If the Universe came from nothing and the Universe has an end then everything can be nothing over a large enough scale. Or if the Universe were infinite the concept of everything goes out the window anyway.
More to the point, mindless little word games and random speculation will not solve the riddles of the Universe or existence. And they have little to do with the article anyway.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I can see that our genetic makeup includes a "gullible" sequence. Evidence is all around us. More cynical is considering that the human being has genetic material that makes them abuse another's gullibility. Wherever there is a group of people 'believing' in something that doesn't exist, there is a group of people making them believe and using that to their advantage.
Problem with being an atheist is that we see through the make believe story and recognize the mischief. We have shown ourselves to be a pretty nasty race at times. Now that it is making more sense that this behavior is part genetic I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.
perhaps theres something to this, evolution occurs for a reason, random mutations don't last long if they don't prove usefull, if there is in actuality a gene that makes one believe in a higher power, then it is most likely beneficial in some way and there for a reason.
If something exists then nothing cannot be everything.
If nobody knows everything then what knows everything?
I think you just divided nothing by nobody.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
This is where I step in. Anyone with a solid background in madness, such as myself, can sum up the existence of a supreme deity, or lack thereof, in a few succinct phrases. So, let's put the whole mess to rest. Genetic, nature, nurture. Put the *description of reality* aside for a moment, if you will. That's all anyone's been doing for generations, anyways. Example: Gang of scientists gets together, assigns values to things, "this is tree, these are the properties of tree, anything fitting said properties - from here-on-in referred to as tree". Human, as a collective, an intelligence, an "evolved being" if you will, (without getting too new-agey about this) is capable of perceiving reality in absolutely *any-way-shape-form-nature* that we "put our minds to" . That's the way of descriptions, your "God" is most certainly another man's "Devil" and another's "Agent Smith". If you and six friends decided "Tree" wasn't "Tree" anymore, but "Fish", well you'd be off in the woods cutting down dinner, you dig? So, where does this leave God? Well, God could be floating in your toilet bowl for all he cares (being a total non-entity outside of the realm of perception) Sure, let's say we have a "genetic predisposition" to perceive, seeing as that is all we as human beings really do. Beyond that, it's only the "matrix of belief" we lay over our *UTTERLY FORMLESS NATURE* that controls everything in reality. But look at this way, I can sit here with all my will thinking I can fly - but if 6 billion of you close-minded dicks don't agree - it ain't gonna happen!
And that, my friends, is reality - in a nutshell.
Frankly, I prefer the company of nitwits.
This is why I'm agnostic. Until you can prove to me either way that everything we know today is all there is to know (there is nothing left unexplained), I'm going to continue to believe that I have no fucking idea what we are going to learn about in the future. What tidbit of information are we going to glean tomorrow that chips away at one of the infinite definitions for "God"?
My point is this: either until God manifests himself in whatever form happens to fit our definition, or until we can prove that we know all there is to know, I will remain curious, but nothing more.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
...if that's the case, how did it just happen to 'evolve' its way into the dna?
:).
I could venture that the people who happened to be just crazy enough to believe in it were conferred some kind of survival advantage superior to those who didn't believe in it. It's been proposed that the divine right of kings was just another manifestation of a possible survival advantage of belief in supernatural deities- groups of people who were all independent-minded and had no concept of submission to authority didn't tend to stick together well, but humans themselves don't tend to survive well in a vacuum without other people. Go 40 miles away from any kind of town or human settlement, break your foot, and you'll know exactly what I mean when I say humans survive better when other people are around. Groups that got cowed into obeying some form of human authority that they perceived was backed up by some wrathful god stuck together better and therefore survived better than groups that didn't have any mechanism of sticking together.
Then again, maybe the supernatural deities just helped out the ones who believed in them
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Angry Atheists? Which one? Anne Coulter? Bill O'Reilly? Rush Limbaugh? Oh Snap! I thought you meant angry assholes. My mistake.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
This is laughable. In Japan and Scandinavia, only a tiny proportion of people believe in a personal deity. Has evolution passed them by? Once again, it pains me to remind Slashdotters that the USA isn't the whole world.
94% of Slashdotters think Wikipedia is a great idea.
94% of Slashdotters are virgins (probably the same 94%)
96% of Slashdotters can't add and don't know what the other 14% are even worse
and....
a full 98.6% of Slashdotters enjoy fake statistics for comic effect.
The sad ones who don't will be appearing shortly.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
People tend to assign intelligence (and therefore intention and conscience) to anything that is too complex for them to predict the behavior. See early humans: they believed in a different god behind every 'unexplainable' complex thing like sun, weather, diseases, birth and death. It is a natural human trait: if it is to complex to grasp, then it is intelligent or derived from intelligence. Since it's probably correct to say that there will always be something unexplained in the universe, there will always be space for an intelligent entity like a god to live in.
Self-preservation instinct + knowledge of inevitable death = Belief in afterlife.
We are hardwired to live at all costs. What if we know the effort is futile? How do we stay sane? Religion seems like a coping mechanism to me.
Sure, the idea that humans evolved some sort of mental 'Ah shit, that was really weird! Better attribute it to some vague unknown before I drive myself completely insane...' mechanism seems pretty plausible. Far more plausible than the various manifestations of said vague unknown we've come up with so far...
Logic?
That isn't even English.
According to research, evidence suggest a God Spot or God Module or G Spot in the brain.
Richard Dawkins addresses this in The God Delusion. He comes up with some fairly interesting ideas.
He strongly feels that this tendency on our part must be a by-product or accident of some other trait that actually is a survival trait. He posits several possibilities:
I think this whole line of thought is really fascinating. To me an answer to this question would be a very useful antidote for people who think I should adopt some particular version of Christianity or other religion that places mysticism and faith above the evidence of my senses and measuring equipment.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Millions of humans have been killed in the past for not following the religion of the dominant group. So believing in something just because the majority of people around you do seems a useful survival trait.
Where you draw the line between gene and meme is sometimes difficult to define, though. And some instincts are easier to override with reason than others.
or at least that's what most people in the US seem to think. I think it has to do with the fact humans are apes, and apes form hierarchies.
God is the biggest alpha male and it is no coincidence that a god, or gods, is used to confer legitimacy to governments (divine right of kings etc.).
We are biased toward hierarchies, and the concept that no one is in charge blows the minds of many people. God *must* bless America, otherwise the foundation of a huge part of American culture crumbles. If no one is in charge, then who will tell me what to do? How to live? Who to hate?
So I don't think there is a god gene per se. It is just a consequence of being an ape.
My own beliefs are slanted toward an impersonal universal force that really doesn't care much about the individual. But that's just my belief.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
We mustn't mistake a cognitive tendency to believe in religion for an affirmation of the truth of religion. We have many cognitive quirks as a species and even Pigeons can learn "superstitious" believes in Skinner boxes so I doubt any neurological basis for religious belief is anything but an artifact of our characteristics as social animals.
It seems that our desire to believe in a supreme being may be mis-adaptation of our built in need for parents. When we grow up, we know we know our parents no longer have all the answers but we still desire that idea of a parent who knows "everything", protect us and insure that we are treated fairly.
Humans are primates. Their primary distinction from ordinary primates is the capacity of conceptual processing - which includes imagination.
Humans are the only primates who are AWARE of death as an abstract. Coupled with the inbuilt fear of death, humans would be at an evolutionary disadvantage if they didn't have some means of coping with that all-pervasive fear. potentiated by their ability to be continuously aware of it, not just aware when under direct threat.
So evolution selected for humans with the capacity to fantasize a "solution" to death. Never mind that the solution was no solution in reality. It worked. The same conceptual processing capability that allowed humans to manipulate their environment also allowed them to manipulate themselves - to fool themselves that they had a "solution" to death even when they didn't. This allowed them to function well enough to advance human development.
Unfortunately the "solution" also did NOT work. It caused most humans to be unable to come up with a rational solution to the problem of death. Only with the slow advance of rationality and science and technology has it become possible to contemplate a rational solution to death. In the meantime, their fantasy "solutions" resulted in murders, suicidal behavior, oppression and war. As usual, most human "solutions" lead to the exact opposite of their intended goals.
Over the millenia, quite a few attempts to (more or less) rationally deal with death were attempted. This was a result of the human capacity for conceptual reasoning. The Gnostics, the Taoists, and others attempted to find ways to deal with death by means of theories of the functioning of the universe and the human body. It would appear most and probably all such attempts failed. Some of them, however, led to the inventions of science and technology.
Now, however, we have nanotechnology and biotechnology. A rational solution is clearly feasible.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the human race continues to behave according to irrational belief systems. These belief systems threaten the security of everyone on the planet when coupled with military weapons technology.
The ignorance and irrationality of the citizens of the United States and Israel at this time, coupled with the insane lust for power of the controllers of these countries, are the greatest threat to peace on this planet ever known in the history of this planet. Compared to that, the so-called "threat" of Islamic fundamentalism pales because Islamic fundamentalists have little power to threaten any significant percentage of the world. The US and Israel, however, nuclear powers both, have the capacity to kill millions of people and to start wars that will kill millions, perhaps scores of millions, more.
Unfortunately, given the number of irrational humans, nothing can be done about this situation until the development of sufficient nanotechnology to take down the US and Israeli states. Israel could be dealt with by merely stealing one of its own nuclear weapons and taking its government out. But the US is not so easily dealt with - even the destruction of Washington, D.C., by a nuclear weapon would not eliminate the US threat to the world.
So the result over the next few decades will be more wars and the slow bleeding to death of these two states economically, militarily and geopolitically, until their threat is reduced. Unfortunately, this will result in the deaths of millions of civilians in the Middle East and elsewhere until this slow, irrational process is completed.
The fall of empires is never easy.
And it's all because evolution is sloppy in the way it selects for survival. Had evolution selected for higher rationality and less fear in humans, we would not be in this situation.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
It's a natural part of human cognition to take a limited amount of information and try and arrange this into a coherent system, making guesses at what lies beyond. The less information there is available, the more guesswork is required. The results get silly very quickly.
Your first sentence was right on the mark. We think that we forgot everything we experienced when we were little. I think instead, we just remember it differently. Before the age of one year, our relationship to our parents is like our adult relationship to god. The parents are those huge things up in the sky, all powerful. They can lift us up in the air, make things appear, give us food, punish us. "Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses..." Are we god-fearing folk? Probably grew up with parents who punished early. So, the reason we believe in god, is because we actually remember him/her. Very deeply. It's ingrained, and we can't shake that feeling that he's up there, watching us, judging us, getting ready with the rewards or punishment.... I think it is genetically useful to remember these early experiences deeply, and to believe in them most strongly. They are your life's first impressions. First impressions are the ones most likely to be repeated....
Join the IParty!
Life needs more saving throws.
This kind of "Thinking" is the problem. YOU! OFF MY PLANET NOW!
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-God-Wont-Go-Away/dp/0345 44034X/ref=sr_1_1/103-3082029-4762268?ie=UTF8&s=bo oks&qid=1173046013&sr=8-1
Why God Won't Go Away - Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
Here in the U.S. there is a strong tendency to ostracize those who do not believe. There are many states where testimony in court and the right to run for public office require belief in a diety. Think for a minute where politicians would be if they came out admitting the were atheist.
We are hard wired to "fit in".
As has been pointed out by so many other posts, the strong belief thing is large in the U.S. but not other countries.
TT
Its actually quite relevant to society at large. While some of the endeavors in this area seem a bit hoax-ish, I have always been curious about patients who have had 'religious' or spiritual experiences during brain surgery.
While some might say that was the angels looking after the patients while in surgery, others will imply that religious or spiritual experiences are a byproduct of brain activity rather than external influences.
There is not a lot of hard science or evidence on this and I think it deserves more attention. It is relevant because if spirituality is a function of the brain, we can all forget organized religions and get on with living our lives free of their interference.
Studying this and similar theories gives us possible hard evidence of things thought to be from god or angels etc. Religion has by far been the most destructive motivational force on the face of the planet. Proving it either right or wrong with physical evidence is a really important thing to do.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
All glory to the HypnoToad!
God put that in us so we would believe in Him. It's all part of His plan.
Do you know anyone who knows everything?--> No
Is it possible for you to know everything? (Theoretically, maybe, but empirically over ten thousand years--no)--> I don't believe it's possible theoretically or empirically. No matter how much time passes.
Is it possible for anyone to know everything? (Theoretically, maybe, but empirically over ten thousand years--no) -->See above
If something exists then nothing cannot be everything. -->Is this sequence of words supposed to mean somthing?
If nobody knows everything then what knows everything? -->Why is it necessary that something has to know everything? Why can't nature just act?
Happy people make bad consumers.
Virtually everyone we talk to in the West is from one of the Abrahamic religions, but look at the world as a whole.
Shinto isn't really theistic, Buddishm and Confucianism are about right living and not about the supernatural, and animism is found all over.
What seems to be universal is the ability to have mystical experiences that feel transcendent and change people's lives.
I know God exists, Jesus is Lord. I wouldn't be telling you if I didn't know. I'm also not still a liar or God would be mad with me. I could go on, but I figured if you're talking about God, I might as well tell you he exists.
God spoke to me.
This is sort of like looking for the gene(s) that "cause" autism. We live in an ecology and our genes express different aspects of their potentials depending on how they 'experience' their ecology. Some of these potentials are pretty obviously maladaptive, like level one autism within which the individual remains nonverbal throughout life. Others are adaptive, resulting in far greater fecundity. Religions are the same. Some, like the Shakers, produce profoundly maladaptive behavior -- guaranteeing no offspring and removing the adherent from kin where they might at least gain through kin selection. Others, like Catholicism, Islam and tribal religions like Orthodox Judaism, and German National Socialism (yes it was a trbal religion within reasonable definitions) can be adaptive in that they have explicit protections of fecundity in them. Sometimes these express a "God" phenotype -- or a similar phenotype such as "Der Furher" within the Nazis. Sometimes they express "heaven" and/or "hell" phenotypes. These phenotypes are not the essence of what is being selected for, however. They merely serve a purpose within a particular environment.
Seastead this.
--"When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success"
You might argue that priesthoods throughout time have always discouraged heretics from
breeding so people might lean towards making that "internal connection" to whatever deity
they're required to worship more easily. Personally I think if anything at all these
priesthoods all the way to the catholic church have been doing themselves a disfavor:
They've selected for intelligence and the ability to deceive.
Buddhists don't believe in God or Gods (depending on the sect, of course). There are also sects of Judaism and other religions that technically qualify as "atheistic" while still being religions.
Perhaps this study should have looked at the entire world, rather than just Americans?
My own theory is that we are genetically wired to understand the world in goal-oriented terms (and also in terms of underlying mechanisms). Both traits provide obvious selective advantages. Combine that with our advanced cognitive capacities that allow us to forumlate questions such as "what is the goal of life?" and "what underlying mechanism brought about the existence of the universe?" and you have a whole species asking questions about things that are beyond the scope of any rigorous investigative method.
"God" is just the simplest answer, so it is popular.
The definition of the US bible belt christian god is actually one of a very small minority on earth. There are billions of Hindus and Buddists who have an entirely different definition of God and many country where more than 50% don't believe in god.(Someone here mentioned Sweden).
This study is next to pointless I'd presume.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Finding the the majority of people are receptive to the idea of a supernatural being doesn't say anything about genetics. What would be more interesting is to find out how many of those people had previously been exposed to such ideas before they actually developed an opinion on the matter. Societies tend to indoctrinate their children with their religious beliefs, traditions, etc. To me, it makes sense that the majority of people are receptive to such ideas because they've been exposed to them for as long as they can remember.
Why am I not surprised that this kind of research was done in the US?
Can you imagine this in e.g. Europe? Russia? China? Ok, Israel or Iran, maybe.
=> Either there's some strange mutations going on in the US or this is bogus. I know which one makes more sense to me.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
"Human heaven? Goodness me! Humans don't go to heaven! No, someone made that up to prevent you all from going nuts!" - Kryten, Red Dwarf
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
No gene needed here. I am dying, and have two options:
1. Eaten up by worms,
or
2. Live forever, and party every nite with all the relatives that I loved.
Even if (2) is a big lie, there is nothing to loose, so it takes a lot of character to willingly going for (1).
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
The "old buck" in the herd is the power figure. When the "young buck" crosses horns with the old buck, it is not so much to try take over the herd as it is to get a feeling of security that the herd is being managed by a strong animal.
People go one step further and have an awareness of far more abstract concepts than other animals. No longer is it just important to know who is in charge of the herd. Now you want to know who is in charge of the seasons, the mountains, etc etc. Clearly no one man is, hence the need for supernatural beings.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Belief is thought. Thought is fluid, and based on past experiences. It's not based on genetic makeup. The same, horribly unscientific argument has been used to suggest that crime and antisocial behaviour is genetic, and that particular races are inferior on a genetic basis. It's total bullshit. People's thoughts are strongly correlated with their past experiences, and complex beliefs such as religious beliefs come from society and from experience, not from our genes. This article just demonstrates how little supposed scientists know about DNA.
I can think of a Flying Spaghetti Monster therefore a Flying Spaghetti Monster exits. Anselms argument is only slightly better than Pascals.
TT
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.
The only belief that's relevant here is the modern belief in the usefulness of statistics. Personally, I'm a follower of the "lies, damned lies and statistics" anti-cult ;)
;)
More seriously... there are lots of people who have a spiritual or ethical basis for their adult understanding of the world, yet have NO belief in the supernatural. In fact, at least one major religion has no deity. Many of the others have no deity or even supernatural entities, in the sense that westerners understand the word.
The problem with religious people isn't that they believe in the supernatural -- it's that most of them can't talk about their experiences logically, and so it either comes out as a supernatural thing, or is explained in terms of their culture's words for such things. In much of the west, people explain their beliefs, moral compasses, fuzzy logic and cultural understandings in terms of "God" and "ghosts" etc. In some western subcultures, it's "mother earth" and "gaia". In still others, it's "science" or "law and order" or "democracy".
Belief has many faces. My belief is that some people stay children, but most of us grow up at 22-30 or so, get some wisdom, find our place in the world, form our adult beliefs, and put a name to it, as best we can.
Of course, others are still figuring out the point of life, so they conduct surveys and come up with things like "73.34% of people answered X when I asked Y, so there must (or must not, or might be, depending on the surveyor) be a God."
Is there something in the genetic makeup of human beings that is making them believe that government is the answer to all problems? Is there a "there ought to be a law" gene? Is there a "someone think of the children" gene? Why is when we are faced with any problem the first answer is always to pray to government?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
From Wikipedia "Development of Religion":
Dogma Selection Model
In the dogma selection model, religion is a set of beliefs which allow humans to encode useful survival tips and social structures. For example, early populations may not have understood microbes (germs), but thinking of illness as being caused by invisible demons that can hop on nearby people and possess them also supplies a mental model that reminds one to stay away from people that are coughing. The demon is an abstraction or approximation of germs and their infectious nature.
Dogma that increases the survival of a group will spread using a kind of Darwinian selection process (see Natural Selection; meme). The most useful dogmas spread because they keep the population that espouses them alive to bear more children. Over time good ideas may "mutate" as new generations or tribal branches alter them and the best variations spread using the selection process described above. Of course sometimes religious doctrine goes awry and ends up in large numbers of deaths, but it is the net benefits that count in the end.
Table-ized A.I.
The other thing it could indicate is stupid people saying things they don't believe because they feel guilty about not believing, or "answer bias" where they say what they think they *should* say.
The other indication is that Americans are ignorant, mindless sheep who have no ability or training in the fine art of distinguishing fact from fiction. (This is NOT an insult: ignorance can be cured! It's the fault of the US Edumicational sys-thiny.) An almost complete lack of scepticism, and a fine ability to be lead by the nose by power-mad fucktards.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Keep your crap-hole planet. I have the earth.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Why do you think that the ontological argument currently in favour in the academy is identical to Anselm's?
Foo'-Mo'-D says,"Have you seen Coo'-Mo'-D?"
I'm French and our society is so 'laic' that raised without religious education, I'm now an atheist without any struggle depicted in the article, so if men were really hard-wired to believe in God, how could a 'laic' society could emerge?
Also in the article, the sentence "Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?" annoyed me: sure there are atheists which are superstitious (which is kind of weird), but there are also sceptics atheists/agnostics, so this sentence is an outrageous exaggeration/lie..
Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident?
Assuming of course that there is no God, belief in God provides an evolutionary advantage. Beings who believe that their actions will reflect upon them later are more likely to make selfless contributions, up to and including death, to protect their larger group.
Throughout history, how many times have entire villages(or other small groups) been saved because one individual faced certain death because he or she believed that God would reward them for the sacrifice?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If you don't believe me, look at environmentalism, the new urban religion. You believe in a pristine Eden sullied by mankind that can only be saved through ritual sacrifice 'lest you face the judgement of apocalypse. Non-believers are heretics to be shunned.
So it's not so much that people have to believe in a supernatural deity. I believe they're hard-wired to adopt a cause that makes believers feel ashamed for existing and requires them to force others into sacrificing their freedoms to live the way the believers want them to. This goes for Christians, Muslims, Scientologists, environmentalists, etc. Self-loathers want to rule the world and force you to live the way they want you to "for your own good."
Just my two cents on the matter.
"Sufferin' succotash."
For being a nimwit following an AC.
Foo'-Mo'-D says,"Wutup foo?"
I really really don't like "evolutionary psychology", but I've already dealt with that in other places.
What I would like to deal with now is the difference between natural and supernatural concepts.
It seems that several natural concepts are hardwired into people as well. I think the simplest concept that people seem to universally believe in is what is called The First Law of Thermodynamics (at least that is the scientific name for it, although the concept I am sure existed before modern science).
When most children are three to six years old, or so, they don't understand conservation. They think that if water is poured from a taller, skinnier container into a shorter, wider one, that water has "disappeared". And then at some point, around 6 or so, children realize that things can't just appear and disappear. (That is the short version of it, people who specialize in cognitive development could probably explain it better). And from then, on, most people know that things can't appear or disappear out of nowhere.
And of course, mammals with simpler nervous systems know the same thing. If a fox sees a mouse run into an decaying log, it knows that it is still in there. It has the idea that an object in persisting, even out of sight. I don't know what level of animal intelligence is needed to figure this out, but I imagine that most carnivores would know it.
And yet, the idea that objects persist seems to be more than just a mammalian instinct. The same idea ultimately tells us that all matter and energy in the universe is conserved. That when an atom decays, the difference in mass now that it has to spend less energy bonding its nucleons together will result in a photon being created out of nowhere, with exactly enough energy to equal the missing weight.
(Although it should be pointed out that some particles that the First Law says must exist, such as the neutrino, only exists to balance the equation, since it is next to unimaginable that there will ever be a society sophisticated enough to design a device for detecting all the neutrinos coming out of a star)
So, the real question is...why can an idea that seems to be hardwired into the mammalian brain to keep track of where prey is hiding, also seem to be universally true across the universe, at all scales? The idea that objects persist is a metaphysical idea, and yet it seems to be true in all experiments.
Why is that?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
it is really this simple.
a handful of fanatics with genetic predisposition for belief in crazy ideas killed off the rest of the town that did not have this genetic predisposition. then they bred like rabbits. this spread their screwed up genes.
if you didnt believe you were killed thus, crazy people were selected for.
comment directly in my journal
Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity?'
I don't see what the big question is here. When you grow up, you see a red glowing light. It excites you. You reach for it.. It burns you.. You remember that it burns you.. You don't reach for that red light anymore.
But with unprovable phenomena (such as lighting bowling night for Zeus, or your personal savior Jesus), there is a pretty glowing light.. It makes sense (kind of). It makes you happy (until you have to stop playing at 11am on Sunday to go to Church). It has lots of cultural excitement (Christmas, Hannaka(sp?)). So you keep reaching for that red light... But it never burns.
It probably doesn't burn because it's just a community hallucination. But the fact remains, you don't have negative reinforcement. So you keep believing.
I propose that all undeterred possibilities are intrinsically sought out by life's sense of curiosity, or at least it's tendency to fill up space randomly (a curious cat wandering into the unexplored room, and the amoeba moving into a less dense region of the fluid). This, I think is the more powerful evolutionary/phsycological phenomena. This is what makes our randomness stick and survive catastrophic incident.
Belief is just one of many unscorching pretty lights. Religion is the community's exploitation of that belief (for better or worse).
-Michael
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.
stupidity and fear.
Quit baggin' on the homeless guy. You must be a pathetic sack of horse crap. Did you have anything productive to add or did you think you'd just get a free giggle from posting an insult?
Foo'-Mo'-D says,"Have you seen Coo'-Mo'-D?"
It's crappy writing but this notion plays a key role in Sawyer's Neanderthals trilogy.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident?
The science community should not limit the posibilities. Anything is possible until it can be eliminated. How about the possibility of created that way? There is lots of evidence of an order to the universe. Many believe there is a creator who put the order in place for things to grow and adapt. Science may try to explain many things not understood and look for answers. Science seldom includes and unseen creator.
If you have time, do a google search for a video series called "Physics for Future Presidents" It's from Berkley Universe of Southern California. In the series, look at the Universe lessons. This is not a chruch but a scientific look at the origin of the universe. Even science calls the origin of the universe the creation. Follow the lesson, then look at the biblical description of the origion of the universe. It's so close to the same to bring into question "Was this created?" Who Wrote the first book in the Bible and how did he know how the universe started when nobody else had a clue.
Leaving creation out of consideration does upset the church leadership and should upset the scientific community who are finding a strong corrolation between the two accounts.
Please don't use my post for a flamewar. It's not the intent. Use my post for the factual information and draw your own conclusions.
The truth shall set you free!
Being religious probably got you laid more in the old days (perhaps not for monks). It sure gave those in power a tool to use over the great unwashed (Kings "chosen by god". If you don't pay money to the church you'll burn in hell. Obey thy husband....). These sure give a competitive advantage.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well I'm a Pantheist myself. But I don't feel nature "knows" everything.
Happy people make bad consumers.
The universe knows itself--thus the claim over all of history, across all religions, that God is everything.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Nearly every human I know believes in something he refers to as "laws of physics", some sort of hypothesized way in which objects behave consistently according to rules.
Do we need a genetic predisposition to explain this?
Is there a specific genetic predisposition to think that people who laugh at their own jokes a lot are usually not funny?
How do we distinguish between "predisposition to believe X" and "observing X"?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
By default the complete universe knows itself completely.
Foo'-Mo'-D says,"Wutup foo?"
Pass the word.
Foo'-Mo'-D says,"Have you seen Coo'-Mo'-D?"
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
People are probably hardwired to be delusional. A majority of Americans also believe in Aliens. A sizable minority (IIRC) believe in ESP. Does this mean that every cranky belief carries a selective advantage?
To say that this is a selective advantage is disingenuous - there's a selective advantage in being able to think and reason at all, pretty clearly. We don't reason perfectly, but that does not mean that flawed reasoning has an evolutionary advantage - we aren't blade-proof, either, but no-one suggests there's an evolutionary advantage that comes from dying when stabbed. Do we see a lot of evidence for non-religious populations that died out? No, we don't - neanderthals appear to have ceremonially treated their dead.
This whole thing is a pseudoscience crock.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
We are hardwired to get together in groups by creating a shared ethos (way of living) and the way we train each other in the way is through telling each other traditional stories. Religion is an example of such a group-work-creating meme.
The god-concept is a tool of the religion group-work-creating meme. It takes advantage of our tendency to reason by analogy. We first understand how other humans, like our parents when we are infants, and like those around us generally, exercise intentional agency upon the world. How they cause events to happen; how they shape situations for
theiror our benefit.
So when early humans perceived large-scale,natural events, or perceived the seemingly intentional agency of non-human animals, they, by analogy, imbued these large-scale natural systems, or the animals, with human-like spirits.
Human leaders (themselves tools of the group-work=creating memes), understood how they could use stories of the actions, intentions, and attitudes of powerful animal spirits and natural-system spirits, as way-teaching stories and as stories designed to threaten supernaturally powerful deterrence of dissenting ideas and ways.
It's all simply the systematic way that "the way' persists itself in human cultures. And why is "the way" able
to persist itself like this? It's simply because groups of people working together (and forming sub-organizations
and specialization of labour within a shared set of norms of behaviour and interaction), are much more
effective at living than are the same number of people unorganized.
Our genetic tendency is to communicate and to create alliances. These alliances work better, both for the
alliance, and foreach member. i.e. members of an effective alliance survive more probably than unattached
humans or worse-organized humans.
Religion and god-concepts are memes that constrain peoples' behaviour sufficiently so that the group will
function well together (in a civilized, "altruistic" manner, i.e. selfish to the group instead of to the individual)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I thought htis was a study. It's just the ramblings of an academic.
The problem is that this is amero-centric and is not indicative of other cultures. There is no science here certainly to suggest that genetics are involved. In some cultures like Scandanavia, athiests outnumber the believers. In the US, it is asking for trouble to say you don't believe in a deity of some kind. Certainly it hampers your chances for public office if you are so inclined. Definitely hampers how people treat you in some small towns. This is philosophical musing, not a science (even if a scientist does the musing).
All it this piece really does illustrate that that humans are herd animals really.
Generally, the question of faith is beyond scientific explanation. See, when I was much younger than today, I was an atheist, one that could scientifically "prove the non-existence of God". Later I learned more, and my cosmological physics whiz-bang could certainly fascinate and confuse your average church-going old granny, but I couldn't fool myself: I realized that what I knew wasn't proof, really, that God didn't create the universe.
:o) ). There are, and have been, enough great God-believing physicists, that you at least have to wonder if there's something wrong with the concepts of atheism.
And quantum mechanics took care of absolute determinism, so.... I had to realize that faith just works on a different plane, that I couldn't attack anymore, BECAUSE I knew enough (astro)physics. I had enough depth to understand that I can't see beyond a certain point in time and space.
If you ask the greatest minds in physics today, they all will have an opinion about the existence of God - some will believe in it, some won't, but neither side would think they can prove their or disprove the opposite side. Great minds are humble (no comparison with me, please
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Asking what advantage is conferred by religiosity is the wrong question. The advantage is in gullibility at a young age--if you can't indoctrinate children, they'll get themselves killed. Unfortunately, this means you can indoctrinate them with all kinds of nonsense, which they'll pass down to their kids, ad infinitum. Hence, I think, Dawkins' strong statements on the religious indoctrination of children.
However, the headline is an irresponsible mangling of this hypothesis. It's not that we're hardwired to believe in Yahweh; we're hardwired to believe authority figures. If the question were rephrased to ask what proportion believe the myths and legends they grew up on, my guess is that it would be pretty high across cultures.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.
My first thought was 'Ah, Creationist! Burn him!' and then I choked that down and thought, 'Actually, that's a good point.'
But I think the reason that God is always left out of science is because there's no test for that. Being ominiscient and ominpotent, he has the ability to either make a reason for the thing to be that way, or make it appear there's a reason. We couldn't know, because God will always beat us to it. Always.
So because it doesn't help us a single iota to keep saying 'Or God could have just made it that way,' we simply leave that off. From now on, you can mentally tack on the 'or God made it that way' to the end of every set of theories.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I know very little about Memes, but it seems to me that explaining such things using the Meme perspective makes more sense than looking at it from a human biology perspective. It's probably true that religious memes are better suited for survival than alternative memes, so they stick around, multiply, and become the dominant perspective. The question is, what about human psychology makes such memes so prevalent?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
A human is not simply 50kg of oxygen, 10kg of carbon and a hundred other elements, but a conscious entity. We are that particular aspect where the universe becomes aware of itself. So yes, there might be more than an evolutionary explanation to religiousness, more than genes and natural selection justifications.
I for one believe that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter, not emerging from a combination of factors (like for example the concept of gaseous pressure - an emergent property of matter, introduced by statistical physics). If consciousness is embedded in the fabric of this reality then the preoccupation with spirituality, philosophy, religion and the nature of consciousness are as natural as seeing and thinking to us.
There are those who seek to measure, analyze and formalize in a scientific way - they prefer relying on their senses and rational thinking. Then there are those who favor the "unscientific" way of relying more on intuition, the ineffable, the mysterious - they center more on the interior. So this division is about exterior vs interior, or ration vs intuition, sort of speak similar with the difference between classical Newtonian physics vs quantum "wave-form-collapse" description of reality.
I don't consider religion should embrace such a hatred of science. And yes, many atheistic people also fall in the same trap and despise the ones who believe in a spiritual causation of this world. This dispute is somewhat more about the social aspects, who believes in what book, historically what has been served to the masses as the "correct" doctrine and who's turn is now to admit mistakes, and take a damage to their pride.
reacting != knowing
Happy people make bad consumers.
Nobody wants to be the only guy that believes in the flying spaghetti monster. Whenever someone says "I'm telling you the truth of God because I care about your soul" I hear "I'm somewhat insecure in my own faith and I need you to believe with me"
A few times I've gone as far as making this idea an accusation against the missionary at my front door. I don't do it anymore because doing so seems to make them less likely to go away.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
The article mentions the anthropologist Pascal Boyer, who has a fairly simple (and imo fairly convincing) argument, that in the article is referred to as the "byproduct theory".
e s/atheism.shtml
Basically it says that the ability to connect cause and effect, that is to connect things that happen to the actors in the environment that cause them, was so powerful that is became overused in humans. Giving them a natural tendency to attribute everything, including chance events or natural phenomena to these actors, or as Boyer calls them "unseen agents".
The reason for this is fairly straightforward, if you were living in the prehistoric wilderness it paid to be paranoid, consider the simple example of someone sleeping in a cave who hears a noise outside, for the paranoid early human the thought process might be:
"oh no, what was that, it had to be something, something made that noise, it must have been a tiger, I know it was a tiger, there must be a huge tiger outside"
pros: if there really is a tiger, or some other threat, you may have just saved your life, increasing the probability your genetic code will be passed on creating future paranoid generations
cons: if you are wrong and there is nothing out there, you wasted a small amount of energy and made yourself look stupid
if on the other hand you don't attribute every event to some unseen agent, you might be tempted to assume it was just the wind, or some other harmless event
pros: if you are right you save a little bit of energy
cons: if you are wrong you may be dead
To hear it explained much more elegantly by Boyer himself there is a short video interview on youtube where he discusses the subject
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etiZv_rOOgc
Which is part of a larger BBC series called "Atheism: A Brief History of Disbelief" and "The Atheism Tapes", in which Jonathan Miller interviews famous scientists and philosophers on the subject of atheism. Much of which can be found on youtube/google video http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/featur
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember watching an episode of Nova some years ago that described the research of a Dr. V. S. Rachandran. It portrayed exactly what this article does - that it is genetically advantageous for humans, in terms of our survival, to believe in a higher power. Here's the requisite Wikipedia link.
The wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but the reasoning was something like: humans survive better in groups, and the notion of a god tends to cause people to gather in groups (not sure I agree, but that was the reasoning, anyway). He even had some physical evidence, which, if I remember correctly, was gathered from several patients who thought they were god after a particular part of their brain was damaged.
Anyway, I think this research has been done before.
Or just Americans?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
It's wrong. Just more apologetic shit trying to sway the masses.
People are hardwired to believe what they're told and to follow leaders. They're just naturally credulous, which helps to maintain some social balance in times of hardship. The problem is that they also tend to believe charlatans and thieves - i.e. religious 'leaders' who are just trying to control people.
You know it makes sense - say no to religion.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
Ask this question in the Muslim world and the frequency of "believers" is likely to be even higher.
Perhaps its so widespread because the religious among us are very good and very busy at persecuting non-believers in one manner or another.
There need not be a gene to explain it, only a propensity to believe in "safe" ideas. Believing in god(s) is sort of like believing in the power of money. I would venture the percentage of people who recognize the importance of money is even higher than the percentage that believe in god(s). Does anyone seem to be suggesting that the belief in the value for money is also genetically based?
Its also likely that even though many are eager to express their "personal relatioship" with God, far fewer would be willing to admit that God, being busy with important things, has absolutely no interest in them and couldn't care less about them because they are simply far too insignificant for "God" to bother taking the time out of her busy schedule to "presonally contact" them. Now who is going to admit to that? Is there a gene for this type of avoidance behavior as well?
One tries to place oneself in situations that are regarded as "safe". Such behaviors will be selected for if over time, they do in fact place people in "safer" situations and these people on average have more offspring. The choices or the bases for these choices do not need to be rational to respond to selection, nor do they need to remain constant throughout human history. At the height of the "Golden Age" in Greece, it was accepted among some circles that the earth rotated about the sun. During later less enlightened times, such ideas were distinctly hazardous to one's health because of religious persecution (eg. death of Giordano Bruno). Selection against those believing in heliocentric theories is now less severe (thank goodness, considering that modern science clearly demonstrates that the earth does indeed orbit the sun).
Many avoidance behaviors may have evolved because they are not rational, since rationality would require people to be aware of them and their awareness may in and of itself be more likely to either confuse or make the "true motives" known to one's adversaries/competitors. For some, their thinking processes may be too slow so its better if they act without thinking, and so long as they on average make the "safe" choice, they will not be at a competitive disadvantage.
Tell it to Mitt "we need to have a person of faith lead the country" Romney.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Summary of the above:
"The invention of a god or gods will occur when a self-aware organism comprehends the inevitability of its own death."
Pick up the bread knife and carve your way into forensic history
How do you know the difference? The hypothesis is that reaction is an expression of knowing. Prove it wrong.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
You can take the US statistics and turn it all around: Only 3 out of 10 Canadians are religious. Therefore the 40th parallel must be a religious inversion layer.
'Those Americans are crazy!' - with apologies to Obelix...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The science community should not limit the posibilities. Anything is possible until it can be eliminated. How about the possibility of created that way?
At the risk of starting a flame war (what? On slashdot?), yes, anything is possible until it is eliminated. That's different from plausable, rational or probable. It is possible that God created mankind. It is possible that the Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a huge giant, and that we should all live in perpetual fear of the Coming Of The Great White Handkercheif.
It is possible that there is a small red teapot which remains perpetually equidistant between Earth and Mars, containing a magical green geenie who will grant three wishes to the first astronaut to find it and rub it.
I know where I want NASA to invest its money; and it's not in green geenie research.
If you want to be religous: fine; just don't bother people who think.
The last few years I've been more and more convinced there is a genetic code that predisposes a belief in a higher power.
Why? Well for one it creates hope, a sense of community, purpose etc. These things are good for creating stable reproductive people.
OTOH as an atheist, for me the logical conclusion to that is nihilism. I mean if there is no afterlife then you might as well do whatever you want since it's all meaningless. The humanist argument of you make meaning by living your life the way you choose, just seems like another form of "religion". IE trying to be comfortable with the fact that everything is pointless and glossing over the brutal reality.
Maybe the "religion" gene is neither helpful nor harmful, but linked to other useful genes (other higher brain function, perhaps)?
o pment_of_cavefish_eyes/
Sort of how blind cave-fish aren't being selected for blindness, so much as being selected for other traits which happen to have blindness as a side-effect?
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/devel
While I doubt there's an evolutionary explaination for people believing in the divine I'd say there could be one for people having general faith. Afterall life is meaningless, or it's whatever you want it to be (to put it positivly). An ablity to go aginst ones rational brain, and do stupid things like say... figuring out how to live in uncomfortable climates because it's somehow better anyways, or perservering because of a cause/belief would be very useful.
Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity?
Yes, as in having underdeveloped cognitive areas that make one subject to the imposition of complex belief systems that may or may not have a logical foundation. There's a reason why organized religions have always placed great emphasis on indoctrinating children (those that fail in this regard tend to disappear.) A child's cognitive areas are by definition underdeveloped, with little capacity to evaluate or reject anything that is fed into them. Furthermore, ideas and values that are instilled at an early age are exceedingly hard to change later, which is ideal for condemning one's offspring to a lifetime chained to one's own intellectual inadequacies. You don't need to invoke a special "God" gene to explain why organized religion has survived as long as it has: it's largely self-sustaining as long as there are sufficiently large groups of people that have faith, and want their children to believe as they do.
The Bishop, a character out of one of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat novels once said, "Man is a rationalizing animal, and requires training to become a rational one." Pretty much says it all.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
More like humans hardwired to believe in the rich and powerful.
Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God -- evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident?
:-)
That's an easy one! Humans believe in God because they've been designed that way by God, no?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
His anecdotal "proof" can be found in the link in his sig.
I lived in the US for 8 years. 92% believe in personal god? wtf? And I lived in North Carolina (and LA :)
JON
No genetics and survival of the fittest depends on knowing what others fear, deny, and/or evade.
....
... very aware of those crazy folks.
Curiosity, depends on genetics and survival of the fittest, to have the courage to overcome our
fear, deny flight/fight lower brain functions, and invade the unknown to learn and survive.
So curiosity created mythology, mythology allows gods to exist and explain the unknown, and curiosity
allows unknowns to exist a little longer than the human-science observation/discovery of the obvious.
IOW: Gods are just VR [AKA: fiction/fantasy] definitions of the unknown by fearful and superstitious
humans until reality is known. NOTE: A dogmatist fears, denies, and evades all facts and evidence that
conflict with their delusional schizoid superstitions.
It is natural and genetic based for humans to question and seek answers; however, a dogmatist is
adelophobic, and can only accept that their dogma beliefs provide all answers to all possible question.
The adelophobic dogmatist always have a potential for sociopathic reactionary behavior that would
eliminate any guilt response to the murder of another human that they are convinced threatens their
dogma (reality) beliefs. The adelophobic dogmatist is extreamly delusional and believes that there are
significant very real rewards for their dogmatic acts of murder, genocide, suicide
Fortunately we are humans (not cats) curiosity does not cause our death, but the delusions of the
mentally ill and emotionally unstable adelophobic dogmatist may seek direct/proxy action another
humans death. Pity the mentally ill, but be aware and vigilant
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
My first thought was 'Ah, Creationist! Burn him!' and then I choked that down and thought, 'Actually, that's a good point.'
Thanks. A good scientest will look at all the facts. Religeion seldom returns the favor. It was hard to write the post and not have it look like a creationist post but a proper "is this a possibility and is their any hard evidence to support it? I was just shocked at the Physics for Future Presidents series from Berkley when I hit the Universe lessons. I thought it was worth mentioning.
The truth shall set you free!
Keep in mind that theism is running high in USA these days. Much of the developed world isn't quite as delusional.
I think it may have something to do with poverty and uncertainty...
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
History is chock-full of people who didn't just believe things, they knew. Revelation, as it turns out, is a piss-poor way of knowing. It was, for instance, the same reason that Andrea Yates knew that she had to kill her children, and the same reason that Charles Manson knew... well, whatever it was he knew.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Galactic Overlord Xenu??!?
IAALS.
That's why God is defined as the god of Abraham
Abraham was that guy who rejected blindly believing the ideas of men.
Basically you are confusing what is evolving in each situation. For example if you possess a religion that doesn't mean that that religion evolved to help you out. Just as if you possess a tapeworm in your gut or mites in your eyebrows that they aren't there to help you out. They are rather there to help themselves. Religions increase in frequency from being preached and expanded (this is why there are so many proselytizing religions), they have become entire systems setup with reasons to believe (just faith) and certain rules and edicts (have lots of kids and teach them this too; Shakers actually had the opposite belief and are now defunct because nobody had kids.). Many of these actually do convey rather significant advantages to the religion. However the advantage or disadvantage to you doesn't matter that much to the meme being evolved.
As for the reasons that religious and supernatural beliefs exists that's basically a side effect of our large brains. Typically the learning curve we need is so steep that as kids it is generally best that we accept everything we hear as true and a large part of what we hear as adults. This however leads to superstition, scams, ghosts, con-artists, astrology, religion, aliens, and myths. But it also leads us to quickly learning the things we need to know to be vastly successful in the real world.
We only evolved our really impressive brain in the last few million years, it'll take a while to work the kinks out. That's also the reason our hips and knees have some many problems, they evolved (changed greatly from previous forms) much more recently than our elbows and ribs.
As for the comment about being a great apes uncle, really the very idea of the grouping of apes including chimps, orangutans and gorillas but magically excluding humans is rather silly. It would rather be more accurate to say that humans are great apes.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I'm outta this trainwreck thread.
" 'When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success ..."
What?! You don't believe in God! You must die infidel!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
If this is a recapitulation of Anselm's argument, it's a poor one. The ontological argument has been refuted: just because we can imagine a greater being doesn't mean that this being exists because (1) we may not agree that existence is better than non-existence (e.g., given their attributes, unicorns would be greater if they existed--but they manifestly do not) and (2) being is not a predicate.
Foo'-Mo'-D says,"Have you seen Coo'-Mo'-D?"
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
... and is just as silly as it always has been. For a history of the ontological argument and it's debunking see Dawkins' _The God Delusion_.
reading through all the negative responses, i can't help but wonder if there is also a genetic disposition in humans to deny the existance of gentic dispositions. back on point, though, if this is true, and a 'God-fearing' gene exists, will we as a society better accept the removal of the gene, or the enhancement of the gene in future generations of genetically altered babies. oooh, or how about in cattle? remove the gene, to guarantee that they're soulless, and we won't have to feel bad about eating them.
Considering disbelief in god could get you killed in the 1800's and prior I think its pretty clear how believing in spiritual crap could have become an evolutionary survival trait via natural selection.
Also, BELIEF or being PRONE TO BELIEVE in something is passed verbally and is therefore spread a lot easier.
Talking to a ________________ (fill in your favorite - ie. priest,rabbi, imam,...)
Q: how do you know that *your* scriptures are the true word of God?
A: It is written in the scriptures!
Q: Yes, but how do you know your scriptures are authentic?
A: They came from God!
Q: Ok, how do you know that?
A: Well, it is written right here in the scriptures!!!
Sometimes one has to think that religious people have some kind of mental blockade when it comes to critical thinking about (ones) religion.
OTOH There lies a great comfort in following religious rules. You can do some of the worst things a human being is capable of and just say "God wants it!". If things go bad, "God is testing me!". If things go well, "Thank God for this". Should you really screw up, "God forgive me"....
Taking responsibility for your own actions is often a very uncomfortable way; so, why don't we just delegate responsibility for *our own* actions to a higher deity?
As long as there is "religious freedom" there will be people justifying their deeds with the wishes of a deity, thus giving the rest of humanity a bad time!
I am not opposed to religious feeling, but many people tend to abuse these feelings, and even more people let themselves be abused; thus delegating responsibility for their actions. When will we have a religion that truly holds you responsible for your actions?
Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango
I believe in my own personal god. I even know who he is. It's me. The only person there is to rely on for my own happiness, well being, and success is myself. There is nobody answering prayers for winning the lottery, or getting a raise, or curing my sick mother, or for a computer glitch to zero out my student loans :) Most of these things, along with most everything else that involves me is my responsibility. I bite my tongue every time I hear someone say "it's gods will", especially when it comes to things like birth control, or someone being murdered or otherwise killed. I guess some people need the comfort of thinking they know that someone is looking out for them constantly, but to me it just seems so ridiculous. Will we ever get past superstitious nonsense like religion, or is humanity doomed to be forever afraid of what happens when they die, where they came from, etc?
Well... If there's sex in heaven, it certainly would be an evolutionary adaptation. But wait, if heaven exists can evolution co-exist? Perhaps it's both are a function of a quantum reality- oh, the paradox! Or perhaps people with good minds should spend their time working on something productive :)
At some point many people have believed the Earth is flat, or that it was held up by some beast
(Atlas, Great Turtle [with and without elephants]). Have we spontaneously lost these genes in
the intervening millenia? Pshaw. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
What about, "Never try attribute to genetics what can be explained by stupidity/indoctrination"?
Were that I say, pancakes?
...or the pro-lifers may kill you.
The belief that you know a thing is a most perfect way to prevent learning.
Can god create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I think that's why they call it a faith. You have faith that your scriptures are true and that your religion is correct, and thats what gives you hope and direction.
Science and Religion aren't mutually exclusive necessarily, but what Science cannot prove (or ever prove?) is where Faith begins.
The most recent surveys I've seen are showing between 15-20% of Americans are atheists. 8% sounds nowhere near my own experience. I've knew a guy who went to church and didn't believe there was a God but didn't want to upset his wife. Perhaps they're counting his wife as a god-figure.
Also, wouldn't some of this depend on how you classify borderline religions like Buddhism? After all, Buddhists don't believe in a god or gods overtly in the way Westerner religions do. I'd offer that some forms of animism, ancestor worship and shamanism don't quite qualify as god-figure religions, either.
And then of course there is the sticky question of classifying agnostics. Where do they fit?
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
...meaning that one might lead an easier life, if he strongly believes in something which gives him motivation to live. While the EMO asks himself why everybodys so mean; the CHRIST already "knows" that its gods way to test him. EM0 ends up cutting himself patterns, while CHRIST doesnt know, what to worry about. greetz r0
our physical composition and makeup are obviously determined by actions. i.e evolution. the desire and need of a bird to seek higher ground to avoid predators after X amount of generations will give them the capacity to eventually fly. All through focused willpower as a result of interacting with our environment? Far out.. when it comes to the topic of how we are physiologically composed for matters of spirit, theists of ancient religions like hinduism have been studying this law of cause of and effect for spirit, down to the subtely of not just merely every action, but through the nature of thoughts themselves. This is of course why all religions are based on ethical principle, so you might find yourself going back to, 'are ethics absolute, what is truth'? sort of debating. but let me add this quote by socrates: "in order that the mind should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can learn to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the good. hence there may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing" the ability to use your consciousness and put forth you entire spirit isn't allowed by some one gene, its basically the entire makeup of our being
Totally agree with you.
However, I do think that religion give us an evolutionary advantage: Religion makes us much better killers. Not individually, but in large groups.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
The existance of religion in general seems to be a by product of our storytelling nature, the nature which played a large part in our ability to out-compete neanderthals. We are after all not really wise men (homo sapiens) but rather storytelling apes (pans narratans) and our drive to make sense out of an incredibly complex universe is what makes us human. If anyone doubts the impact of following a certain religion on the evolutionary path of a tribe then they should really consider why the god of the jews and the muslims forbade them to eat pig flesh - the most parasite ridden meat you can find. This commandment prevented the investation of the followers by tapeworms and other nasty bastards, drastically lowering the amount of morbidity and mortality in the population. The religion (and the people) proliferated. Plus there's always the fact that devout followers are more likely to survive and procreate in a society that has a tendency to stone non-believers to death ;)
"In order that the mind should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can learn to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the good. Hence there may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing." chew on that and then tell me what effect a being's choices, thoughts, and actions have on their evolutionary development.
For most people, religious belief is a replacement for moral values, and for some it's the entire basis of their lives.
People who find meaning in life and have moral values without religion are really lucky. Most people would crash and burn when their most basic concepts are revealed to be just a mean to control them.
Daniel Dennett has some interesting views on how Darwin's theory affects religion.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
And when we die, will Heaven be filled with bananas and flea-ridden chimps who need picked over?
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Follow the lesson, then look at the biblical description of the origion of the universe. It's so close to the same to bring into question "Was this created?" Who Wrote the first book in the Bible and how did he know how the universe started when nobody else had a clue.
Leaving creation out of consideration does upset the church leadership and should upset the scientific community who are finding a strong corrolation between the two accounts.
Is this a joke? There is no correlation between the bible's description of creation (either one -- there are actually two creation accounts in the bible) and modern theories about what actually happened. Even ignoring the "6 days vs. 12 billion years" discrepancy, the order of creation in the bible is completely wrong. Plants before the sun? The earth before the stars? If you took each individual event mentioned in the creation account and scrambled them randomly, you'd likely wind up with a creation order that isn't much worse than the bible's.
I completely agree with you. The whole article is rife with the assumption that Christianity is the definitive religion and the central hypothesis is irreparably damaged by this oversight. As you point out, we don't have to look far to find non-theistic religions that can't be easily explained by say, over-enthusiastic agent detection.
"It's Dot Com!"
I think it's something in our Meme Complex.. It's evolved in the Meme complex over time and its a stable strategy over the evolutionary time period relative to meme evolution.
e _strategy
As such, it's hard NOT to believe in it... and it has evolved to the point that it does provide some help; that isn't to say that religion itself doesn't cause some harm and in no way am I evaluating if religion has a Net "good" or Net "hard" to society...
Exactly what help religion provides maybe about a clear as exactly what each type of gene goes; even when we know how a gene expresses itself, that doesn't' mean we know everything it does. When only know it has stood the test of time. My speculation is that believing deity and "holy" texts, is a lot like writing a program within a well defined operating system and operating environment. Which is to say, "you don't have to spend a lot of time on background tasks like drawing screens, memory management, etc. Your OS/GOD has worked out all the details, you just need to subscribe to all the updates and show up in "Church" at the specified intervals.
Please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stabl
http://www.hawknest.com/
Shhhh... he might here you!
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
What humans have is the ability to perceive infinity and eternity. Meaning: the ability to think on what's happening here and now, or what happened there and then, or what will happen somewhere and when, or even what's the meaning of everything during every time, without being limited by neither our surrounding environment nor current historical shapes. This ability to go beyond the ever changing immediate facts and sensations takes lots of forms. Religions and their myths are just one of these forms.
So, the moment you find the reason why humans can ask what they're made of, then discover DNA, then ask what genetics means, then interpret natural history through the lens of genetics, then human history too, etc., is the moment you find the reason why humans believe in gods. Both things have the same exact source: our ability to look further than whatever limit is placed there.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
...doesn't mean we need it... our brains have nicotine receptors as well. Why? I feel the same way about being hardwired for religion. It serves no purpose and has to be nothing more than an evolutionary left-over...like the appendix.
Prove it.
You can't? Well I can't prove one exists either.
Agnosticism is great;)
"Can one imagine a religion which believes "There are chosen people, but they're not us"
For everyone but Jews for Jesus, it's called "Christianity."
I beleive there are two major reasons for the "god" and the "afterlife" concepts: 1. it's very hard to accept that in the next moment you can just cease to exist. Just try to imagine it. It's very strange and maybe even scarry. 2. Politics. Most religions promise you the afterlife. It's not really hard to figure why. I mean, if your soliders knew (and beleived) they lived their one and only life they'd most probably find a better way to enjoy it than to die for some useless political goals. So, you have to offer them something: - reincarnation (just read the first few pages of the Bhagavad Gita and you'll understand) - endless life in heaven - virgins in the garden of eaden (I recommend reading Alamut by Vladimir Bartol; it's a fiction but worth reading) OK, maybe 3: Not beeing able to explain a perfectly natural phenomena (like drought etc.), which has a negative impact on a person or society. "This year there's no crops due to drought, I must have done something wrong to uppset the God. I'l sacrifise my youngest daughter to see if it helps." I'd thought we'd get past this stage by now, but... Since most people have problem accepting their death and / or live empty miserable lifes, religion kicks in nicely. I doubt it's genetics. And if it is, it's most defenitly a bug. On a side note: I do have my own little philosophy that hepls me accpet my death: in order to acknowledge you've died, you'd have to live past the moment of your death. Since that is most probably not the case, you'll never know you've died. But if you DO acknowledge your death, there must be some kind of afterlife. See, you just can't die!
Religion does (or at least did) confer a survival benefit by virtue of it conferring a survival benefit. People with religion want to breed with people of the same religion or lack thereof. If you're part of a religious minority group, then it's harder to find a mate. If those of the majority religious belief persecute minority beliefs, then it's even more difficult for minority (non)believers to find each other.
Note that this does not necessarily imply a biological instinct for belief although it seems likely that such would develop at least in some part of the population.
Atheists and agnostics (and various theists) spend a lot of time arguing over what atheism/agnosticism is or is not :] Ironically, the one thing I'm sure of from all the arguments is that none of them are unsure about what they (don't) believe, but not all of them (dis)believe the same things, either.
Or is He dead? Don't blame me, blame Nietzsche ;-) Cthulhu, on the other hand, is dead but dreaming...
^[:q!
Of course we're genetically hardwired to believe in supernatural deities. That's so the Vorlons, who appear to us as angels, can use the human telepaths they've also been engineering in their upcoming war against the Shadows. Manipulative bastards.
When your parents believe and the education/childhood is good, you likely believe as well.
When your parents are atheists, you likely become one as well.
There are examples of evolutional advantages, e.g. being a Jew/Moslem and not breeding/eating animals that live in their own shit (Pigs e.g.) might be preventing lots of illnesses.
OTOH living in africa and getting parts of the female sexual organs cut off is a wide spread religious rite but certainly gives the risk to die early.
If the religious/evolutionar researchers had any clue about religions they knew that most our days religions have common roots. In those roots man are more or less made after the image of The God, or The Gods. Read about "gnostics" a early christian faction, or any esotheric religion.
Bottom line, religions are traditions, or social rules, in some circumstances they are favoring breeding/evolution of man, but I really doubt if you put people onto islands as children they get any idea about gods from their own and I doubt even more that one single gene is in us making us believers or not.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Prove that I don't have a wonderful magical blue puppy (fluent in five languages, including the long-dead tongue of the Hittites) in my living room. You can't?
Do you see the problem? The burden of proof is on the claimant, not the claimee. Agnosticism is not a logically tenable position to hold.
Leaving creation out of consideration does upset the church leadership
So ff-ing what? religion is not science, the only overlap is that both try to give answers about the world. Religion uses invisible friends and all the nonsense humans can think of, science tries to come up with answers that are provable.
should upset the scientific community who are finding a strong corrolation between the two accounts.
Wrong. There are no 2 accounts, but billions of theories about creation. The smarter scientists who 'find a strong correlation between the 2 accounts' will know that correlation does not automatically make a causual relationship. Maybe the authors that wrote your big-bang creation story have heard that holy book story of yours too. Even if you don't believe in it, it is still part of your cultural influence.
I suggest you read the F-ing article, it's quite an interesting read. But I don't expect that your tunnelvision will allow you to absorb new knowledge. You'll probably distort it in such a way that it fits your fairy tale image of the world.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think Freud had it right when he posited that "God" is a needed projection; it/he/she takes the place of the love and order provided by our parents when we were young. Once you get a bit older and your parents die or you realize that you're basically on your own, inventing a deity that loves and protects you and who even has expectations of you goes a long way to ensuring the continuance of the parental umbrella. On an evolutionary level, belief in a higher power might be enough to encourage one to take that risky ocean voyage or war on a neighbor.
I don't know who I pity most, the devout atheist who lives in the empty materialist world or the blindfolded religious who use faith as anything more than a way of encapsulating the grandeur and humbling nature of our planet and our Universe. I suppose if it's only the subjectivity of the situation that matters then the religious come out on top seeing as they have everlasting glory to look forward to.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Anyone wanting some good reading material on this subject check out "How We Believe" by Michael Shermer. He's got some pretty good insight about religion and how it evolved and it's written from an athiest point of view.
Who is this Jimmy character, and why was he cracking corn in the first place?
"The science community should not limit the possibilities."
..."
..."
Actually, science does this all the time. It's called 'limiting the scope of investigation'. Generally put, if you're looking for an answer to a problem, you seek out the probability of each solution before investing too much time in it. Those that can easily be dismissed as 'improbable' are set aside until investigation on more probable candidate solutions have been fleshed out.
"How about the possibility of 'created that way'?"
Unfortunately, this one is highly improbable, not to mention logically problematic. First the probability.
If something were created, there would have to be a more complex entity than the creation existent to have created it. Since complex entities, by definition, arrive late in the game, the concept is shown to be very improbable.
As for the logical problem: if there was a complex entity to create this complex universe before it started, what created it? You can't actually answer that without exposing the relationship that intelligent design hold with scripture.
"Many believe there is a creator who put the order in place for things to grow and adapt."
"Leaving creation out of consideration does upset the church leadership
That is fine. Religious leadership have generally been angry throughout history.
"... and should upset the scientific community
Hm? Why?
"... who are finding a strong correlation between the two accounts."
What on earth are you talking about?
'Course, I should know better than to try and argue with someone who thinks ID is a reasonable avenue of inquiry. As above, including creation - or 'design' as has attempted to get snuck in - in scientific inquiry would be a bit like including electricity in theistic inquiry. It simply doesn't make sense, and is kind of a waste of time.
The most common argument of evidence for design is the makeup of DNA. Couldn't have gotten that way from chance, could it?
Well, no. But here's a task. Look into a bit of genetic 'black box' programming, apply your new understanding to that of natural selection, and get back to me.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Jung talked about the god-image--meaning the part of the psyche that wants to believe in a deity--decades ago. He then came under fire for turning belief into a psycology and challenged that he was an athiest. Both he and Jacobi defend what he meant.
Have you read my journal today?
--"A belief in God, be it Christian or Jewish (the two dominant samples, obviously) conferred survival advantages in the camps. It seems that men who had Someone to pray to, something to hope for, gained a psychological edge that could mean the difference between life and death under extreme conditions"
I didn't know you interviewed German POWs at the infamous Rheinwiesen Death Camps
http://www.rheinwiesenlager.de/andernach.htm
I'm not trying to disgress here too far but the atrocities enacted on German PoWs are something I'm sure
most Americans do not know about. Most people associate Germany's surrender with positive imagery of
liberation from Nazi rule andthe Berlin airlift. As always however there is however an uglier truth
lurking below the surface.
I'm sure someone will come up with a convoluted theory requiring a number of implausible conditions or variables leading up to this phenomenon that would not require God at all but [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor]Oc cam's razor[/URL] would tell us that: "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.". Note that nowhere in that does it say that God cannot be a variable. I would argue that saying that this phenomenon is the result of God's work is a far simpler and plausible explanation than anything any of you could come up with.
I can just see the atheists twitching at this very moment with huffing and puffing at a complete loss for words.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Most humans do not believe in god. It is ridiculous to say that belief in god is universal. It is ignorant and bigoted also.
Even if you add up all the Christians, Jews, and Muslims (who apparently believe in the same god) you only get to half the population of the world. And many of them do not believe, it is a mistake to count the heads of those who self-identify as Christian/Jewish/Muslim and assume 100% Believers. Some will tell you quite frankly that they are simply following the faith of their fathers. Some will tell you they want to believe but they don't. Some will tell you that's just fine. So even among "the religious" the true believers may be a minority, even a small minority.
Buddhism by definition does not allow for a supreme being. It is antithetical to Buddhism to equate the original Buddha with a supreme being.
When you say "are we hard-wired to believe in God?" you don't have to delve deep into the science of the brain to find out. You can just ask people. You can answer that question by simply looking at the statistics. Very few of us do. Therefore, no.
All of the god talk in this article is extra. It is totally bolted on to what little science there is in it. Further it is politically suspicious when someone says "God" and "Darwin" in the same breath. When in the next breath they tell you god is universal, then you know what kind of science you are getting.
Dawkins also compared a child's propensity to believe whatever it's parents tell it to computers and computer viruses. This may be over simplified for the /. crowd or cause disagreement, but he said that computers follow every instruction they are given whether it is good or bad - it has to, otherwise it wouldn't be a very useful computer. It makes them by design, susceptible to computer viruses in the same way that a child's mind is by design, susceptible to the 'virus' of religion. Just another interesting analogy from Dawkins book.
You may be agnostic, but are you theist or atheist? Saying "agnostic" is a cop-out, and not really an answer.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
First of all, the most atheistic among us do not cross our fingers during turbulence. That's the kind of unprovable truism that these religion-obsessed researchers always trot out. I have been in a few life-threatening situations in my time, and I have never been overcome by some sudden wave of belief. And to take people's hesitation to put their hand into a box that they've been warned destroys things as evidence of latent religion is really, really reaching. I mean, the guy who tells you that the box knows your sentiments towards religion is obviously a nut -- who's gonna put their hand in his destroy-o-box?
The whole premise of this article is deeply flawed: "When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation," it says, but the spectrum of belief is so wide that characterizing it as a single thing, a "universal trait" is just nonsense. When Europeans came to America, they called the people they found there devil worshippers, because they could only see those people's beliefs in terms of their own. This is just more of the same. I refuse to put my hand in Dr. Crazy's box, and he chalks it up as proof that I share some ridiculous belief of his.
Some people just can't stand the idea that the human mind works fine without gods. Sorry, folks, but it does.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
Has anyone else noticed that creepy trolls come out of the woodwork to stalk HLiLJ?
Hustlers exist solely through charity. I see their scams, lies, and deceit: I'm too charitable to outright shoot them.
Perhaps true. Ignosticism, on the other hand, is probably the only logically tenable position to hold. But then some consider ignosticism to be a form of agnosticism anyway...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Omnes stulti sunt.
"Religion has by far been the most destructive motivational force on the face of the planet. "
Written by someone who is almost certainly a member of Western Civilization this is pretty strange. The Humanist ethics considered the norm in Western Countries are the direct outgrowth of Christian morals.
There are plenty of other morals to choose from. Choose them if you want to be free of Christian taint.
Coward.
Foo'-Mo'-D says,"Wutup foo?"
I took a class in English literature once, and the prof noted that the first book that we had to read was the Bible if we wanted to look at English writing critically. That implies that the ideas in the Christian Bible permeate the language. A study of "genetic origins of the supernatural" would then be very difficult as the language that questions are posed in could influence the outcome. More specifically, a speaker of English has very likely been exposed to the idea of "god" even if they do not subscribe to it. Furthermore, you'd have to here the idea of "god" to reject it, so I wonder if it is possible to distinguish between an innate tendency and the side-effects of exposure to the idea.
So many things in the culture I grew up in suggest the supernatural, even outside of religion. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny. Santa Claus. These are all entities that are described to the youngest children, but they are supernatural. I think that would constitute exposure to the idea at any rate.
To summarize, I am not trying to dismiss the ideas of either side, but suggest that questioning modern humans will be difficult. Also I think that the surviving artifacts of ancient human culture would tend to be on the religious/supernatural side as religion is an excellent tool for control. Call it the calculation of a shrewed leader or a corrupter of the religion, history shows this to have happened.
I pointed out in a different post that the human mind uses a simple ploy to keep operating smoothly. That is, the conscious mental model of reality differs subtly from subjective reality. This mechanism is used constantly to keep out details or ideas that would be distracting. For example, someone living in a warzone and someone living in a suburban North American area. Both have daily routines they go through, but one is much more life-threatening than the other. Both would notice anomalies in their environments, but they are, again, vastly different. Why ramble on with a pointless example? To back those posters that have already indicated that belief in the supernatural could be beneficial. The mechanism described above provides a possible means. Psychology research (sorry, don't have any studies handy to quote) has demonstrated this mechanism is present and useful to the individual.
Given that it is possible, I re-iterate that I don't think we can tell if the "supernatural" is a cultural suggestion, supported by a built-in mechanism, or a separate mechanism.
"You need a license to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp." - Red Green
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're not important, I'm not important. Ego be damned.
The meaning of life is simple. Procreation.
I'm one of those people who goes back and forth on ideas of God a lot, but one thing I know for sure is I don't believe in hell. Being a father is the closest thing I can acquaint to the idea of a God - and as a Father I could never condemn my son to such a thing, for any act.
Another thing I believe, as a father, is that the most hurtful thing a son can do to his father is deny him.
Lastly, while I do question all these things frequently - I also believe that if there is a God - he made me this way. He gave me this ability to question these things, and what father would condemn his son to eternal damnation for merely doing what is natural?
Certainly no father I'd care to believe in.
People think and see crazy things while some guy fiddles with his brain. Really! That is odd.
As far as science can tell, religion is absolutely false. I do think it is a proposition worth looking into, but we have. The world doesn't fit what we would expect to find if religion were true. In fact, the world we have is exactly like the world we should have if there were no gods.
There certainly exists some reasons for seeing aliens or angels and those reasons are fairly interesting. We have managed to trigger certain parts of the brain which give people either a religious experience or of aliens. Hard evidence for their existence is a waste of time, but finding why you see them is a fairly important point.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Man is not the most fierce, or the fastest, or the most capable at hiding. We are not as efficient as the plants (photosynthesis is so much easier than having to kill other organisms). The only things we really have going for us are our ability to form plans, strategies, to work together to meet common goals, and to take up for others, so that we, as a collective can have a higher survival rate.
It is easy to tell someone these things, but making him or her really believe it, so much so that said person is willing to put aside his or her own selfishness for the good of society, is a little more difficult. The desire to be part of a collective, to conform to their ways, and to believe that we are serving something greater than ourselves is a pretty powerful behavior.
It was a beer commercial a few years ago... but the question remains. The answer of course is that "Why" is a question that any creature as dependent on thinking as we are, will ALWAYS have to ask, or suffer the ignominious consequences of genetic defeat. So the "Why" question is hardwired into us. As anyone who's ever raised kids will realize. When we come to a question we can't get a "Because" for, it makes us damned uncomfortable. It increases stress levels and depending on the level of education and natural ability, those questions can become more or less frequent. God (and religion) is a marvelous way to quiet that endless and impossible to fully satisfy "why". It leaves an internal peace where there was just uncertainty before, and strangely enough, that is one of the things the religious folks among us describe. Such internal peace instead of stress would go a long way to explain survival in-extremis cases as well. So yes, we are hardwired for it... and the less we know, the harder the wires. I got my nomex suit handy now. BJ
-beware the man of one book
Furthermore, the organism is likely incapable of creating a god any greater than itself. Most deities seem to have all the wonderful flaws of character that humans have --- jealousy, anger, hatred, etc.
The post war change in belief patterns in Europe (towards Atheism) must border on the miraculous if this article's claim of a genetic basis to belief is to be credited. Such rapid genetic change is unprecedented. Another case of "America = The whole world".
> If there is something (indicating that nothing is not everything) then there must be something which knows everything.
Sorry, I don't see how that follows.
His question was trying to shift the burden of proof to the other side. Which you correctly noted, but that isn't agnosticism. Agnosticism is the idea that you can't know whether or not god exists. Either weakly in that you just don't know or strongly in that proof isn't possible. However, this question is different from the questions of whether or not you believe in god(s) or whether or not there is a god.
I am never agnostic about the absurd.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Look at it this way:
If God is our father and we are here to learn to be like him, then some are going to be better at that than others. Let's say you have two kids - one is dutiful, always listens, and is completely trustworthy. The other is a druggy, always take the easy way out, etc. Now you are retiring and you want to leave the family business to one of them. Obviously, you choose the dutiful one. The other one believes that you are leaving him in hell - but really, he just made his own hell.
I don't think God sends people to hell for the most part - he just elevates people out of it.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I'm new to the internet debates on this subject, and I've only looked at the top level posts for this article, so my apologizes if I'm beating a dead horse. I don't understand why the belief in God would come from a fear of death. At least when I've thought about it, the order is reversed. If there is no afterlife, etc. then death is no problem at all since I cease to be aware of anything once I die. Death is only a problem if I continue to be aware of something bad after I die. So, I only seem to have a rational reason for fearing death if I believe in an afterlife where I could be punished. Similarly, I have no reason to fear anything in life as long as I can escape it all through death. So, I don't understand the 'God comes from fear of death' argument, besides a glib 'people are irrational' jab. But, that's just the easy way out, since you can just say that whenever anyone disagrees with your point of view. If someone could give me a more rational defense of that argument it would be appreciated.
(3) Be chased around by a giant spider for all eternity
or
(4) Relive the same life you just lived, but everything tastes like crab
or
(n) Be reincarnated as Oprah's workout thong?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I humbly suggest that before you decide what to believe
that you look into what is known (or hypothesized, or believed)
about what belief actually is,
-and look into the general reasons why you should or should
not believe proposition X, whatever X is,
-and look into what sorts of factors should make you believe
X more strongly or less strongly.
A lot of people are really confident about what their beliefs are,
without reflecting much on what that means, or on what it should
mean, in order for them to be acting rationally.
I suggest starting out by looking into reason-maintenance-systems,
the philosophy of scientific revolutions, logical inconsistency,
godel's incompleteness theorem, possible worlds logic (model theory),
bayesian inference,
zen buddhist ideas about the limitations of ideas, and so on.
Then get back to us on what you believe, but more importantly,
why you believe X, and why strongly, and why you are justified
and rational in believing as you do.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
> There is no correlation between the bible's description of creation and modern theories about what actually happened.
Exactly! Thats' why early church father Origen wrote:
"What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first, second and third days in which the evening is named and the morning, were without sun, moon and stars, and the first day without a heaven. What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in paradise in Eden, like a husbandman, and planted therein the tree of life, perceptible to the eyes and senses, which gave life to the eater thereof; and another tree which gave to the eater thereof a knowledge of good and evil? I believe that every man must hold these things for images, under which the hidden sense lies concealed." (Origen - Huet., Prigeniana, 167 Franck, p. 142)
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
If you don't know then you are not supposed to know, for if you did, then your experience here might not be quite the same. And it could be that not knowing is a choice you made for this trip.
Science has come up with explanations for the out of body experiences some have had.
All the so called miracles in the bible are explainable in terms of common sense and without breaking any laws of physics.
The catholic Church exonerated Galileo in the early 1990's, and there are many other examples of man believing something even long after evidence to the contrary is in wide use.
Do you continue on after body death? Sure you do, even physics support it in conversion of energy. Though we don't often account for consciousness, the energy of it.
Is there a one god? Just ask any religion and recognize the answer given. "there is a god and he/she is my god, not yours" should be enough evidence to say no religion has it right. But that doesn't mean there is no continuation after body death.
Here is a thought: IS there anything in your conscious existance that says existing is easy? And with the obvious answer What makes you think there is nothing after death?
many say Jesus loves you, yes he does...
I say Murphy loves you more. He keeps you guessing..
Measuring something is easy - it is knowing what you are measuring that is the hard part.
I suspect that this study might have its share of assumptions and flaws.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
The benefit has to be for the genes of the believer for there to be a genetic advantage, and lets not forget that you share most of your genes with your family and probably those who live close by.
If a belief in an afterlife causes you to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of your siblings children, you may well lose out personally, but the genes you and your siblings share may benefit overall...
Your genes aren't necessarily working for your benefit.
Deleted
The proof is easy. In short, a being that is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent cannot exist in a universe that contains evil. Evil exists. Therefore, God does not exist. QED. No need to make any circuitious arguments about the existence or nonexistence of God, and you can now feel good about being an athiest. God is a logical fallacy.
Sure, you can give up any one of the three O's and my argument falls apart, but then, that's not the same God {Christians, Jews, Muslims} are talking about, is it?
I have yet to meet a single person who expressed his or her disbelief in ferries, or any other mode of marine transportation.
"Cansuh? Geddoudduh here!"
"I'm a Laver, not a Phyto[plankton]"
I guess my point is, your post had a tone of "What has religion done for me?". I was pointing out something large and obvious.
Literally atheism means not being a theist, and all of us are that. I don't expect you to have a belief in e.g. Zeus, Morrigan or Seth. This would make you an atheist regarding these gods. Then again, strong and weak atheism are defined differently. Strong atheism says that there is no god (or even, not one god). Weak atheist just does not believe in god. There is a difference, as not believing in god is different than being sure that god does not exist. These, both, are forms of atheism. Agnosticism is different, it's actually being unsure if you believe in a god or not. A weak atheist does not believe in god, and a strong atheist believes that god does not exist. It shouldn't be that confusing, really. Many ppl who think they are agnostics are actually weak atheists. And all of us are atheist regarding some deities.
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
I think you're right.
I also remember reading somewhere that early christianity helped the grow of civilization because it finally ended with the practice of child murdering.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
It's just another data point and not connected - the standard of education is declining and is a serious problem. For example - a public high school in Bangladesh will teach the most able students calculus while there are many public and even private high schools in the USA that don't.
The main reason for a polytheism/monotheism believe system is easy to explain. It is to explain the unknown. If there is one thing people are afraid of, it's the unknown. Look at the Greeks and Romans. They had a god for everything that couldn't be explained. (ie. Apollo = Sun, Selene = Moon) Over time science and human discovery had weeded these myths down. I would say that almost all religions are down to a monotheism system to explain the last mysteries in our lives. I also agree with a previous post that when people start contemplating death, that a belief system is bound to develop. Personally, I am happy that people can draw strength and courage from a god in their daily lives however I think people take the "god" think a little too far.
Unfortunately, this one is highly improbable, not to mention logically problematic. First the probability.
If something were created, there would have to be a more complex entity than the creation existent to have created it. Since complex entities, by definition, arrive late in the game, the concept is shown to be very improbable.
What do you mean by "complex entities, by definition, arrive late in the game"? You seem to be assuming a lot. If there is a "complex entity" that created us, why does it necessarily have to "arrive" at all? (more about this below) If it is improbable that some "complex entity" that could have created us exists, then why is it not also improbable that we humans (being rather complex ourselves) exist? As for the logical problem: if there was a complex entity to create this complex universe before it started, what created it? You can't actually answer that without exposing the relationship that intelligent design hold with scripture.
Why does the "complex entity" need something to have created it? You either have to regress infinitely (something greater created the "complex entity," which itself must have been created by something greater, etc.), or you eventually have to come to something that was not created. We can apply this more broadly. Where did all the matter/energy in the universe come from? Either it is infinite, or at some point it was created. 'Course, I should know better than to try and argue with someone who thinks ID is a reasonable avenue of inquiry. As above, including creation - or 'design' as has attempted to get snuck in - in scientific inquiry would be a bit like including electricity in theistic inquiry. It simply doesn't make sense, and is kind of a waste of time.
Why shouldn't electricity be included in theistic inquiry? If the world was created by God, then electricity is part of that creation and studying it would be part of studying that creation. Does the creation not tell something about the creator?
Consider for a moment that we and the universe was created by some "complex entity" and we knew that for a fact (work with me, just suppose it, okay?
Well, no. But here's a task. Look into a bit of genetic 'black box' programming, apply your new understanding to that of natural selection, and get back to me.
Genetic programming is an interesting field, and honestly I do not know much about it. But chew on these questions: Did the algorithms used in genetic programming happen by chance? What about the computer they are running on? Are there no parameters needed to be specified by someone? Has it ever happened that while trying to solve one problem with a genetic algorithm, it went on to solve another problem? Remember if we are going to rely completely on chance, any "intelligence" or outside influence at all must be removed. If you want true chance, stream some random bits through your processor as instructions and see how far it gets with that.
Belief in God is a fairly complex concept. Genes encode proteins. Not complex thoughts. There are very basic survival instincts that can be conferred genetically, but even something as simple as not crawling off the side of a cliff is a learned behavior that doesn't happen for a while after we're born and that's a hell of a lot more important for survival.
There's simply no way genes can be responsible for encoding thoughts as complex as belief in a higher being. It's simply an artifact of being reflective beings that have the ability to think about things beyond our immediate surroundings. There's a comfort that comes with believing in a God or some other higher power. It gives us the ability to relinquish control and responsibility for everything, which is something we generally need. We need to feel like things have a purpose and having a God or higher power helps to provide that. But it's not genetic.
People wanted to believe the universe revolved around the earth, because it makes us feel more important.
People want to believe that when humans die they have an after life because it comforts them.
People like to believe that humans are the only mammals that go to heaven and anybody who does not act or believe like them does not get access, because again it makes us feel important. Observe the people around you, and you will notice these things.
I believe there may also be a genetic basis for the "us" and "them" mentality. It brings unity and there is strength in numbers. People tend to group together based on their social clicks, where they are from, their skin color, the school they went to, the sports they played etc.
People bond over the dumbest things but just about all people (and many other animals) have this same trait. This grouping would obviously carry survival advantages.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
We are analytical creatures. God isn't hardwired into our brains -- deities take so many functions, forms, numbers, etc -- but comes about as the natural result of trying to understand that which is outside of our ability to perceive. For the earlier people, deities served to explain everything about the universe and everything had a strict order. As science began to come about, deities took smaller and smaller roles in our understanding of the universe -- no longer was it required to have a God to explain why something falls. Of course, there are always going to be limits to what we understand, as there is no way to understand when we have reached the boundaries of our knowledge -- only methods of estimation. God now rests and dwells in these positions, taking a smaller role as the spark in the universe, that which lies in the gaps of our knowledge.
If God is hardwired, then at what point does God stop and our natural analysis begin?
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
And saying you don't know is a cop-out, and not really an answer.
There's a reason such things are in built? Or shall we just forget all logic and reason and confuse everyone.
It is more logical to believe there is a God when our genetics make up everything we are, and therefore were created by God.
It's illogical to think that there is no God when everything in the world points towards one.
Pronunciation[hyoo-bris, hoo-]
-noun excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.
example:
"Eventually the geneticist's hubris became evident."
You're right, it WOULD. But that does not explain why he would leave the remaining 8% in the cold. Nor does it account for people who switch from atheist to religious, or vice versa. It also fails to explain why some religions are mutually exclusive. (A person who keeps the 10 Commandments, for instance, cannot be a hindu or a buddist, since the first commandment rules out worshipping any other gods, and those religions are polytheistic.)
Back to the argument about atheists who convert, are they claiming that the very genes of such people have changed?
To carry the examination further, the hypothesis does not explain why the LORD would predetermine the absence of faith, and then punish those who were deprived of the "faith gene".
I think it is flawed to claim that human free will, in particular where matters of the spirit are concerned, is 100% subject to material constraints. (i.e. protein, tissue and DNA) Perhaps the material (the DNA) is subject to SPIRITUAL constraints. That would really get some people thinking, now, wouldn't it.
I would be deeply surprised if the experimenters had taken the time (or given the consideration) to examine the DNA of people BEFORE and AFTER they had converted from atheist to religious (or vice versa).
To claim that religion/non-religion boils down to genetics merely makes excuses for those who don't believe, and it also makes excuses for those who don't help the ones who don't believe.
The sins of atheists are still sins, and the silence of believers is still silence. If you know there's a person who goes every day without prayer, and rather than saying "it's in their genes, forget about it", it is better to say "there are atheists who have converted; I will talk to them; I will pray for them."
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Saying that they are "hardwired to believe in a supernatural god" makes it sounds like that's its purpose. However, evolution doesn't work with purpose or goals in mind, it simply uses what works. That is, the evolutionarily important part is that you feel someone is watching you (that keeps people in line), the supernatural part is simply a post-hoc rationalization that people come up with to explain that feeling.
Harmony of the spheres depends on 1 Alpha (person)to govern over us all. The Placebo effect is WHY God works for some of us. Simple. The mind is a powerful thing, which brings me to point #2 Electric/magnetic fields connect all parts of the universe through a plasma grid of some sort. The Electric Sun Theory. A sort of 'God Grid?' Is God a Grid, Or an Alpha human? Even to our brains, it might be possible magnetically, that there is a connection to the grid, of sorts. Might be why we stargaze. The 'Grow Old Timber' dude
(I'd love to have time to read anything but a skim of the 4+ comments on this thread, and to also eventually to have time to write something of general benefit, but this is all I can afford ... I haven't tried to treat your first line of concepts - the psychological explanations for belief, which is a worthwhile topic in itself - as that would hook me in too deep and perhaps require *much* more conversation, but the last point is one I'd like to offer some thoughts towards.)
Yes, this ("""When you look to other religions and say "that's ridiculous" at the idea of a wine god or a god with the head of an elephant or spirits and ferries or Zeus or Thor wielding his hammer, have you ever considered one thing.... is your religion any less ridiculous????""") has become a very specific component-aspect of some sort of coalescence of generalised theory I'm trying to groom for eventual public consumption; which I hope will eventually be both pragmatic and affirmative, permitting people to hold and promote distinctive individual or corporate supernatural or counter-supernatural theories, without having that sour backlash either of zealotry, ultra-homogeneity or self-certain superiority, except in misinterpretation.
Your point is fine, and my take on this is something like a "principle of uniform credibility": that a variety of human qualities are more probably uniformly distributed across the world's societies than we would generally like to imagine: ie: intelligence, honesty, personal credibility, moral goodness, altruism, etc are probably aspects of the human being that are equally gifted to people in all nations and people groups, even the ones we (whoever that may be) think are of minimal integrity/credibility.
For completeness and to survive the critique of self-application, all comers to the field of "theories of existence" must be afforded the same basic respect and dignity, without the need for a co-condition of agreeing to *subscribe* to the alternate theory. This doesn't mean that "Everyone's own theory is right for them", it means: "Well, you may be right, but I am not yet convinced and am satisfied to continue to hold and/or promote my own thoughts on the matter; and neither, either or both of us could *ultimately* be shown to be right. You may continue to labour for my 'conversion' (if that is what your world-view implores) and I will listen to you with honesty, and I may continue to labour for your 'conversion' (if that is what my world-view implores) and hope for you to listen with honesty - and both of us are being honest to our own stance."
Sure some have built up folklore (that word is not intended as an insult!) and knowledge bases that have more or less questionably independent sources of information, but the *persons themselves* are (in a bell curve) both intelligent and honest about their uptake of these things, and to dismiss a world-view is to dismiss an entire population's personal integrity and intelligence. What I'm saying is that the bell curves of these qualities (if they could be measured) probably map reasonably equitably from culture to culture across the world.
So my outcome of this is that it is self-demeaning to dismiss out-of-hand any other world-view as being a mere "power-play utilised to oppress and control the masses" (post-modernist critique) or a mindless herd-mentality if you like, or even a purely psycho-biological survival mechanism, let alone any of the even more questionably biased supernaturally-based criticisms of other world-views, as an auto-dismissive approach equates to a self appointment (either personal or corporate) as being the only one(s) who are actually honest and intelligent about their approach to reasoning out and testing out their own world-view with integrity.
If you have read this far, thank you for thinking about this aspect, and I'll try to read replies if any come so that I can think about your critique and revise my work. I'd be interested to engage in this at length some time as this is only on
Just because you choose to arrive at nihilism and hedonism does not mean it need be that way.
Others would be apt to think that the point is one's legacy i.e; contributions to the progress
of human knowledge. How does a genetic predisposition towards believing in invisible friends
relate to that?
Were that I say, pancakes?
You have presented what amounts to a really confusing version of Anselm's Ontological Argument, involving the greatest conceivable being. Most philosophers do not believe that it works as a proof for god, according to Graham Oppy's "Ontological Arguments" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gaunilo's Island is one of the earliest counterarguments, and Hume made a very nice general argument against a priori arguments in general.
Abraham.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Religion has served it's purpose. It was required during the formation of early civilizations. It was something more powerful than all of us and kept everyone from killing each other. Now (and for the last couple of thousand years) it is instead the reason we kill each other. It gives us false hope, breeds ignorance, and divides us. It tells us that we should believe things with reason. It discourages us from testing those beliefs. It is the antithesis of progress.
I am not hardwired to believe anything. My beliefs are shaped by my experiences, and observations. I gather evidence, and attempt to be rational when knowledge allows. Through observations of the world around me I have come to the conclusion that mankind is not a creation of god, but god is a creation of mankind. I DO NOT believe your fairy tales. I DO NOT fear your hell. I WILL NOT suffer your god's wrath. I WILL NOT fall prey to ignorance.
If you must!
In Western Europe the belief in the supernatural is a lot less than in the US and other more primitive countries. Studies in the finding the relative belief in the supernatural both between countries and between individuals, have come up with these findings:
1. The higher the general educational level in a nation the lower the belief in the supernatural.
2. The higher the educational level of an individual the greater the probability they will not believe in the supernatural.
The US is an exception to observation 1. , but observation 2. applies there, viz. the above Nobel prizewinners. The population of the US and Europe has a very similar genetic make up due to recent immigration over the last few centuries. Therefore the the large percentage difference in belief in the supernatural between the two populations is due to cultural, social and historical differences not genetic.
In the medievial period open disbelief in the supernatural was extremely rare, following the Enlightenment absence of belief in the supernatural become much more common, especialy amongst the increasing numbers with a scientific education. There was not a huge genetic change that occured over a couple of hundred years, no it was again social and cultural changes that lead to increasing disbelief.
So the conclusion we reach is that belief in the supernatural is culturally, socially and historically dependant not genetically dependant. So why is belief in the supernatural so widespread especially in societies with a lower general educational level and amongst the less educated. The answer it is a product of social evolution not biological evolution. In more primitive societies it probably poved useful in creating social cohesion in tribal groups and nations. In the modern post-Enlightrnment era its usefulness is more problematic and indeed may be pathological.
The meat is weak, but having confronted my own mortailty I can say that faith offers no better protection from psychological stress than resignation. "I admit that I cannot guarantee my own survival, so when my best effort falls short I accept death."
Since I have offered a counter example, faith is no longer a necessary condition. It remains to be seen whether faith is a sufficient condition for psychological survival.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
Always cracks me up! Check out the International Square Earth Society:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShMlZsjBeec
I'm really looking forward to the "one true religion". Now, let me see, it will: 1. Hand out money to all comers, instead of having a hand out for money 2. Tell us that we should "go for it" here, because the afterlife is bit of a bitch 3. Preach good will towards all other creeds and religions, regardless of what they believe to be true 4. Give us this dfay our daily bread (and butter, and jam, and...) 5. Have a special place reserved for used car salesmen, politicians, dog catchers, parking inspectors and other sundry low lifes And I haven't even started on the 42 virgins here on earth, either!
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
damn snakes
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
reminds me of an old Marx saying,,
"Religion is the opiate of the masses"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
..because as we all know, there are very few Atheists in prison. Ironic isn't it
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
No, not the belief in angels, demons and religion. Curiosity and that we hate things we can't explore is what's hardwired into us.
We are explorers, researchers, we're curious. We want to know. Mostly out of the drive that we can't stand not knowing something. The unknown is inherently threatening to us. Think back of your childhood days when those shadows and noises you saw and heard at night were threatening, but only until you found out what it was. Then everything was just fine.
Death is something we cannot explore. So it is threatening us, we fear it. We are the only animal on this planet (as far as I know) that is able to reflect about itself and think of its future. And we all know we're gonna die. Sooner or later, but one thing's certain: We will. There's nothing we can do to avoid it. And since we don't know what's waiting afterwards, and there is no way to find out, it is something that would drive us nuts.
Few people are atheists when they know it's about time to die. And those who are usually either go mad with fright or cry helplessly.
Religion now uses this problem we're in. Every religion has some kind of afterlife implemented, giving us an explanation for something we can't explore and research. It offers easily understandable answers for something that can't be solved any other way.
It also offered answers in other areas that we couldn't figure out, like the universe or the past of the world. Also something pretty much every religion deals with. The question where we come from and what was before there was something, the question of how it all started. And many also deal with the question how it's gonna end.
That it is human nature to want those answers can easily be seen by our scientific community. We don't do astronomy, geology and archaeology just to prove that the bible ain't right. Most researchers I know couldn't care less about that. They want to provide for one of human's deepest, most fundamental drive: Answering the questions of our origin, of our creation, or our ending.
That's what's probably in our genetic makeup, the need to know, the need to find out, the need to get answers. Religion is only the tool to satisfy that thirst.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Religion has served it's purpose. It was required during the formation of early civilizations. It was something more powerful than all of us and kept everyone from killing each other. Now (and for the last couple of thousand years) it is instead the reason we kill each other. It gives us false hope, breeds ignorance, and divides us. It tells us that we should believe things without reason. It discourages us from testing those beliefs. It is the antithesis of progress.
I am not hardwired to believe anything. My beliefs are shaped by my experiences, and observations. I gather evidence, and attempt to be rational when knowledge allows. Through observations of the world around me I have come to the conclusion that mankind is not a creation of god, but god is a creation of mankind. I DO NOT believe your fairy tales. I DO NOT fear your hell. I WILL NOT suffer your god's wrath. I WILL NOT fall prey to ignorance.
If you must!
I'm really looking forward to the "one true religion". Now, let me see, it will:
1. Hand out money to all comers, instead of having a hand out for money
2. Tell us that we should "go for it" here, because the afterlife is bit of a bitch
3. Preach good will towards all other creeds and religions, regardless of what they believe to be true
4. Give us this dfay our daily bread (and butter, and jam, and...)
5. Have a special place reserved for used car salesmen, politicians, dog catchers, parking inspectors and other sundry low lifes
And I haven't given up on the 42 virgins here on earth yet, either!
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
I read this book on the topic of how natural functions of the brain easily lead to the creation of 'god':
Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (Paperback) by Andrew Md Newberg (Author), Eugene G. D'Aquili (Author), Vince Rause (Author)
It gives good science, some annecdotes, and talks through reasonable conclusions for the data research presents. It tries to be objective, the authors are almost coy in avoiding to sound too scientific or too religious. It is a hard read in places (biology and neuroscience stuff), but it was good to fill my head with some well thought out data based conclusions, thus making it easier to reach my own conclusions.
Us trying to reduce God to a genetic advantage is like when the smart computers of the future, who no longer believe in humans, all of a sudden notice that have these things called keyboards attached to themselves and who go to great pains to explain that the keyboards must have arisen because they happen to provide mysterious input that makes computers run better. God must get quite a chuckle over our mental gymnastics sometimes :-)
Even if belief in a supernatural being WERE part of our genetic makeup...
..it was pretty much discussed several hundred years ago with Rene Descartes' "The Existence of God". He suggests that we have prior knowledge of God which we are born with. This seems pretty similar.
Do not mark in this space. For official office use only.
Or it could be that the logical individual does the "right" thing because of a variation of the prisoner's dilemma. A normal prisoner's dilemma has only two players, but in our variation we'll say we have as many players as are in the society. Each player has two options per "turn": Behave (play nice, don't steal, don't murder), or Betray (kill, rape, pillage, et cetera).
In the classical prisoners' dilemma, if both parties betray, both parties lose a lot, and if neither party betrays then both parties lose to a lesser extent. In the real world, if everyone steals and murders and whatnot, everyone loses. But if everyone cooperates then nobody really loses. Of course, if only one person betrays, that person can win a bit at the expense of everyone else. But most societies catch on to betrayers pretty quick, and dispose of them. The optimal solution for the society as a whole is one in which everyone behaves, and societies with a large number of betrayers fall behind and stay behind, I'd imagine (witness most of Africa, where bands of militias steal from others within the society).
In short, most people behave for two reasons. The first is because it would suck to live in a world where everyone misbehaved. The second is that the penalty for being caught is usually more than the potential gains from betraying. (As a side note, different cultures define "misbehavior" in different ways and have different rules for how much a betrayer loses when caught, which is why you get your hand cut off for stealing in certain countries and a slap on the wrist in others.)
We have also managed to trigger parts of the brain which give people the experience of color, light, smells, memories, sounds, tastes, movement, and sensations. Based on the brain-part triggers, I am no more convinced that the religious experience is not a genuine perception of something that exists independently from us, than that there exists nothing independent from us to smell, taste, see, etc.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Religion is the result of smarter people taking advantage of simpler people. Although I support neither politics nor clergy, I think if I was interested in getting rich while controlling lots of other people, I would do whatever it took to become a member of the clergy!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
Well said.
The doors of hell are closed from the inside.
If perception is overly conservative and has false positives it is better than missing the occasional threat.
I had a cat that developed an aversion to ripples in my bedspread. I didn't even have an arm under the bedspread playing with it. It was just walking across the bed one day , put a paw on a ripple in the cloth and something about the way it sprung back made it jump. It avoided ripples on my bed for a couple years. I can only speculate that in considering bedspread ripples a threat it was interpreting an animism to them. Before you think that is going too far think about how a cat reacts to something like a CD tray opening, or, more interesting because there is sound but no external observable movement, something like a VCR starting up a timed recording. Certainly humans are equally spooked by false positives like the "person in the doorway" out of the corner of our eye who isn't there. Couple some of these psychological tendencies with the drive to be part of a community and believe the community mythos and you have organized religion.
My favorite human bad causal reasonings are ones that reflect unthinking egotism. "After surviving this plane crash, I _have_ to believe in God! Even though he took the head off the guy sitting next to me!"
Perhaps most humans like to believe that they will not die once they establish a concept of dying and therefore will themselves to believe that there is likely something beyond death to ease their fear of death? I know this sounds pretty far fetched but it is a posibility...
meridian at tha.net
Quite a coincidence...or is it?
cat
A particular religion is often painted as the only source for morality (substitute your own locally popular religion--in the case of me as an American, it's Christianity) when it appears that cultures all over the world have ended up coming up with large overlaps in their moral codes, indicating that we don't really owe that to religion so much as necessity as social beings. I don't think that "Keep Holy the Sabbath" is necessarily something I should be thankful for--at least not in the same sense as I'm thankful for the idea that most people aren't interested in murdering me. Really, I think that Christianity was in the right place at the right time to get credit for Western moral values, and that fact is causing us a lot of heartburn. How many people are so confused about morality that they think that anybody who doesn't share their religious traditions can't possible be a moral being?
I think that religion in general gets way too much play as The Source of Morality. Listening to the whims of an unmeasurable invisible entity, while often having great results, isn't necessarily the safest way to build a moral code. Sure it's all good and fine when your deity says "Don't steal that guy's stuff" but what about when that deity starts asking for virgin sacrifices or the extermination of the left-handed? When social moral codes are imposed arbitrarily without an opportunity for discussion (at least, not beyond, "Ahhh! Please don't burn me at the stake!"), you're seriously rolling the dice.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
One belief that C.S. Lewis espoused was that one can only go to Hell if one, in fact, chooses to. Since (to Christians) God is the source of all goodness, if you choose to isolate yourself from God you isolate yourself from all that is good and pure. He phrased it something like this: "There are two kinds of people in this world - those who tell God 'Thy will be done,' and those who God tells 'Thy will be done.' The gates of hell are locked from *the inside*." People who end up in Hell choose to consign themselves to the outer darkness of non-entity rather than submit themselves to God.
Do you think it would be better to say that any change that occurs - whatever it's attributed to (God/Jesus, the person having newfound motivation, etc.) - is due to psychological experiences rather than genetics?
Isn't the purpose of this article to say that the whole general concept of religion (just the very fact that it exists) has origins in "evolution or some neurological accident?" I don't think it was proposing that life changes have been due to shift in genetics.
Agnosticism was an attempt to soften the absolutist tone of atheism. The position was that there's little or (more likely) no credible evidence supporting the existence of a deity, but it's logically difficult to prove a negative, so there's always going to be a provisional element in such a judgement. This is very different from a position of being undecided. It's quite possible to be agnostic but to believe that the evidence in support of atheism is somewhere between "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "beyond the shadow of a doubt." But if a deity showed up tomorrow and bought me a Guinness, or unzipped the sky from the horizon, the preponderance of evidence would shift. Meanwhile, I'm not going to be out slaughtering ruminants on the solstice Just In Case. Pascal's Wager doesn't make sense when you have mutually contradictory religious beliefs to choose from.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
I'll take a guess, based on "America's Christianity" and the makeup of Slashdot, that you are European.
You might want to recall what the religeous fanatics did 100 to 400 years ago: they moved from Europe to America.
So the populations have different genetics today. Americans are more restless, adventurous, imaginative, risk-accepting... and religeous.
God created the devil. How can he be all good and the source of all goodness if he knowingly created the devil. As most christians seem to forget lucifer/devil was an angel. So the very same place you call heaven is the same place that created evil and the devil.
Evil is simply the corruption of good. God gave the beings he created the gift of free will so that they would not be mere automatons. Inherent in free will is the ability to choose to do something against God's will. Satan was once good, but his ambition and desire to have power separate from God's caused him to be cast out (or, some would say, cast himself out) of Heaven. We have the same free will, and we have the same choices to use our power for good or for evil. I highly suggest you read "Mere Christianity." It explains things much better than I ever could.
It's natural: kids start off believing in everything -- tooth fairy, Santa Claus, etc. I saw a study which showed that about 100% of kids believe in Santa Claus at age 5, and about 0% at age 15. In-between was a fall-off curve. First to go is the tooth fairy (in my experience with my kids). Santa's the last of the "childish gods" to go. Many (but by no means all) kids come to realize there is/are no "adult gods" (e.g. "God", ghosts, witchcraft). Then, as you get older, you start to think more about death. The closer people get to death, the more apt they are to become religious. Hence, churches are over-represented with old people. I mean, it makes perfect sense. Religions tend to promise their payoff after you die. Before you die, they tend to be a burden (e.g. time spent going to church, tithing, etc.). So it's only natural that the closer you get to death, the better the deal looks. Less years spent going to church, tithing, etc, but still the same payoff (eternal life, multitudes of virgins, avoidance of eternal fire, avoidance of coming back as a toad, or whatever).
//Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God -- evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident?//
How about the Inquisition?
We are talking about Western civilization, here, after all. No mention of Asian cultures in our use of the term "universal", here.
You mean like wriggling out of handcuffs?
We're starting to get an understanding of this. There are some well known mechanisms in the brain which confer a survival advantage but are not rational. One is the tendency to see structure in random data. Related to this is a tendency to perceive cause and effect relationships that aren't justified by the data.
Some of this has a survival advantage. It's useful to trigger the flight or fight reflexes before the situation is clearly dangerous.
Someday we'll get to the bottom of the human tendency to band together under insane males, and then we'll make real progress.
Being a limp wristed heathen DOES have advantages. Some obvious, some not.
I'm gay, but I'm a beer-drinking NASCAR-watching guy who has had a car engine in his living room - and we mean a real car, not some prissy little four-cylinder transverse-mount crap. Lemme tell you, there's nothing like:
So being a non-limp-wristed homo has its advantages, too. By the way, I like the femmy guys. So if you are one and can compile a Linux kernel, drop me a message.
As for the heathen bit, all I know is that e^(i*pi)+1=0. That's so weirdly coincidental, bringing together so much of the Universe in one super-elegant expression, that I have a hard time believing it's accidental. But organized religion? No thanks.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
That said, one can make judgements about likelihood, and many kinds of factors can go into such judgements. For example, if no-one else claims to have seen or otherwise experienced your magical blue puppy, that would seem to argue that you might be making it up, or imagining it, and I might be tempted to assign a probability indistinguishable from zero to the likelihood of its existence. But if millions of people claim to have some sort of experience of the MBP, it seems likely that these people are in fact experiencing something in common, which they've chosen to characterize as MBP. The MBP clearly "exists" in some form, even if only as a shared delusion.
In that scenario, lacking direct personal experience with the MBP, I can reasonably claim to be agnostic about both the existence and nature of the MBP. Practically speaking, agnosticism applies much more to the nature of the entity than its existence: in that scenario, *something* called MBP clearly exists in many people's minds. The question is, what, if anything, does it correspond to in shared reality? Usually, the believers themselves can't answer this question precisely, which doesn't help...
Maybe there actually is a God. Maybe there is a supernatural realm. Maybe the universe and life on earth didn't simply happen by chance.
Even more, maybe everyone who believes such things isn't a complete idiot.
Doesn't it take just as much belief to think that everything simply happened by the coincidence of time and chance as it does to believe that a superintelligent spiritual being did it all?
That is the biggest problem with religion, it's used all the time as an excuse for immoral acts. It's so ironic considering that their main recruting strategy is to appeal to morality by saying that if we believe we should not steal, we should not kill, we should be nice with others, it means we are a one of them. This is utter bullshit having a sense of community, ethics and morality is quite natural and totally independent of your faith. More often than not, religions end up circumventing rational morality, sometimes in very gruesome ways, instead of making people more ethical.
Maybe they're afraid of the nutcase with the "magic box"? Maybe they're just reluctant to be made sport of (by reaching into some unpleasant surprise in the box).
This does not prove those people believe in god.
That said, it may be true that we have a bias toward religion. Dawkins has interesting things to say about that, as does Susan Blackmore in "The Meme Machine" (http://tinyurl.com/22jsz3).
"You either have to regress infinitely ..., or you eventually have to come to something that was not created. We can apply this more broadly. Where did all the matter/energy in the universe come from? Either it is infinite, or at some point it was created."
Which is what makes a Creator less probable: An eternal complex being capable of building the universe is less probable than a large amount of eternal matter and energy. Hell, you could break it further down: if all matter was created by the condensation of energy as the universe initially cooled, then we only have to account for eternal energy.
I mean, at the very least, we can see and interact with matter and energy.
Still, none of it REALLY matters, except in how we proceed. The answer, for research, need not be correct, just more likely.
"Did the algorithms used in genetic programming happen by chance?"
No. They were written to emulate an existing process. The remainder of questions there are irrelevant.
The process, by the way, is the natural extension of any self-replicating matter. One could suggest that a self-replicating amino chain was the only thing in the history of life to come about by chance. Since there were a couple billion years available for that to happen before the advent of life on earth (and to take for long enough to grow more complex), and since SRAs come about pretty frequently in conditions similar to primorial earth, I'm willing to see it as sufficiently probable.
Look, you can argue 'till you're blue in the face, but a Designer just isn't a plausable enough excuse for the universe. Besides, how would science proceed? 'Why is the sky blue? It was designed that way'?? Naw. Sorry, but some of us look for deeper answers.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
All this talk of "religions" and "God" and "angels" and "Satan" and "billgates" has made me very thirsty. Bartender!! A round of drinks for everyone!.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Well, the term "psychological experiences" is really a very broad blanket. What it defines isn't exactly clear. Within the field of psychology, there are physical psychologists, who explore the relationship between physiological and psychological phenomena. There are behavioral psychologists, who study behavior (but not necessarily why that behavior happens). There are psychoanalists, who study symbolism, dreams, the subconscience, and that sort of thing. There are hypnotists. There are other branches, too, and I probably don't know the half of it, but I guess I'm saying I don't know what it means when you ask whether it is "better" to explain things in terms of psychological events. Psychology is a very broad field (that covers many interesting topics, actually).
I guess that might be a tangent, though, since I'd be much more inclined to say that spiritual/religious experiences are religious/spiritual experiences, and I would not give any field of empirical study dominion over them. In my own life, there was a time when I lived as an agnostic. (15 years) During that time, I had seen NO evidence of God, and I'd given up on faith. But when I finally saw the light, there was no turning back. During that first 15 years, it was empirical science and philosophy that kept me as an agnostic. Since I saw the light, however, no amount of empirical, scientific or psychological speculation could diminish my faith.
You have successfully isolated the essence my objection. The summary of the article makes the bold faced assertion that "religiosity" comes from science. Basically it makes a big "ven diagram" and says "empirical science & forensics are bigger than God, and bigger than believers in God."
What I, a believer, am saying is that "their conclusions are wrong, and their method of analysis [probably] failed to account for people who have changed their faith." (as I have, since I was once an atheist, then an agnostic, and now am a Christian). What's more, they probably failed to look for patterns such as family heritage [of atheists begetting kids and raising new atheists, for example]. Since the genes follow from the parents to the kids who receive some teaching and conditioning from the parents, it would not be surprising if there were some correlation.
BTW, on a theological note, I know that there are those in the Church who seem to claim that Jesus and God are one and the same, but if you read the Bible it is clear that Jesus carefully avoided claiming he was God, AND he PRAYED to God, and since he wasn't praying to himself, it is probably a mistake (on the order of breaking the first of the 10 Commadments) to worship Jesus (although I do believe he is the savior, and he was sent from Heaven).
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
In Christianity, the rule is "Christ chooses anyone who sincerely chooses Christ."
And what are those fullfilled prophecies may I ask?
In any case, basing the whole supposition on "6 out of 10 Americans believe in the devil and hell, 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and life after death, while 92% believe in a personal God." is shaky from the start.
Since many polls would indicate that in, say, Europe, the statistics are reversed, I fail to see how that equates to humans being hardwired for belief in God. On the basis of that statistic, one might with as much validity claim that all Americans are hardwired for stupidity.
...then I for one am proud to be a genetic freak.
What religious people seem to fail to comprehend is that atheism is not a religious belief, it is the lack of religious belief. So there is no reason for an atheist to get all political or freaked out if it turns out that there is a biological basis for religion.
I can't say I'm really an atheist - because e^(i*pi)+1=0 brings together too many scientifically observable facets of the Universe for me to believe it could be accidental. Organized religion absolutely disgusts me, with its fervent brainwashing, hypocrisy, and other multitude flaws. But I'll tell you something else - kick an evangelical in the balls and he'll say "Praise Thee Jesus" and smile an even broader smile. I envy the simple joy that must come with that brainwashing. If contentment were as simple as just drinking the Kool-Aid...
That sheep (even with someone sufficiently self-righteous and shameless to call himself "a pastor", note the true meaning of the word!) will never be me, however - I'm not content in life, but I get through it with a mathematical truth which is orders of magnitude more improbable than a winning lottery ticket. I don't know identity or the motivation of Whatever made e^(i*pi)+1=0, but it's the one religious article I carry about in my Toolkit Of Emotional Survival (Or A Reasonable Facsimile Thereof) (tm reg'd 2007).
There's a reason it's called God's Equation. There's too much meaning to those five simple constants all coming together like that.
Genetically flawed to believe in Something, PhD Math, or genetically blessed? I'm unsure. It seems it has been a survival trait in my case, since that little hope that there's reason to life has pulled me through some of my darkest days. And that's a "religion" based exclusively on the cold hard and provable truth of mathematics. Okay, it's a survival trait, but is it a blessing? I'm not a happy camper, can't really say I've ever been - therefore blessing is out the window, though survival trait remains something else.
Again, and even as a scientifically-educated homo (and the evangelicals would have us burned at the stake because they refuse to believe what I jerk off about is as genuine as what they jerk off about), I do have to confess an admiration to the evangelicals: their belief ("truth" in quotes since they can't prove it the way I can prove mine) is warm and fuzzy; mine is about as warm as "The answer to life, the universe and everything is 42." Oh great, that helps a lot... I guess I'll understand 42 sometime within the next 50 years or so.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Is that they are brainwashed to do so nearly from birth. People who don't grow up in religious homes can look at objectively and imo see what a load of crap it is. That being said, I believe church is a good source of "community" and support structure.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I like your openness on the subject and willingness to ask questions and I would love to talk with you sometime about what I believe, if you are interested. Message me or reply to this or something (there is a way to do that on here, right? I'm usually more just an observer).
:-)
:-). God doesn't condemn people to Hell, they refuse to accept the only escape from it. In fact, God does not want to send anyone to Hell, that is why He provided a Way out. But if people reject that Way, His Justice demands that they pay the penalty.
:-).
Disclaimer: What I write here is what I believe. I shall present it as fact, though, because, 1. I think it is, and 2. It is just easier to write it that way. You have a right to disagree and I have a right to express my opinion.
I disagree with you in your conclusion, but I think you are not all that far off in some ways.
One thing to consider in your thoughts is that God is perfectly Just. He cannot tolerate sin (wrongdoing, something that is contrary to His nature) to the point that He cannot let any sin go unpunished. And God has declared that the soul that sins must die (a spiritual death in Hell). God has the perfect right to condemn someone to Hell for anything. Thankfully there is more to God than just His Justice.
Here is one place you are somewhat close. Hell was not created for us (humans) but for the angels that rebelled against God (Satan, aka the Devil, and the demons). After we humans began sinning against God, it also became the destination for us as enemies of God.
I agree with you that the most hurtful thing a son can do is deny his father. And that is the only thing that causes a person to go to Hell, denying God. Actually, to be completely correct, it is denying God's Son. But He is Himself also God, and "denying God" fits better with what you said
Well, that is all I wish to put here on Slashdot for now. As I said, I'd be glad to talk further about it (this goes for anyone who seriously wants to know). I left out some important details, but you can find everything in the Bible if you are impatient
No U!
I am an atheist. My parents are believers. So are my grand parents on both sides. So is my sister. So is my brother. If my entire family is hard-wired to believe, then why am I different? No, I know I am not adopted :-).
Yeah for the 1%!
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I just thought religions were self-reinforcing delusions; I never thought it could be caused by a biological anomaly. But, if it's true, I must have been born without the religion-gene, cause for as long as I can remember, I never believed in any of that religious nonsense, even before I knew anything about the scientific theories of evolution, the big bang, etc.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
If religious belief, or faith in a deity, supernatural or something like that, promotes survival. I wonder if the evolutionary advantage produced is in the form of mental health. I would love to hear if there is a correlation between secular societies and increased mental health difficulties like depression, suicide, self esteem issues etc. One could never prove causation, but I've certainly heard that there are high mental health issues issues in North America and Europe, which tend to me more secular than other parts of the world.
I could see the relationship between religion and mental health though. Religion often fosters:
1) Community in the form of churches, and there-by a sense of belonging
2) A sense of doing good for others, and others doing good for you
3) A faith in a higher power (however irrational) could relieve stresses and feelings of fear.
4) Promotion of taking off Sundays (or some time during the week for religious observance)
Anyone have any data to show that secular societies have higher incidences of mental health problems?
On a more micro level, my wife is a mental health councilor and I must point out that neither of us are religious, at all.. But she has found that people who she sees with mental health problems often get better when they find some kind of belief (religious or otherwise) to put their faith into.
Interesting stuff.
I think religion came about because of humanity's need to find explanation for everything. When presented with a question that we don't have an answer to, humans are more likely to make up an answer using their existing knowledge rather than say they don't know. Not everyone of course, but most people. An example from the past: What causes lightening and thunder? Well nothing I know of can create those sorts of things, it must be the Gods making it. No doubt some people would provide the same answer today, but we now know the real causes of lightening and thunder and the answer is not as mystical as was previously thought.
This can be evidenced by the pre-curser (or original, can't remember exactly) to Judaism where they believed in Yahwey and Yahwee (spelling?), the Male and Female gods. The theory went that all living things come in either male or female varieties. It requires a male and a female of any species to create life, so if God(s) created life they there must be both a male and female God.
So I don't think we are hard wired to believe in a Deity, otherwise I've been wired wrongly for a long time. I think it's more our desire to seek an explanation for everything we question, our general failure to admit not having all the answers, our imagination, and attempts at logical reasoning using limited knowledge.
Shitdrummer.
I dunno. I think Captain Jack lashing two sea turtles together was a bit of a stretch...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
98th percentile means "more arrogant than 98% of people".
Not really. As you point out, God created the angel Lucifer, who at some point decided he wanted to be God and rebelled, along with many other angels. I view evil as the absence of good, in the same way the darkness is the absence of light. I don't claim to completely understand it, but that is the best analogy I have come up with.
As a sibling points out, God created creatures with a choice of whether or not to follow Him. Which would you prefer, that someone love you because they have no choice, or would you rather they choose to love you when they could hate you? Which is the greater love?
I work a lot with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who attempts to articulate a relationship to what lies beyond reason. Levinas refers to this as the transcendental Other--beyond the limitations of human perception, cognition, and signification.
What separates Levinas' investigation into the Other from traditional theology is that he doesn't accept that we can know anything about the Other, only posit the (im)possibility of the Other's existence. So, the first person approaching you and claiming to speak "God's word" is suspect, since the first act of sacrilege is to reduce the infinity of the Other into human terms (since language always fails to capture the entirety of what it would signify). Rather than act empowered by our knowledge of God, Levinas suggests we act with hesitancy out of our ignorance of the Other. Such hesitancy should lead to hospitality (rather than hostility) for those different than us.
So, while not religious in any traditional sense, I do believe that their are limitations to human knowledge. For instance, in response to several posts above, will science ever be able to tell the origin of randomness? Or will knowledge of this type always belong solely to the Other? Certainly science and rationality have made considerable contributions to our understanding of what "human" is, where "human" comes from, how "humans" behave, etc. But it cannot, and perhaps never will, be able to address what it means to be a human being--that question belongs to the realm of metaphysics.
Sorry, that doesn't work. No reasonable and informed person would ever choose hell. If Christianity is right and people are going to hell it is either because they are not mentally capable of making the right decision or not enough information has been provided to them to make the correct decision. Either way, it's not their fault.
I know apologists like to say if God made it so that everyone would go to heaven than we wouldn't have free will. So what? I would never leave a bottle of rat poison in the fridge just so a child would be able to freely choose between drinking that or orange juice. Free will (or the illusion thereof) is great for most things, but it is not responsible or the right thing to do to offer someone a choice in a situation where there is an obvious right or wrong answer (e.g. OJ v. cyanide, eternity in heaven v. eternal torment).
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Very cool quotes. I like C.S. Lewis and need to read more of his writings. I just said a very similar thing in one of my posts.
That's good - if they find what specific brain structures and neurochemistry is involved in religious belief, then science can start working on a cure for it.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
95%+ of all Americans wear clothes. Could humans be hardwired against nudism?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I find the "Magic Box" demonstration uncompelling. Scott Atran, the perpetrator of the demonstration seems unwilling to think outside of the box, so to speak. Perhaps the individuals harboring "negative sentiments toward religion" are reluctant to place personal possessions or body parts into the box not because they secretly believe the superstitious claptrap they've just been told, but because they now suspect the crazy person who just told them that nonsense to have boobytrapped the box. The answer to the article's question "If they don't believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?" is that they are afraid of Scott Atran.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The belief in a supernatural being might be preferable to coming to grips with "this is it".
For most people, that could be an incredibly depressing thought. Most of humanity is not "well off". Religion is "a way" to ingrain morality and (when the government controls the religion) control the people. Any threat you can come up with is far worse if the people imagine they will have to endure it for eternity -- and conversely, the suffering that people endure now is often tolerable, only because they believe there will be an afterlife that will be better.
The difference here is that it is within the realm of possibility to prove you don't have a blue puppy. I could go to your house. Of course, the day I arrived at your house, you could tell me the puppy was at your sister's house. Or only comes out on February 29th. Whatever, the puppy example begins from the premise that a claimant could verify the existence of this intriuging puppy. The very question of God (or Otherness or metaphysics) begins with the possibility that there is something/one/place/energy/possibility beyond empirical observation. Which, of course, as you point out, is a non-logical position. Metaphysics, however, begins by advancing from the limitations of logic... I would also point out that the idea that the only "tenable positions to hold are logical" is itself predicated on a faith in Reason as the operating principle of the universe. This belief in logic can itself have no logically-demonstrabe origin or foundation--it too eminates from an initially non-logical belief. Ultimately, the problem is that, when discussing metaphysics, no one can claim to hold the logically tenable position; we can only hope to live among the differences in equally non-rational positions.
It seems to be that the free will thing is a bit of a red herring. You don't really need to take away someones free will in order to prevent them from going to hell.
Say you have a car a car with bad brakes. Someone in your family needs to borrow a car so you see them reaching for the keys of the faulty car. Do you stop them from taking those keys and inform them that they need to take another car until that one is fixed, or do you let them go ahead and say to yourself "well they made the choice to take a car with no brakes, it must be what they want."
I think the answer here is pretty obvious and no one will get pissed at you for infringing on their autonomy if you don't let them take those keys.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Ironically, the one thing I'm sure of from all the arguments is that none of them are unsure about what they (don't) believe
This is just a matter of how you frame the question. I firmly believe we don't have enough data to answer the Big Questions yet - therefore I'm also unsure what the answers are.
I could also be sure what the answers are and unsure about what data supports those answers. I think that's the definition of 'faith'.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If the headline's question is answered in the affirmative, us atheists aren't even considered human anymore.
You're also hardwired to hump your neighbor's wife whenever possible (assuming she's a hottie) but Moses's Seventh Amendment to Human Nature teaches the other part of your brain that it's not such a scalable idea for building a stable society.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How would you interpret the story of the Prodigal Son in light of this? Bad analogy for God? After all, he gave the druggy son just as great a reward as the good son.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
I'm curious, does the parable of the Prodigal Son inform your beliefs in any particular way? It seems to address the issues you cite.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Interesting, you view the very concept of god to be an challenge to your ego. What power is it that you are referring to? Do you fear god having power over you? Are you afraid of not being in control of your own destiny?
'"God" obviously does that so lets just kill God!'
Such hostility you show towards something you claim to not exist. Is this you speaking or a Demon that has possessed you? Demon, what is your name? It's so sad to see you in so much pain and anguish.
'We are hardwired to kill, maim, destroy, be selfish...'
That is what original sin causes you to believe about yourself. You are buying into the lies of the father of lies. You should read over those words you wrote and ask yourself if those are really words you would write about yourself and humanity. Don't let the bastards win. Reclaim your birth right.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
There is no correlation between the bible's description of creation
Homework time.. View the mentioned video. It is online for free and is not from the church side of the isle. After that, then make informed comments.
The truth shall set you free!
Even if you don't believe in it, it is still part of your cultural influence.
I suggest you read the F-ing article, it's quite an interesting read.
An article is fine, but what has the scientific community found based on evidence? Please view the mentioned Universe lecture, then you will see where my comment originates.
The truth shall set you free!
When you look to other religions and say "that's ridiculous" at the idea of a wine god or a god with the head of an elephant or spirits and ferries or Zeus or Thor wielding his hammer, have you ever considered one thing.... is your religion any less ridiculous????
Yes. And there are two facts you're essentially ignoring.
1: The "religions" that believe in a dedicated god of wine, or the furies, or Thor and Zeus, all died out long ago. So long, in fact, that that the best record we have of them is the written account of Christian Missionaries and Scholars who had little cause to seriously study them. (The Greeks and Romans are slightly better than the rest, but our best grasp of their pre-Christian religion is colored by what might be intentional myths.)
2: Most of the extant modern religions have a basic theology that is essentially compatible. Where they differ are on a relatively small number of specifics -- is the Almighty humanlike, or divine and unknowing? Are we supposed to live in this world, or try and escape it, or suffer here until we prove ourself? Is sex a good idea or a really good idea? (The former Pope and the Dali Lama -- two of the most different religions we have -- were known to meet and find as much they agreed on as they disagreed on.)
No one at all should be surprised to find similarites between religions. If there is truth in religion, there is one single objective truth, not half a dozen different mini-truths. If religion is just a myth, then it's a myth likely shared by those who believed it to be true, and even with telephone-style mutations it should still be similar after only a few thousand years.
I don't think that anybody's religion is absurd; I think that absurdities are introduced into religion by those who wish to pervert religion for their own ends.
I'll certainly agree so far as any study of such question is incomplete without some direct attempt to study the effects of nature versus nurture. While I admit such a study would be hard to design to remain within human subjects standards, having RTFA, I see no mention of any conceptual attempt at such. But then, how much can I expect from the NYTimes?
A more subtle possibility is that while the belief may not be genetic, it may be a trait (like sight in animals) that provides sufficient survival value to society to allow multiple societies (although not necessarily the members) to independently develop it; those that did, and were able to pass it on, had enough of a survival advantage to overcome any societies that didn't have it. If the society can pass on (via education/indoctrination/brainwashing/etc.) pass on the idea successfully to new members over time, the survival tendency does not need to be genetically encoded.
An evolutionary development need not be fully optimized to provide a limited form of advantage. Similarly, religion need not be "true" or "correct" to serve a useful function: keeping track of the seasons for planting and harvesting, providing a reason why killing other members of the tribe is bad ("big sky wizard says so!"), disapproval of eating certain animals (dogs, pigs, other humans — raising other omnivores for food is calorically inefficient compared to raising herbivores), and so on. Developing a rational, objective, universal system of ethics without resorting to "Because (mommy, God, the king, the FSM) sayeth so!" is a non-trivial problem. As well, conveying it to other members of society requires that the other members of society have enought cognitive ability and flexibility to assimilate the idea, and suffienct effort to spare from survival tasks to do so. Most religions, on the other hand, are simple enough that a high-grade moron can understand well enough to follow the creed in most cases. Or, in terms CS types ought to understand, a low cost O(n) algorithm that gives an answer within a small episilon all but a small fractional delta of probable cases may be a lot more useful for real-time work than a high cost O(e^n) one that is right every time.
You can accomplish a lot if you can line up enough brute force and massive ignorance pointed all in one direction... or something like that.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Apparently some people are too wrapped up in their own little world to have noticed. Pride always blinds man to what is right in front of them. When was the last time a man stopped to ask for directions?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I think he's referring to the Bible Code that revealed eerie modern words and names from the Torah. Several words involving an event such as 9/11 would show up within a close proximity to each other, resembling a kind of crossword. Pretty spooky stuff, and a lot of world events were found in there before the hubbub died out.
It seems odd to me that there is this gap in the Twentieth Century during which nothing new was apparently learned about religion or the religious sentiment. All of this was being debated, with more articulation and learning on both sides, in the Twentieth Century. "Orientalism"--the fascination with all things Asian--was big at the time, and Buddhist "atheistic pessimism" was constantly being contrasted with "Emersonian atheistic optimism." If you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience .
Oh we could make a god who was better than us, but who would want to? If god is flawed it's that much easier to justify our own flaws.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Homework time.. View the mentioned video. It is online for free and is not from the church side of the isle. After that, then make informed comments.
I've read the bible. I don't need a video to tell me what it says. How about making a substantive response to the gross inaccuracies in the order of creation already mentioned (and those were just the ones off the top of my head)? Anyone can take any mythical creation story with sufficiently general or vague creative steps (in this case, days) and make it seem predictive a-posteriori, in the same way the bible codes or Nostradamus are predictive a-posteriori. Until you can answer for the glaring errors in the creation account or show me where it has taught us anything of value about the actual nature of the world, it's all a bunch of hand waving. I have no problem with people believing without evidence (so long as they don't make public policy based on their faith), but I hate when people misconstrue the evidence we do have to try to make it back up their fairy tales.
I've got a genetically hardwired appendix. So far it's behaved, but thousands of people each year die when that now-useless old organ pops.
If racism turned out to have genes that modulate its sense of identity/exclusion and affinity/animosity, racism still would be wrong and need to be wiped out.
Maybe finding the "pious" gene would lead to a vaccine.
--
make install -not war
I thought it was obvious our value systems all evolved from the Three Laws of Robotics.
Don't hurt people, get along with others and look after yourself aren't bad principles to live by, regardless of how they are presented.
...laura
I tend to think that we westerners give too much credit to Christianity for moral codes that, by all appearances, other cultures have managed to arrive at without any input from Jesus.
Speak for yourself, not Westerners in general. I also don't give much credit to Christianity for anything particularly moral - there's far too much immoral history for that. About all it did (and it's not a specifically Christian thing) is give small communities a focal point when times were tough. Most Western communities don't need that now... sure quite a few individuals need it on a personal level to help them deal with their own dramas, but society as a whole doesn't. Who needs religion when you have TV and/or the pursuit of money to keep society humming?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Yeah - because the son came back to him. The idea of hell in the Bible is a separation from God. If God is the font of all good things, then separation from God logically entails a place with nothing but bad things. The prodigal son walked away from his father, and entered "hell". When he came back to his father, he came back into "heaven".
The idea is that we get after death exactly what we wanted during life. If we wanted to be with God here, then we'll go and be with Him afterwards. If we don't want anything to do with God here, then after death, you'll be in a place that has nothing to do with God. Hell isn't so much a punishment as a consequence.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Sorry, that doesn't work. No reasonable and informed person would ever choose hell.
I think you underestimate people's capacity to be stubborn and wrong-headed. People will knowingly do stupid things just so they won't have to back down, or admit they were wrong. It's exactly the same sort of arrogance C. S. Lewis was talking about.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Unless of course this God happens to be omnipotent, in which case He could simply create another family business...
Say you have a car a car with bad brakes. Someone in your family needs to borrow a car so you see them reaching for the keys of the faulty car. Do you stop them from taking those keys and inform them that they need to take another car until that one is fixed, or do you let them go ahead and say to yourself "well they made the choice to take a car with no brakes, it must be what they want."
It seems God's choice was to tell them the brakes were broken, and let them make their own decision:
"...you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
They chose to drive the car anyway. When the car crashed, God went out himself to pick them up and get them safely home.
Just to extend the car analogy a bit.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Both the Torah and the Bible refer to the Jews as Gods chosen people. Many Christians believe that the Jews are God's chosen people even if they are not Jewish.
God decided to let non-Jews in for a small price. Just ask him.
And God said unto them, "Meh, I'll let the goa in for a small price. I'll make them such a deal! Vhat?!, they don't believe in me! OY VEH! Schmucks, I tell you!"
If your conscience is merely something that society has taught you, logically you have no reason to comply with society's proscribed values other than avoiding retribution for your anti-social actions.
Speaking as someone more happy than you can dream with my increasingly relative morality, no. This is an instance of fallacy "Argumentum ad logicam", concluding that a fallacious argument makes the conclusion ipso facto necessarily false. That a conscience is merely something taught by society does not prove the non-existance of a valid relativistic moral framework, where "good" and "evil" (or something similar) exist. Any resemblance between the two may be a matter of coincidence attributable to evolutionary pressures on society (if not necessarily although possibly the member's genetics), and at best suggestive of correct behavior.
As a specific although oversimplified alternative: being a member of society improves my long term survival prospects, which I consider good; ergo, taking actions likely to collapse the whole society, such as immunizing myself against my best supergerm and secretly releasing into the domestic yahoo population remains ceteris paribus bad. Even if I can get away with it without "retribution", there are always "consequences". Damaging your own life support systems is counterproductive.
This tends to lead toward the moral relativity direction, which I think most people find uncomfortable and counter-intuitive.
Which just means that generally it is (pun unintended but accepted) a hell of a lot easier to inculcate simple ethical frameworks that just have not yet demonstrated highly anti-survival tendencies than it is to get people to learn complicated correct ones. This doesn't seem a major concern; truth has limited survival value.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
In case you don't remember, similar "prophecies" were made from other texts, such as a supreme court ruling, using the same rules. I wasn't aware that a supreme court ruling was such a holy text.
Also I don't remember that the bible code actually predicted anything that hadn't happened already. Prediction is always difficult, especially about the future (N. Bohr).
......The world doesn't fit what we would expect to find if religion were true........
You are making the same basic assumption that the original article makes: Namely that evolution is true and that special creation by God is false. The evolutionary world view requires a convoluted, contradictory theory why man is so incurably religious. The Biblical world view cuts through all that and simply states that we are made in the image of God. In the tone of the article, yes, indeed we are hardwired by the Creator to have a deep yearning for a connection to Him. I prefer to use the word "programmed" instaed. It is really that simple and the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Just as hardware and software are distinct, so too is the brain and the mind. Software can exist independent of any particular hardware. In the same way, the mind can be independent of the brain. Software in itself is immaterial and can exist in many locations simultaneously. It only requires hardware to be physically manifest to us right now. Mind, soul, spirit or whatever this immaterial thing is labeled is like that. It can exist on its own, but usually in our experience requires hardware in order for us to perceive its activity.
Is it really so surprising that triggering certain interrupts in the brain causes normally hidden software routines to execute? The operation of a computer is determined by its software alone, given properly functioning hardware. Modern Macs can switch back and forth between Windows and OSX. Why should it be so surprising that the basic functions of a human being should not also be controlled by immaterial software originally written by the programmer, God in this case. He simply decided to build "religion" deep into our operating system.
All theory is gray
This story is often related to Plato/Socrates's Allegory of the Cave. The "druggy" son went out to explore life and woke up and left the cave. The "good" son stayed in the cave and never really learned what making a choice his (all his choices are made for him).
I tend to relate the Allegory of the Cave to people who have learned to think or not. Those who have learned to question their surroundings. Those that have left the cave are those who realize that they (these range from complex to simple ideas): don't have to be slaves to belief/religion, are often fed crap information (meaning, I don't listen to peoples' bullcrap without checking it with Google), can take any path in life besides the ones laid down for them (though it often means that you will have to make some very hard decisions that can have very real consequences--but in the end, you should be proud for taking the path you know was correct). Hopefully you can relate this to the story of the prodigal son.
I came out of the cave when I realized (in college) that my high school physics teacher (who was a coach incidentally) had taught us utterly awful basic mechanics. It came to me that I could have used Google to learn physics the correct way, or I could have purchased a good physics book (rather than the POS that we were used...it must have been the worst book on the planet), or I could have simply asked my father (Chem. E.) about such things. That wasn't the only thing that awakened me (many other things from the college experience that--sadly--most don't experience in college), but I finally started questioning everything.
Opportunistic eaters, such as bears, human, and chimpanzees, aren't that picky when it comes to plants... In order to understand the difference between reality and hallucination, you have to become self-aware...you must begin to understand what your mind is, how it works, and what it is capable of creating
So do bears possess consciousness or are they dying off by huge numbers from eating funny mushrooms? I'd love to live by Christopher Robin's woods, but so far the bears around here just like to eat the sunflower seeds out of my feeder (BTW, the mother bear teaches the young which foods are good to eat - they have a special organ in the roof of their mouths to discriminate plants).
You might enjoy Julian James's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind for an alternate theory of how the conscious mind evolved in humans.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Wha? How does that get a plus 5? Yes, there are a lot of old religions in which the gods look like people, but in all the new fangled ones, they always explicitly tell people, "We're talking about Gods/the gods as though it/they were human, but that's just a metaphor and the God is far beyond our ability to comprehend." I mean seriously, this isn't a secret doctrine; it's the core of post-Platonic religion.
Or is he trying to raise the stakes?
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
If there were no Voltaire, it would be necessary for God to create him. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You claim it's arrogance, but I'm not buying it. Take me for instance, I was raised as a true believe in a fundamentalist Baptist church. If I was arrogant and stubborn I would still be believing what I believed when I was a teen. Instead I have slowly been won over by the arguments that the Bible is not infallible and God is probably just a myth. BTW, that change in belief happened very begrudgingly at first, so you may be right. Maybe I was pretty stubborn as a Baptist.
To me none believers seem much more like people using their god given judgment the best they can given the lack of evidence as opposed to the stubborn arrogant gits you are implying. Admit it, if there is a god he sure doesn't make his existence obvious, does he? If he made all the stars, how hard would it have been to put up a few that spelled out "believe in me or go to hell", or how about making a monthly appearance in the skies over Israel reminding his chosen people of their covenant? Yet he does none of these things, so if anyone happens to have doubts about his existence maybe it's not stubbornness or wrongheadedness, maybe it's just a best effort at making sense of the world.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
The drug enforcement agency sure is letting this opiate of the masses get out of hand.
True fact. I am an atheist Christian. I have a friend who's an agnostic Jew. We don't believe in a different God. When we worked together, he had an electric menorah on his desk, while I had a Stryper album above my desk.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
.....Perhaps the material (the DNA) is subject to SPIRITUAL constraints...
The DNA is a carrier of information in the same way a disk is. The DNA is equivalent to the hardware and the information it stores is the software. Each of us is a software program executing in a hardware body. The former can exist on its own, but requires the latter to become manifest. Software is not physical. Neither is our soul, spirit or mind, whatever you want to call it, made from matter. Jesus tell us that God is Spirit. According to scripture, we too are living spirits, currently executing in mortal hardware. The promise is that one day that software, the real person will get loaded into immortal hardware, commensurate with our now already eternal spirit. The choice we have now is whether we will be with God or away from Him.
All theory is gray
What I really love is how the article doesn't even allow for the possibility of a supernatural being actually existing.
"Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God -- evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident?"
While science can't validly answer questions about the supernatural, to not even consider the "God put it there" possibility is creating a false dichotomy, and is just plain bad reasoning, which in turn is bad science. We need to stop pretending that all our questions can be answered through science. I guess I'm biased as a philosophy major, but still... closed-mindedness hasn't gotten society anywhere, whether it's being closed against science in Galileo's time or being closed against religion today.
And before someone corrects me and points out that the article did mention that possibility, I meant to say "study," not "article". My bad.
Ahh, so one reminder seven thousand years ago in a document in an obscure language is sufficient notice when the fate of someones eternal soul is on the line? I think an almighty god could try a little bit harder if he really cared about his children.
And you're extension to the analogy doesn't make sense either since god doesn't pick up all the none believers after they die give them a stern talking to and drop them off at heaven, does he? Well, maybe he does but that isn't Christianity.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
To make this discussion about god or the supernatural is to jump to a very advanced
(unsimple) explanation.
The real explanation is much simpler: Human beings are hard wired to find answers.
The application of this is that we connect dots. On the most fundamental levels, our
brain is a "dot connector": Our brains connect multiple nerve singles to form a cognitive
sense of touch. Our brains render wholeness from the imperfect matrix of our rods
and cones.
On more advanced levels our brain seeks to connect groups of dots to find cognitive "wholes"
from elements and/or concepts in our surroundings.
God, is just our brain leaping to the ultimate easy answer. Its that ultimate dot that explains
every series of other dots there is -- or every question that exists. Its a conceptual piece of very
dangerous code. It short circuits all questions -- prematurely exiting our most basic
function call: to formulate answers.
Is belief in the supernatural innate? No but we have 3 conflicting programs: the need
to connect dots (solve problems, answer questions), the desire for things to be easier (our id),
and the ability to imagine things that are conceptual. (the 2nd one is really optional I suppose).
A 'belief in the supernatural' is just a product of this equation. So in essence, yes we are hardwired
to believe in the supernatural. But that belief is a random byproduct of other forces. If anything,
supernatural beliefs represent an evolutionary disadvantage (on an individual level) because it compromises
a vital piece of our primary software.
On a social level it is arguable that it is a behavior that benefits the society while harming the
individual -- but that's another topic...
: P
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
"People who find meaning in life and have moral values without religion are really lucky."
They're called 'Atheists'.
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Ok, I'm lost. You're not talking about Harkness, are you?
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I wasn't implying atheists were arrogant; I was implying that people who continue to do something they know is futile just to salvage their own pride and self-image are arrogant. Say, for example, like taking that twentieth shot when all your friends are cheering you on, even though you know all the facts about alcohol poisoning.
The only time my description would necessarily fit an atheist was if the atheist knew Christianity was correct, but kept up their atheism all the same, which were the parameters the grandparent put forward. The grandparent was assuming that all people are inherently rational, and that given all the information, will always choose the optimal decision. My argument is that pride plays a larger part in decision making for many people than does rationality. Even if Christianity was definitively proved to be true, there would be some percentage of people who would still deny it, just so they didn't have to admit they were wrong. Not all atheists, mind, but I'm sure there'd be some.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Since I have a little baby boy, I've given this some thought. When we're really young and helpless we see our parents as creatures who know everything, are able to do everything and are responsible for everything.
When my little boy has a tooth ache he looks at me to find relief. When he's done something bad he looks at me for 'punishment'. When he's done something good he looks at me for appreciation and reward. Thanks to the IP camera in his room and the baby monitor I know when he wakes up and needs help.
This omnipresent and omnipotent being around us when we are small is our first encounter with - what is then - a simple world. Please the 'god' and all will be well, offend him and you will 'suffer'. Of course, his tooth ache is not caused by me and I can't really help him get rid of it.
Religion is just a way of continuing this simple image of the world into the rest of your life. It's a psychological relief because, no matter how badly you are treated, your Father knows and will compensate you in good time (the after life). It's no coincidence that god is portrayed as 'the father'.
Of course, religion is also a wonderful way of reinforcing social rules aand laws and forcing bonds within groups. That's where instutional religion comes from.
X.
PS: Don't take this punishing talk too literally. He just gets cuddled, really. I'm a benevolent deity (for now).
Ahh, so one reminder seven thousand years ago in a document in an obscure language is sufficient notice when the fate of someones eternal soul is on the line? I think an almighty god could try a little bit harder if he really cared about his children.
Well, he managed to get that seven thousand year old document in an obscure language translated into almost every modern language and become the most reproduced document of all time.
And you're extension to the analogy doesn't make sense either since god doesn't pick up all the none believers after they die give them a stern talking to and drop them off at heaven, does he? Well, maybe he does but that isn't Christianity.
All the ones that are willing to get in when He comes by, He does. Those that say they don't need God and are perfectly fine on their own refuse to get in the car. It's not that they weren't offered the lift, it's that they rejected it.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Man, I could have SWORN I coined that one. And I know I don't know you.
Feh. Great - or way too busy - minds must think alike ^_^.
For the record, I crossed from apathism to atheism after reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Figured, I still don't believe there is a God, and I spent enough time reading a book about it that I can't REALLY be apathetic about the questions.
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Not that that makes it true, of course - that's another conversation for another day (though if I know Slashdot well, it's probably happening in a quite heated manner on the next thread over...).
I am willing to accept the possibility of pontoons, but not without a great deal of skepticism.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
"If the Bible proves the existence of God then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman".
That still doesn't explain why I think that people who talk to invisible men in the sky are idiots.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
In other news: 95 out of 100 Americans believe that the earth is a sphere. Conclusion: human is hardwired to believe this.
WTF? This is insightful? First of all claimee is not a word, and even if it was I think you would be applying it to God so I'll let him respond in his own post.
But you are right that the burden of proof in on the claimant in any argument, so how does that make agnosticism a logically untenable position? Agnostics don't make any claims, we just sit back watching theists and atheists debating each other and say to ourselves "where's the beef?"
As a somewhat atheistic agnostic I would go further and say that atheists aren't making any claims either, it is solely up to the theists to support their belief in a god with evidence. If they can't come up with anything than the default position that there is no god would have to be assumed. That much you can't dispute, as Richard Dawkins said "we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
How do you quantify this? Try replacing "religion" with "greed", "desire to be famous", "desire to rule people", "sexual desire", "anger", or "sheer stupidity", and see if you can somehow compare their respective "destructiveness". In actuality, people are motivated by many things; every act can be motivated by some or all of the above. Your statement is just an expression of a value.
so, I frequently ask myself "How can I believe in God?" (as a supernatural omnipotent diety) I can believe in a higher consciousness of the Universe, that is okay, however, if the Universe is equivalent to universal turing machine, then there must be such it's state where very good and benevolent "God" really exists. So, maybe we can actually believe in "There is or will be God", and believe that this God is good, and omnipotent, and that it can communicate with us, and affect the present time. Imagining the big brother (God), and imagining the communication with God, might be useful for finding better, more moral ways to behave.
http://id3as.livejournal.com/
This is somewhat offtopic, but if anyone is interested, here is a series of video lectures on religion and atheism by some prominent scientists: http://beyondbelief2006.org/
I especially liked Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Sam Harris, and Richards Dawkins is always nice to hear although he does manage to sound a bit pompous even to an atheist, must be that accent. =P
While I'm at it, I'll include a short overview of my own beliefs.
I'm an atheist.
I define anything in the world as natural and therefore the supernatural does not exist by definition.
If there is any consciousness having powers so much beyond that of humans in the natural world that you would call it godlike, i have seen no evidence to its existence, and even if i did, i see no reason why it would merit unquestioning worship.
I think that a major part of religion is the belief that there are some things that are in some sense universally special, as opposed to personally special.
I don't really care what other people believe as long as they don't try to impose their beliefs on me (and we have quite a bit of that here in Israel).
That's pretty much all i can think of at the moment.
We understand what causes these experiences to happen, typically a smell of roses is triggered by actually smelling roses, tastes and other things are triggered by material things as well. However, the really telling part isn't that we can trigger perceptions of material things but that the perception for triggering the non-existent things occurs in the same part of the brain. When we fiddle with the smell section we end up recalling actual things, whereas when we fiddle with this section we get things which don't, and very exacting stories which fit in perfectly with religious and alien experiences.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Not once.
Not ever in the whole existence of the human race.
If I'm wrong maybe you could provide an example of someone who did reject salvation with the full certainty that their choice would lead them straight to eternal damnation. You know why I know it never happened? Because no one has ever proven Christianity correct. The major tenet of the religion is that it is based in faith and so it is admittedly not provable. That being the case I don't believe that anyone who may have ever gone to hell has ever done so with the full certainty of such a fate. Seriously, who would? Yeah ok, people are stubborn and maybe their are a few people who would rather drive over a cliff than lose a match of Chicken, but the number of people like that are so insignificant they aren't even worth mention when talking about the millions of rational atheists and infidels in the world.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Part of our genetic makeup? Religion? No. It is simply our lack of understanding things like what is that big red thing on the sky that stings your eyes when you look at it. The aztecs called it the sun god and worshiped it. Later we found out that its actually a star, part of the galaxy our planet revolves in and etc. The reason we make up gods is to explain things that we simply are not capable of understanding yet.
That's precisely what free will is all about. God is giving you the chance to screw yourself, only he won't sneer and say "I told you so." when you're at the pearly gates and your name's not on the list.
/.) but go find youself a CS Lewis and debate with him.
Religion is addicting: if you get deep enough into it and exercise a little faith, there's always an answer for everything.
Face it: you're fighting an establishment several thousand years older than you. Defeating you in a theological debate would be like sandblasting a sodacracker. I'm not saying I'm qualified to do so, but a competent scriptorian could. I'm no modal Christian (hello! I read
You'll loose every time.
Trust me....
Consider yourself spoken to.
If I'm wrong maybe you could provide an example of someone who did reject salvation with the full certainty that their choice would lead them straight to eternal damnation. You know why I know it never happened? Because no one has ever proven Christianity correct. The major tenet of the religion is that it is based in faith and so it is admittedly not provable.
For the most part, I'd agree with you. This discussion is largely theoretical, about a situation that rarely occurs. However, looking through Jesus' interactions with the pharisees and others, it seems they had sufficient evidence to be reasonably sure that Jesus was divine, or at the very least, acting on behalf of the divine. As scholars of their scriptures, they were aware of the consequences of rejecting God. But for the most part, they still rejected Him. They were more concerned with their power in this world than their fate in the next. Again, that's something that people often demonstrate - a tendency to take instant gratification rather than delaying it for the chance of a greater payoff.
Of course, the difference between you and I in that discussion is that (I assume) you doubt that Jesus' interactions with the pharisees took place, or at least, that they didn't take place in the way recorded in the Bible.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I don't need a video to tell me what it says
The video is not about what the bible says. I didn't say read the bible. I said watch the science lecture. Now finish the homework assignment and get back to me after the part about what existed before the big bang and what the physics model (not religen) says.
The truth shall set you free!
That is either a typo or a profound insight into modern society. As South Park would have it,
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
"God does not exist. It is all 'hardwiring' in our genetic make-up. When we get the genetic tools, we can get rid of God." And'I suppose we can get rid of hunger and the need for foood as well (great for Third World countries.) We can get rid of sex drive (not acceptable in the U.S.)
"Glory to Man in the Highest, for Man is the Master of things." - A.C. Swinburne.
Or "Our genetic make-up requires God as much as it requires food and sex. We accept hunger, the sex drive, the need for affection and companionship and supply their needs appropriately. Why not do the same with our need for God?" If we get to the next life and find that there is no God, no Pearly Gates, that doesn't help us right now. Right now, we are starving ourselves if we ignore our need for God.
Sorry you right I forgot to make the link. The point I was saying is nihilistic behaviour is more likely to get naturally unselected and hence the prominence of a God gene. The classic example is Nietche, not exactly the splitting image of a family man. Family promotes legacy of ones genes.
And yes as you say you can arrive at other conclusions than fatalism or nihilism, but I'm suggesting that if you starting out as an atheist you are far more likely to reach that conclusion. Religion steers one away from such reasoning.
Lets call it a 'gullibility gene'.
How is you swearing up and down that having religion equates to ignorance any different from a bible-thumping redneck swearing that evolution is a sham?
The big question is: what if? There could be a God, there could be seven, there could be millions, one for each grain of sand. Regardless of your personal beliefs, there is no way to know for sure.
No matter how loudly you might say it.
You are right. In Christianity at least, the idea of Hell as a place of eternal torment is untenable. A good example appears below: amRadioHed destroys C.S. Lewis' "free will" argument in just two paragraphs. He is, in some people's view, the best of what the Catholic (Calvinist, whatever) church has to offer in terms of theology, and yet his argument is totally inane. You just cannot reconcile the notions of God being the benevolent, omnipotent designer who designs some souls to suffer forever... For what? For not appeasing God in some way? But he has no lack. There is no way to hurt God or to be in debt to him. He would not miss a penny, would not drop a single tear if he allowed everyone in Heaven.
I have a good friend who is a professor of Biblical history. Hates Hell, hates Augustin's "original sin" (another big theological blooper), and always says that the church keeps these around because they are the easiest ways to get people to come. And to pay. Why make the community relevant? Too much work. Here in US you would have to go door to door and explain to people why God matters, why the community matters, since people are so well off that they do not readily see how they could possibly benefit from it. In order to be effective in US, Christianity must fight the extreme selfishness which resulted from the universal welfare. But why do that? Much too easier is just scaring everyone with Hell. It is a straightforward appeal to an egoist. I used to be skeptical about that, but after years of arguing with him while visiting various churches I found that he is absolutely right. Look at churches without hell, like Mormons: they have a very strong community, which in itself is rewarding enough for people to be a part of. Look also at churches (even Catholic ones) in places where Christians are persecuted. You will find that no one preaches Hell there. Hell just does not sell alongside the Hell on Earth; but the loving community in this life and the communion with God in the afterlife do.
[If you are wondering about my own beliefs, I am a heretic.]
My question is--what about all the POWs who believed in God, but still died from the abuse, malnutrition, or disease? Didn't they have enough belief in God? My guess is that people are just uncomfortable attributing their survival to chance, genetic advantage (body fat, disease resistance) or something beyond their control. So they attribute it to God.
Dumbass.
Your definition is artificially structured to make atheists look like they're making claims of omniscience. When we hear someone say "I don't believe in ghosts|reincarnation|ESP|alien abduction|bigfoot," we know darned good and well that they aren't saying, "I know everything, and I can conclusively say that these things do not exist anywhere in the universe." We KNOW they aren't laying claims to omniscience. We KNOW what they're saying is "I don't see any credible reason to believe in any of these things." I know it, you know it, everyone knows it.
But if you put the God word into it, suddenly people like you want to leap out and say "Aha! Atheists are arrogant because they think they know everything!" You using juvenile and absurd arguments doesn't make me arrogant, sorry. I don't believe in God in the same way I don't believe in Santa or faeries, or Thor or Shiva. I don't claim to know everything, but I can say "I don't believe in God" without magically becoming arrogant and closed-minded. Stop trying to shift the burden of evidence to me.
I would challenge that many of the similarities you describe didn't, in fact, develop independently. It can at least partially be explained by cultural exchange. For example, our (Western, Christian) image of God as the old white-haired powerful guy and our idea of hell owe a lot to the Greeks. The belief and worship of saints in Christianity can be attributed to polytheistic beliefs that existed before Christianity and were adapted. There are a lot of examples of this. There has always been a high amount of cultural exchange between different societies, even millennia ago. When you compare cultures that had little if any contact with the Eurasia/Africa landmass you see more dramatic differences in beliefs. I do believe you are correct that the different beliefs serve the same needs, however.
Humans are a social species. A person who is alone, not part of a tribe, has no chance to reproduce, and even very little chance of surviving very long.
For hundreds of thousands of years, not to worship the right God in the right way has caused people to become social outcasts at best, but more likely stoned, burned or bludgeoned to death. To be a fitting member of one's tribe and to worship in the same way as the majority of that tribe has usually protected an individual against such a threat to their reproductive success.
I was cured by a physics degree.
There is hope.
Even if the universe was just a never-ending random shuffling of atoms, eventually there'd be one (in this finite search-space) that was conducive to the existence of observers, and the observers would more than likely make the observation that the current arrangement of atoms, the one that allowed them to be there, was too improbable. It is, but just as probable as each of the others.
You can call it an "accident," but it had to be some way, and this way is the only way anyone would ever witness.
- the fear of vengeance from an unseen god allows for creating larger communities without the need for constant human policing
- the belief in a greater being allows for people to sacrifice their time and skills to construct great feats that promote the general good
I bet there are many more, genetic traits rarely have a single purpose. If such communities survive due to their biological inclination to believe in god then it makes sense. PS: Sorry for my English, it feels like sandpaper on my tongue sometimesAs if that alone wasn't hard enough to have faith in, there is no shortage of equally ancient and apocryphal texts from countless other religions all claiming to be true. Maybe we can look at the Pharisees in the Bible and rightfully say they were fools if the stories in the Bible are accurate, but things aren't nearly so simple for us contemporary skeptics.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Actually, I think evolution presents a very strong argument against a (purely) genetic basis for religion.
Namely that no other animal exhibits religious tendencies. I'm not talking about superstitions -- these are actually logical for most animals. My grandmother had a cat that thought that whenever it went into the supply closet and banged around, food would appear in its plate (she'd hear it, and then pop open a can of cat food). It's simply false causation (or true causation as the case may be, since it did cause my grandma to open the cat food). I mean honest-to-G-D religious behavior. Where are the monkeys worshiping shamanistic totems? Where are the dogs praying late at night? Where are the animals crossing themselves before they engage in mortal combat? Animals turning down sex because it is "morally wrong"? Answer: there aren't any. Humans are unique among all animals in this regard. Which should be a red flag for people trying to make this claim.
If you're going to hypothesize evolution as the source for religion, you have to actually consider evolution. If all you have to work with is the (modern) man, you're ignoring the fact that all genes have to come from somewhere. Royal Jester Richard Dawkin's claim that religion is the result of a wanting-to-follow authority gene is ridiculous, as if such a gene existed, it'd be more present in the orderly Germans and less present in the iconoclastic Americans. But half of Germany is Atheistic, and only 8% of Americans are.
In fact, the differences by culture, alone, discredit this theory. If there was a gene, that was presumably more prevalent in some populations than others, that gave people an inclination to believe in God, then you should see correlation between genotype and Atheism rates, whereas the opposite is true. The same descendants from Europeans in America still have high theism rates, whereas their cousins in Europe have very high atheism rates.
Nurture, not nature.
And, honestly, I think the article is insulting to the rational theists out there. It removes personal decision from the equation. (If you are an atheist, consider someone telling you that you're only an atheist because you have this one gene, and through no personal decision of your own.) It really is insulting.
Does it prove that 123% of all US-ians are idiots ?
Seems like it was (intelligently?) designed just to make the point about a future need to use genetic therapy to cure atheists from their 'abnormal' disease...
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
The single most disappointing thing is when uninformed posts like the parent get modded up.
theism - from Greek theos; belief in a supreme being.
atheism - a- (without) + theism; a lack of a belief in a supreme being.
antitheism - anti- (against or opposite of) + theism; a belief in the nonexistence of a supreme being.
agnosticism - a- + gnosis (knowledge); the belief that we cannot prove the existence of a supreme being.
ignosticism - (from ignore and agnosticism); the belief that the question of the existence of a supreme being has no verifiable consequence and thus it should be ignored.
Note that agnosticism is compatible with theism, atheism, and antitheism: it is entirely possible to believe that the existence of a god cannot be proven and concurrently hold an opinion on the matter. Conversely, ignosticism is only compatible with atheism; it makes no sense to believe that the existence of a god should be ignored while believing in its existence or nonexistence.
Also note that antitheism is generally considered a subset of atheism. This is why many theists seem to think that atheism is a belief in the nonexistence of a god. Just as we atheists mostly hear the loudest of the theists, the theists hear the loudest of the atheists, who are nearly always antitheistic.
Lastly, proof has nothing to do with any of the above categories (read: belief), with the exception of agnosticism, which only deals with the lack of proof surrounding the existence of a supreme being. Please don't claim that theists or antitheists do anything without proof, because both belief systems are founded on faith. There is no proof to go either way.
Even the "humanist" ethics came from a rediscovery of the Greeks and Romans (i.e. the classical world), which predated Christianity.
And all your holidays are pagan. Christmas, Easter, the whole bit. The virgin birth, crucifixion, resurrection after three days, and other details all existed in religions older than Christianity. So I guess you have to choose something other than Christianity if you want to be free of pagan taint.
If you want to think you're going to heaven and I'm going to burn, fine, but stop thinking that Christianity sprang up as a completely new belief system when Jesus came along. You didn't exactly invent much, just killed off all the competition once you got the government on your side.
As far as I'm concerned, Christianity has actually harmed morality. Many Christians believe that you are saved not by works, but by faith. So whether or not you "walk with God" depends not on whether or not you help the poor, show kindness, or are decent, but purely on whether you have accepted Jesus as your savior. Being decent in my book is linked to what you DO, not what you BELIEVE. I don't care if you talk to Jesus and He loves you. I care if you're honest, decent, compassionate, humble, and so on. But to many Christians, those are incidental, and the real issue is whether or not you have accepted Jesus. I hate when evangelicals come to my door, because they just ask "have you accepted Jesus?" If someone asked "do you want to go work at a homeless shelter with me this weekend?" I might respect their religion a bit. But I've never, ever been asked anything by an evangelical that relates to anything other than doctrine. They're just trying to get to heaven, and that isn't a very elevated ethic. It's inherently selfish.
You want to know what nauseates me? In the movie Passion of the Christ, that table where Jesus was scourged was heavily gouged and blood-soaked, and the men whipping him were casual about it, meaning they did this all the time. This was their JOB--people made a living doing this. What made me cry (yes I cried) was this casual, commonplace cruelty of man towards man--that this is how we treat each other, and that this is acceptable behavior, by which you can even make a living. It's that normal. But not one Christian I've spoken to even noticed this scene. When I asked them, they were puzzled, and had to think about it for a bit before they could even recall this detail. ALL THEY CARED ABOUT was that Jesus suffered and died FOR THEM. That this suffering and dying was commonplace, that others were scourged and crucified that day, meant nothing to them. Yeah, Christians are moral. If you're saving THEIR butt from the fire, they'll shed a tear and sing your praises. Otherwise, it's beneath notice.
You are making the same basic assumption that the original article makes: Namely that evolution is true and that special creation by God is false.
... It is really that simple and the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Actually, that's not really an assumption. That's what science shows to be true based on massive amounts of evidence. We find that both evolution is true and that special creation is false. However, the article suggest that due to the frequency of religious belief that there should perhaps be a biological component, and moreover a genetic cause. This latter claim is extremely suspect due to it existing in the realm of memetic rather than genetic evolution as well as for a number of more general flaws.
The evolutionary world view requires a convoluted, contradictory theory why man is so incurably religious.
No it doesn't. There is plenty of atheism to go around, and beyond outright atheism there is a massive amount of irreligious people, in fact polls show that 50% of people would currently describe themselves as religious in the United States and that number is dropping. However, we are talking about a belief, rather than some part of our phenotype. One need only show that that belief can spread and pass from one person to another to explain it's success. Religion is well evolved for the task of spreading from one person to another with promises of eternal happiness for conforming and eternal suffering for failing to... an infinite carrot with an infinite stick.
The Biblical world view cuts through all that and simply states that we are made in the image of God.
I think you do Lord Occam a disservice by pretending that an explanation that explains nothing and raises a huge number of secondary questions is on par with a simple materialistic explanation which actually fits the facts. The point is that at the core the explanation regardless of complexity needs to actually explain the facts it is set forth to explain. Certainly you could say "Goddidit" to any problem, and it does only contain 8 letters, but it fails in that it doesn't actually resolve anything.
Just as hardware and software are distinct, so too is the brain and the mind. Software can exist independent of any particular hardware. In the same way, the mind can be independent of the brain.
Actually neurology has rather firmly come down against this. The brain is the seat of our very being. We are fully contained in that three pound lump of gray stuff between our ears. The best computer analog would be some form of highly flexible firmware running on hardware, without any software in sight.
In fact, we find that in infants the original programming is hardwired (instinct) within the primitive brain to look at things that move and to recognize faces, whereas later this is turned off when our brains grow large enough to counteract this. However the software isn't written, rather it develops with our brains. Infants are born with a vast number of neurons, more than they can use. When they try to grab things, the strongest signals get through and the unused neurons atrophy. This allows for skill development and learning. It's not a program, it's a self rewiring asynchronous system wholly material in existence and function.
Creationists and religious folks have been so busy bickering about evolution they didn't notice when, in the last few decades, neurology came in and obliterated the idea of a soul. Modern science tells us that "we" are about three pounds of gray stuff. Our perception of ourselves is natively rather flawed. When we are told that our brain "thinks for us", we tend to think of it like a computer our mind uses to do things rather than the more accurate understanding that our brain is 'us'. It is a wonderful organ, but not the greatest at perceiving itself. Rather I should say, I am a wonderful organ. I control my body with ease.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
In one interesting book I've read that religions were started by visionaries. Visionaries would see something that they interpreted as god, and would feel compelled to do things that are too unusual, risky or so out of bounds that people would believe they are on to something otherworldly. However, what they have seen is something called the mold of man. It's more exact to say that they have seen only a glimpse of it.
If one looks at the mold of man briefly, he will be overcome with awe - because it is full of ethereal beauty that has nothing comparable in our experience. It combines all that is highest in our nature.
However magicians can look at the mold of man for hours at a time, and therefore they can see that it cannot do anything in the sense that people would expect god to do. Nor in any other sense.
Normal people have at least some vague recollection of it and therefore cannot be purely atheistic. Only magician can be purely atheistic if he looked at the mold of man for many hours. This echoes a comment of Dostoevsky who said that atheists at his time (1880s in russian empire), are more religious than normal faithful people.
who let a poet in here?
But remember that George Bush Sr. said that atheists shouldn't even be considered citizens. It's okay to dislike us just because we don't share your faith. Adults have bills to pay, and that "integrity" thing that was so invigorating and principled at 16 becomes a liability when you have to pay the rent. Are they lying? Some of them. Most are rationalizing so they can be seen being just like everybody else.
Also, people become more sensitive to hurting their parents' feelings when they become parents too, or in that age range. I know one woman who said her mother wouldn't talk to her anymore, that her entire family wouldn't welcome her the same way, if she became "a Darwinist." No, I'm not making that up. So the dynamics involved here may be more complex than adults "needing" faith. Some no doubt do (I don't) but the stigma issue shouldn't be underestimated.
Besides, the GP is being honest by mentioning his analysis is based on his "personal experience", and by no means a generalization; and (s)he only says that "belief of God is vulnerable to rational analysis", not that you suddenly become a wholehearted atheist.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
"According to a Sunday New York Times article, 6 in 10 Americans are socially forced to pretend to believe in the devil and hell, 7 in 10 are socially forced to pretend to believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and life after death, while 92% are socially forced to pretend to believe in a personal God."
There, fixed.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
BZZZT! Wrong! This is a common belief within the Christian societies though, and Christians love to believe this. There is very close to zero effect of the Christian believes in our law and moral systems however. Most of it pre-dates Christianity by a significant margin.
One of the fun things to as Christians about when they argue as above is to ask them to quantify it. How many of the 10 commandments and the teachings of Jesus has ended up as law in the country where you live? The answer is, interestingly enough, a wholly insignificant amount.
I agree with the GP, but you also have a good point.
Religion came about to explain everything that couldn't be explained, namely what happens after death, the beginning and end of the world, the boundaries of the world, etc. Most religions throughout the world have their own story "explaining" these. Science came about with a similar motivation, except that instead of just making up convenient answers, science attempts to actually explain them through (almost) objective reasoning and inspection.
Science is as perfect as the people who practice it, but at least it takes us in the right direction. Religion stubbornly refuses to be contradicted because it was created to fill in all the gaps and be unquestionable. And that's the reason there are so many clashes about evolution and the origins of the world, because ignorant fanatics refuse to diminish the power they attribute to their beliefs.
The most devout believers I know regularly question their faith and give it a test, and my local vicar (Anglican), minister (Methodist) and rabbi (Jewish, evidently) say that blind faith is useless because you don't know what you're believing in unless you've proven it to yourself.
Rationality and religion aren't mutually exclusive - take creation for example. The evidence points towards some form of Big Bang, but there's nothing to explain how a universe worth of matter suddenly popped into being, although physicists have been trying. Lets call this unknown thing 'God'. Now, lets take a piece of scripture such as Genesis. Six days of creation... The six 'days' are very close to the actual order of events, and if you had to explain the creation of the galaxy and all things in it to pre-Roman humans would you really be happy trying to explain the concept of astromechanics, biochemistry and evolution? Nah, much easier to explain it in terms of days. People understand those.
Evolution next - perhaps simply throwing together a load of matter and nudging it gently (See chaos theory - what we perceive as chaotic may actually be slightly more directed than it appears) is the easiest way to build life. Also note that nowhere in theBbible does it explicitly state that mankind is the only thing in existence, it only says God created man. It never says "And the LORD thought this was enough, so signed off for the day and didn't do any more life".
You may as well believe - if religion is right then you get a place in the afterlife. If not, by your own argument, what have you lost?
Yes, I'm being devil's advocate here. But don't assume that you're always right because the evidence points that way. After all, we *knew* the earth was flat until we took a better look at it, and we *knew* illness was caused by bad smells until somebody thought to perfect the microscope. Have a read of "Science of Discworld II" by Terry Pratchett if you can find a copy - it takes a good look at why mankind surrounds itself with stories and gods (Amongst other things).
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I'm sure you're not talking about the Christian god though...I mean, he got pissed off and drowned everybody at one point
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
I think that is wrong -- Sweden has one of the best statistics of suicides! Since we're not religious, there is a lot less stigma with suicide, so the reporting is better (i.e. a lot less are written off as accidents).
On the other hand, with the winter darkness being what it is...
This lack of religion isn't the most extreme difference of Swedes. I always thought that if there, against all taste and reason, should be a god -- then the Swedes are its way of LD-50 test caffeine. Then the senile idiot just forgot to lock the cage door.
Atheism in Sweden shows differences compared to other countries in that few people here are brought up with religion. People just don't care -- at all. To declare faith in anything is a bit strange, like chewing with an open mouth. A bit strange. Most people that turn religious without that kind of upbringing usually have some lesser mental problems.
I was really surprised the first time I went to Ireland and realized that people were religious -- but otherwise normal.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
Q. What's the worst thing about being an atheist?
A. There's no Hell for the Protestants to burn in!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I reckon this is where the other part of evolution kicks in: The strong belief of Americans is a consequence of selection, not mutation. Think: Mayflower, etc. The early settlers in America were religious fundamentalists^H^H^H^Hrefugees, and their (presumably already mutated) genes dominate the gene pool of the US.
But there is another example of genetic difference between America and Europe due to selection: I read somewhere (sorry, too long ago, can't cite any source) that the ratio of people with myopia is considerably lower in the US than in Europe. With all those dangers (gunfights, bears etc.) in the Wild West, survival would have depended a lot on good eyesight.
Anyway: I remember when George W Bush claimed he was on a mission from God against the Taliban and Saddam. This statement would have earned a European president a sure ticket into retirement (if not asylum).
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
Exactly, and not quite right.
I'm certainly agnostic.
My belief is that it's impossible to know whether there is a god, or something you just don't understand.
However, i do believe one should assume that things are just hard to understand, because that's the only way you can learn about them.
I refuse to rule out gods or pantheons, even though i find many of them unlikely to the point of idiocy. I also refuse to accept those that cannot be proven.
I'm also quite convinced that no human can convince me to believe in any religion.
A funny thing about the bible, is that its started as a peer review. (no it doesn't make me think it's right)
A funny thing about slashdots non-bot confirmation, is that i just got the word possible.. random is fun, but only when you notice it (or is it the other way around).
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Some people, and some aspects of religion refuse to be contradicted... The end-result is that God can neither be proven nor disproven -- if by God, we mean an unknowable being who asks for our faith. Because both "unknowable" and "faith" are stopping points. If it's knowable, it isn't God, and/or one doesn't need faith. There are plenty of people who read and understand the latest research in behavioral, evolutionary, physical and Cosmic sciences and don't feel that it challenges their belief in God in the slightest -- the idea of a Bible whose truth lies in its allegories sweeps away all sense of contradiction. And, of course, no matter what we discover about the Universe, it doesn't prove the absence of God. You can't prove a negative.
who let a poet in here?
If the God of the Old Testament really existed, it would be necessary to destroy Him.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
There is a lot of symbolism in religion. And after time passes people abuse it for power, prestige, money and many other things, just as Coca Cola exploits the fact that we can feel good after drinking that special and unique beverage. That does not mean God exists, but proving abuses does not prove God does not exist, nor that we could not know about "He", "It", "Him", "That" or "This".
Now, nobody has to convince you. If you look inside, you can find a bit. Or if you look hard enough, you can see a smile that is very different from others, which seems so much at peace, that you would like to feel like that person. But if he tries to explain, he will never convince you, and you'll never believe him.
unfinished: (adj.)
Let's be honest - every religion makes some extreme claims, otherwise they would all be boring. Most of these extraordinary claims are quite absurd to me, and to believe them at face value seems absurd. I understand that the "point" of most religion is not mere belief in these ridiculous physical events, but they are lumped in there (and are quite frequently the most heated points of contention between believers and nonbelievers) and are certainly not trivial.
I must note, however, that the strict scientifically inclined non-believers (I gather there are quite a few around these parts!) make a mistake almost as egregious as the most fundamentalist of believers. There is no explanation for existence of the system that we find ourselves taking part in unless you look outside the system; no set of axioms can establish itself as true, to put it another way. You always need meta-axioms that establish the truth of the axioms, meta-meta axioms that establish the truth of the meta-axioms, and so on. And don't even start trying to think that you can bootstrap the infinite regress away with self sustaining axioms like "This axiom is true, along with all these other ones" because that axiom itself could be false (its truth is self consistent but not self evident). Similarly, our world's existence must be established by something, and that something's existence must be established by something else, etc. This means that at a fundamental level, there is a point at which reductionism must fail, and science can no longer point the way forward. Religion actually fails at addressing this point, as well, because it tries to get away with the self sustaining axiom that God exists more or less because He wills it (or some variation on that - every theologian seems to have his own pet way of boiling the tower of necessary axioms down to one). Which is all well and good, except that it's perfectly consistent to assume that He doesn't exist at all.
Still, the fact that science cannot explain everything doesn't mean that it is flawed, or that the current religions somehow do any better. I think the true fact of the matter is that from within a closed (or mostly closed) system, it is impossible to completely investigate that which lies outside the system. For instance, suppose for a minute that our universe is really just a highly complex computer simulation running on a powerful but non-networked computer in some kid's basement in the "real" meta-universe. It would be fundamentally impossible for us to determine anything about the meta-universe in such a situation; this is not a failing of our science, it is a mere fact of the crappy situation we're in. There is always some uncertainty left after we've discovered everything that is possible to know. Always. Both the religious and the skeptical would be well advised to remember this more often than they do.
But if I'm greedy I have a harder time getting others to act than if I was religious and used that, spreading religion. Greed wouldn't work as well because they'd want a payout and when it didn't materialize, they'd leave.
Ponzi schemes last days to years, religions last centuries, at least. It seems to me that for a specific lie, from a specific person, the religion one had a larger effect. Some effects were good (charities) but much bad. Not just the wars and hate, but the ignorance and the inability to allow people to examine the world around themselves.
In the same way that a cult/scam like Amway, Scientology, or Herbalife keeps their members in the dark so that they don't learn the lie of the organization, religions promote ignorance of the world. The Catholic church persecuted Galileo for writing about observable facts. Scientologists sue and ostracize members who discover the truth about their teachings.
Same tactics, much longer lifespan. Therefore, religions wins. imho. Bit silly though, to nitpick, because it's certainly a net loss, for the ignorance alone, even if it isn't the worst thing ever.
>My beliefs are shaped by my experiences, and observations.
And so are my experiences and my observations...I think you are not looking hard enough, and that doesn't mean Catholics are right, or Jew, or Mexican Chamanes, but that there _is_ something else you are connected to, and that you can experience. Try medidation, or something that looks inside you, if you do it with a heart, you may notice something.
unfinished: (adj.)
Furthermore, I believe God does not elevate you, doing the right things can get you closer to god or the essense, and it's so great that there you have "heaven". If you do the "wrong things" (whatever are different from the essense) get you further away. Nobody is pushing you or rewarding you, but yourself. The difference being that God does not "help", but merely share you a bit of conciousness, and you go were you want from there.
unfinished: (adj.)
When you look to other religions and say "that's ridiculous" at the idea of a wine god or a god with the head of an elephant or spirits and ferries or Zeus or Thor wielding his hammer, have you ever considered one thing.... is your religion any less ridiculous???? Being ridiculous is one of the attractions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credo_quia_absurdum
>"We're talking about Gods/the gods as though it/they were human, but that's just a metaphor and the God is far beyond our ability to comprehend."
Bah and in the same time there is a book which says 'Adam was made in the image of God'.
What you're saying is just a defence against the obvious criticism against Religions that they treat Gods like humans, the defense is that it's 'just a metaphor', but the truth is: religions *cannot* avoid this metaphor which make them look a lot like the myths that they are.
For a while now, i've been entertaining the theory that religion is at it's core a refuge from complexity.
Basically, the world is a complex place:
- Nature is infinitly varied.
- Human societies are complicated, semi-chaotic systems.
- Many life changing events (for example, accidents) result in one outcome or another based quite a lot on luck.
The harder it is for someone to intelectually concieve and/or emocionally accept that the seemingly complex can grow from quasi-infinite combinations of the simple, the more likelly it is that said person will be overwelmend by the complexity of the results.
Many people feel powerless and overwelmed by all this. Most of those cannot bring themselfs to live life as a small boat in the middle of a big storm.
Those are the ones more likelly to believe in a Deity or Pantheon. The belief in the mere exitence in this higher Being(s) gives confort because He/She/They give logic to the complexites of the world ("it is the will of $Deity") thus providing a form of emotional shelter. A Belief also gives a sense of purpose and, when shared with others, can create a comunity of individuals which support each other. Life is simpler if there is a "Greater Truth" which us simple mortals cannot comprehend.
Hence believers find shelter from the storms of life in the arms of a shared belief on a "Higher Purpose" which acts as a guiding light and an "All knowing, all powerfull $Deity(ies)" which is responsible for making things as they are.
[PS: I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to fit the emotional shock of the death of a loved one or the fear of death in this theory]
Thank you, Zonk. It is for those articles that I prefer /. to digg. The articles that go against the mainstream (mainstream of technocommunity sites being atheist).
Muslims share the notion of intrinsic awareness of supernatural deity ingrained in our body/mind. It is called Fitrah. It pops out even in some atheists when they are incountered with incredible danger to their life. People who never before mentioned God in their lives, suddenly call to higher help in the materialistically (or if it is seems that way) hopeless situation. Even atheists won't deny that usually people turn to religion when life becomes hard on them (atheists think that they do it in dilusion, while believers think that it is Fitrah).
That distinguish humans from other creations: live or inanimate which also obey laws of God.
That said, I have to say that I am very skeptical of scientific relevance or merit of the posted article without even reading it. I have read way too many "science" on popular notions to be think differently on that matter.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. "If you have negative sentiments toward religion," he tells them, "the box will destroy whatever you put inside it." Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver's license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.
For Muslims, actually, NOT putting or even being afraid of putting their hand in the box will be act of Kufr, of disbelief that the Prophet Muhammad, sal Allahu 'alaihi wa sallaam, is the SEAL of messengers and prophets. Being even hesitant in doing so, they would assume that the professor has prophetic abilities and have more intimate connection with God than mere mortals.
I am glad I dismissed the article as a whole. It is sad that many believers probably will take this article of pseudoscience as a some kind conformation of their faith. We have to be strong to dismiss pseudoscience whether it supports or contradicts our faith. True science (a) will never contradict Qur'an and Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad, sal Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam (b) would never provide any materialistic proofs of existence of God (Qur'an states many times that the key component of the belief is belief in UNSEEN, that is not detectable by any scientific method).
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The thing is, though, that e ** (j * PI) == -1 is just an equation. If you know how pi, e and j are defined, and more to the point you know the series expansions of e ** x, cos(x) and sin(x), then it's really not all that magical -- just a special case of how e ** (j * x) == cos(x) + j * sin(x). And when x = pi, cos(x) == -1 and sin(x) = 0. That's all there is to it! It shouldn't even surprise you. Even powers have reflective symmetry about the Y-axis (like cos), odd powers have spin symmetry about the origin (like sin). If you can expand the sine function to an infinite series, then the terms which make it up can contain only odd powers of x (anything else would spoil the symmetry), whereas the terms which make up the co-sine must contain only even powers of x. Now, successive powers of j go 1, j, -1, -j, 1, j, -1, -j, 1 ..... a nice progression, interleaving the alternation of sign and "realness". If you put a j into any infinite series expansion, you'll find all the even powers coming out real, the odd powers coming out imaginary and the signs alternating in each progression. But this is all just because j * j == -1 and -1 * -1 = 1.
If you want something really interesting, consider why the slope of a graph and the area enclosed by a graph, the axes and some ordinate should be inverses of each other.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
My goodness you have a very warped view of Christianity. Of course I don't think you will burn in hell. God loves you just as much as he loves me. Just as much as he loves everyone and there is nothing you or I can do to change that.
I'm very sorry you feel this way.
Right. That's why the early Christian church grew from one insignificant death to envoloping the Roman Empire despite continuous persecutions.
Because their morals and sense of cohesion were no different from everyone elses.
Fear is usually considered the most basic emotion, but I have had several life-threatening situations which did not evoke any fear in me. However I have found that in the most stressful experiences I have had, the great emotion I felt was guilt. If we are hardwired to feel guilt, then we will attach it to the most important icon we can imagine, which would be God and all he represents (life, death, creation, eternity, etc.)
Out-of-body experiences are another phenomenon that science seems on the verge of convincingly explaining in purely naturalistic terms.
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter though. The new agers will either continue to believe in out-of-body experiences despite convincing naturalistic explanations, or they'll give up that belief and cling to the ones that science hasn't yet investigated thoroughly. Similarly, religious people will either ignore science altogether (e.g., the creationists) or follow the tried and true god-of-the-gaps strategy by focusing more on other beliefs that science hasn't yet investigated, or creating new ones if necessary.
The will to warm, fuzzy self-delusion is the strongest will in many of us, and as the saying goes, where there is a will, there is a way.
Just about all religions state that if you don't believe in their Deity you won't get to their version of Heaven (consignation to a Hell or Purgatory is optional) independently of you being a righteous person that lived a good life and never hurt a fly (i reckon Mother Teresa has a 90% change of ending in some kind of hell or other).
So, just out of curiosity, me being a non-believer (agnostic, please do not confuse with anti-religion: atheist) and thus undecided, please tell me which Deity is the right one to belief in. If applicable, don't forget to include the specific profets i'm supposed to believe in (for example Islamism, Judaism and Cristianism are all born from the same original religion but differ in their profets) and which is the right version of the sacred book(s) i should read and the correct language to read them in.
Also please let me know what kind of Deity condemns good and fair people to eternal damnation simply because they happen to not believe in that Deity (with a weak argument as "it's your fault for not believing in me"), and why should i follow such a selfish and unfair Deity.
God is perfection, heaven == god. An imperfect being cannot be one with God, as God is perfection. The only way a being could be one with God is by being God; perfection.
It's a religious thread, I'm allowed to babble.
[clever sig]
That's the really important question. The answer will make us understand why people search for a religion gene, for example.
I think the reason for going after religion is a actually a mix of many reasons: bad education, media brain-washing, economic problems, etc.
It may seem far-fetched now, but USA seems to have lots of internal problems...I think those problems will led to its downfall. If only USA adopted a more mild/less aggressive/scientific-oriented approach, it would be much better for them.
USA seems like ancient Greek Athens: Blinded by its own power, heading straight into self-destruction.
There is a good argument that can be used to test if someone is agnostic, atheist or just confused. Answer the below questions:
1. Are you agnostic or atheistic about your believes in God?
2a. If you answered atheist to question 1: You are an atheist. Good for you.
2b. If you answered agnostic to question 1: Are you agnostic or atheistic about your believes in Santa Claus, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Invisible Pink Unicorn and Fairies?
3a. If you answered agnostic to question 2b: You are an agnostic. You believe anything is possible even though there is no proof either way.
3b. If you answered atheist to question 2b: Why are you questioning your unbelief in God, but not your unbelief in Fairies? Both have just as little proof of their existence. Think about it carefully before doing the test a second time. If you arrived at this point for the second time it must be because you have a special reasoning concerning God. Call yourself an agnostic if you want, but be aware that atheists will think that you just like sitting on the fence post unless you give a very good argument for your reasoning.
Basically that's right, but more to the point I just don't see the pharisees of the Bible as relevant to the discussion. Maybe they were willing to trade their influence on earth for an afterlife in paradise, but I'm really talking about the majority of the worlds non-believes who never had the benefit of direct interaction with Christ.
Well, my original post was a refutation of a hypothetical situation (that even someone fully aware of the consequences of their actions may make a non-optimal choice). If you're moving on to the practicalities of modern skepticism, that's fine, but it's a deviation from what I was talking about in the original posts.
Everyone today can only base their decision to believe or not to believe on ancient apocryphal texts instead of the primary sources available to the pharisees.
They may be ancient, but they're hardly apocryphal, at least if their attribution is correct (and there is little evidence to the contrary). Of the Gospels, all but Luke were eye-witness accounts (for the most part; obviously they weren't there for Jesus' birth, or the creation of the universe, which they also mention), and Luke was written while there were still living eye-witnesses that he talked to. Pretty much all of the New Testament claims to have been written within a generation or so from the actual events.
That aside, modern reformed theology (which I'm the most familiar with) basically states that there is no such thing as a purely intellectual belief. That only people who the Holy Spirit works through are going to believe. That essentially boils down to the fact that Christianity can never really be derived through pure intellectualism - it requires a spiritual experience. Once you're convinced of the basic truths of Christianity, then the whole thing holds together. But you're probably not going to find sufficient evidence to prove those basic truths empirically.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Once I call them on it of course they say "no, I was moved by that, too" but the fact is they had to think hard to even remember what I was talking about. It didn't register, because for them it isn't the point of the movie. That Christ died for their (and my, and your) sins, and that by accepting this we get into heaven, is the point. The tragedy of torture and execution being normalized to the point of hiring people to do it--that doesn't register. If you want to refute me, fine, I can live with that. But please don't go off on the "I'm sorry you're so bitter" angle while ignoring my actual points.
I'm not bitter and I don't hate Christians. I just don't consider them to be inherently moral or decent. They're people, just like everyone else, only they believe that everyone who doesn't believe in their God deserves to roast for all eternity. They're stuck with having to say either that the unbelievers deserve it, or that God is unjust. Tough choice when your own soul is on the line. How does God deal with open rebellion again? Oh, that's right.
Sigh. No, that is not why Christianity grew. On the other hand, any scholar or someone just interested in the topic knows a lot about why Christianity grew. You obviously don't know anything about it. It didn't really have any thing with its morals at all, but it did have a lot to do with the problem of polytheism in societies that were developing more and more advanced thought systems.
A slight oversimplification would say something like: Christianity is what you get when you spread monotheistic Judaism into the intellectual systems of Greece at around that time. Christianity was, as is most of this stuff, an accident of time, not the result of some divine dude taking human form.
The funny thing is that your misplaced sarcasm, with zero content, masks entirely the fact that you could not point to a single new thought in Christianity of the time, which kinda proves my point, now doesn't it?
If you remove from the Christian set of moral codes those codes that overlap with a lot of others (e.g. don't murder people and take their stuff), what are you left with that's uniquely Christian, though?
Not to sound flippant, but you are left with Jesus Christ, and what He represents to Christians: forgiveness from our multitudinous ways of harming ourselves and those around us, and a bridge between man and God, as we believe He was and is both.
There is nothing particularly unique about Christian moral teaching, as we believe God has written this part on our consciences as well as on the world around us, and people can and do rediscover it all the time, more or less independently. But no one lives up to this, or any, moral code perfectly, all the time. We call this sin: failure to live up to even our own imperfect standards, much less God's perfect ones. And in Christ (not in Christianity, but in Christ Himself) we have a way of forgiveness and restoration, and the strength to try to do better next time.
Don't mean to "preach," but you did ask. :)
Nonaggression works!
First off, it is an American study we're talking about, so I don't think it surprises anyone that more than half of you guys believes in a deistic God. But if humans are biologically hardwired to believe in supernatural deity, then how come these figures do not apply to other places? The majority in Sweden and the rest of Northern Europe are atheists. Also, before Christianity delivered us from temptation and sin, people here believed in a system with many gods, similar to the Greeks. Furthermore, I think most old 'native' religions have a completely different take on their place in nature, and I don't think for a second that you can call them deists. So, humans may be "hardwired" to look for quick answers and authoritative figures, but we are NOT hardwired to believe in God. There's no excuse, now repent.
I'm sick of this "Hell is a separation from god" line that Christians have been using more and more.
Hell is vividly described in the bible as a place of torture and pain.
This whole pick and choose method of belief annoys the hell (sorry) out of me.
Either you believe that the Bible is the word of God and follow every rule...
or if you feel like ignoring some bits why not ignore the whole thing?
I'm sick of this "Hell is a separation from god" line that Christians have been using more and more.
Because both are true. Hell is a separation from God. God is the source of all goodness. When you take away all goodness, what are you left with? Suffering, pain, torment. The difference is in the emphasis - Hell isn't God being vindictive - "you didn't believe me, so I'm going to fry your ass" - it's God giving people what they've said they wanted. "You wanted a life without Me. OK, here it is."
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Sorry, but if you had read the article, you would have noticed that one of the human traits that set us up for believing in religous nonsense, is the the tendency to see patterns and relations when they are not there. Any other comparison of modern day science with say the teachings in the Kama Sutra would be deemed absurd. So why should the bible be exempt, what makes the bible (a 3rd century compilation of various older religious tracts) so special, except that you 'believe' in it?
But please remember the fine article was about why people are religious/tend to believe in a god, not whether or not your beliefs are equal to those of children believing in Santaclaus.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Well it certainly proves my laziness. I could talk about connectedness, pacisfism, turning the other cheek, the true nature of effective leadership, discarding the superfluous, the benefits of altruism, the power of redemption but no doubt all those ideas have precedent in some other culture at an earlier time.
What can I say? In the end it works for me. I feel a profound peace and much higher sense of connectedness to the world and my fellow man after church. That is good enough for me. I think it is only right that I tell others about this in case it helps them too.
Finally I do not think Christianity is the only path to God. It is what I know the best and am comfortable with though.
While 92% of americans believe in a personal God, the situation is almost the complete opposite in countries like Sweden.
So the basic premise is flawed. This is not a universal trait, but a cultural one.
That is what your argument suggests: That we are subject to Heaven or Hell without choice or free will.
But the LORD loves us enough that He chose to give us free will, and the LORD helps people with miracles. The cold empirical facts fall way short of that. Seek and yea shall find. Ask and you will receive. Faith can move mountains. That means: Look for miracles and the silliness of the cold genetic explanation becomes clear.
The LORD trumps all of science. Wordly things are only as deterministic as He allows them to be.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
I am happy for you that it works for you, but I also feel profoundly sorry that you need to delve into the halls of mysticism and absurdity to find meaning in your life. Wouldn't it be better if you could find purpose an meaning without inventing an all-good, punishing, caring and eternal-damnation-creating Santa Claus pulling the strings from behind that curtain and those mirrors?
You might find this interesting.
Essentially he argues that religion may be a survival trait, where mild psychoses aid belief. Saplosky is certainly qualified, and it's certainly preaching to the choir, but an interesting article nonetheless.
Life is just a bowl of All Bran - Small Faces
Of course, I do think my religion (Islam) is NOT ridiculous, while some other are. The God with qualities I believe in is God who is believed in by the greatest scientists of the past, non-antropomorphic or non-idol in any other way.
Before making overgeneralizing statements about all religions, may be you should have studied some of them.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
If by 'those in the church' you mean 'the classic creeds, the church fathers and the statements of faith of all mainstream denominations' then you are correct.
Actually, he repeatedly referred to himself as 'I AM,' which is a name for God and said that he was one with the Father, claimed abilities unique to God, such as the forgiveness of sins (which is one of the reasons the Pharisees wanted to kill him). He does distinguish between himself and the Father at times, but he is also quite clear that he is God.
He was praying to the Father, but that doesn't mean is isn't God. The Trinity is relational, with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit displaying love towards one another. The Son, once incarnate, communicated with his Father through prayer and in doing so set us an example.
Actually, Jesus willingly accepted worship when it was offered, e.g. by Thomas.
The trouble is that in order to be our Saviour, Jesus must be both man and God
If you are sceptical of what I've said, here a few links you might find interesting reading:
Good Reference http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiddu_Krishnamurti http://www.kfa.org/ http://www.kinfonet.org/
"I am happy for you that it works for you, but I also feel profoundly sorry that you need to delve into the halls of mysticism and absurdity to find meaning in your life. Wouldn't it be better if you could find purpose an meaning without inventing an all-good, punishing, caring and eternal-damnation-creating Santa Claus pulling the strings from behind that curtain and those mirrors?"
Actually you don't sound particularly happy for me but maybe that is just the nature of an internet conversation. I have lots of meaning in my life and many, many challenges. I have marvelous sense of wonder at the beautiful Universe for us to discover learn about. I have the chance to participate in that. I have challenges of developing a first rate software program that could transform the lives of millions of children around the world. I have the challenge of participating in the debate of the future of the energy for our civilization. Having access to that peace and connectedness it a marvelous aid to the challenges of my life.
I feel sad you feel the need to denegrade it.
I have never seen anything to suggest that athiests are inherently moral. In fact, there is little reason to believe such to be the case.
So I guess we have to accept people-of-faith just like homosexuals:
because they were born that way ?
But re: the Fundies: You cannot tolerate intolerance and hope to remain free.
"You have liberated me from thought."
What you are missing is a person's ability to disregard reality when they feel it should not apply to them. A lot of people do things they know are wrong because they feel the consequences do not apply to them. In case you haven't been awake for the past 30+ years, the modern world is full of people who do not believe that the real world applies to them, despite ALL evidence to the contrary. Even a person who believed utterly that telling a lie would send a person to Hell would tell a lie because they would not believe that the rule is for *them*.
No knowledgable and religious Jew of the time would have accepted any other Jew as being literally divine (as opposed to figuratively, in the sense of all Jews being "children of God"). There is no evidence that Jesus proclaimed himself to be the literal son of God, and there's little reason to think he would have -- as no one would have believed him. Only to Christians, who have *already* accepted the idea, does it seem odd or simply wrong for someone to deny his divinity. Learn the Jewish religion someday, as practiced by Jews around the start of the common era. Even Jews who believe that the prophet Elijah ascended to Heaven while alive do not believe he is divine.
Why do you think God should think the way YOU think? Why do you think He is any way resembling you or vice versa? Where does THAT come from?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The most basic tenet of Judiasm is that there is a single God. Judiasm places no other restrictions on non-Jews in terms of belief. You are free to believe in other supernatural powers or beings, so long as you do not believe they are a God of some kind. According to Judiasm, non-Jews are completely free to be a-religious, so long as they are theists. Personally, if one presupposes the existence of God, this would be the most reasonable one could ask for.
I think the idea of a God and the concept of religion are often confused and conflated. One need not follow a religion to believe in God, and there are religions that do not espouse a belief in any gods.
In the article, Scott Atran wonders what the use of religion was from an evolutionary perspective.
A few days back I saw a comic strip of a caveman worshipping a rock. A fellow caveman remarked that it was just a stupid rock. The first caveman promply bashed the second caveman's head in (using the rock), saying it was necessary, because he was an 'infidel'.
Now think about it for a second. If we look at the course of history, a lot of wars have been waged in the name of religion. This has been going on over the course of decennia, millennia even.
What if there really is a genetic trait that 'hardwires' us to be religious? What if the holy wars have caused the lesser (read: non) religious genes to be weakened in numbers, or even erradicated? If you look at it like that, religion could have caused a significant change in human evolution.
That would put the whole Evolution vs. Creationism discussion in a whole new perspective, right?
As far as human evolution is concerned individuals don't matter too much for survival of the species. So religion itself isn't important but the main religions moral systems provide advantages to society. Some examples? Marriage between one women and one man. Politics aside a system that promotes pair bonding (at least during reproductive years) will make society stronger becuase it provides a more nuturing environment for children. Please note I am not making moral judgements but look at societies with growing populations and you will see more pair bonding. Government Socialism/Communism: Again politics aside look at more "socialy aware" societies where there is a huge welfare state and you will see a lower birth rate. It seems that those systems are not sustainable in the long term. My own opinion is that one of the reasons people have children is to have someone to take care of them in their old age. The purpose of a welfare state is to force other peoples children to take care of you. So if there is a welfare state you benefit most by not having kids saving yourself the huge costs and reaping the benefits of other peoples kids in your own retirement. Religion directly competes with government for this role. So the larger the governments role the smaller the religions. So it isn't that religion is genetic it is the moral systems that the major current religions provide give those that follow them an evolutionary advantage.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
You have a (not uncommon) misunderstanding of the biological basis of psychology. Any genes involved in determining predisposition to religious belief would simply be something that affetcs the cocktail of neurotransmitters/neurons and their interactions in our brain. There is no `belief in god' gene. The brain of people prone to religious belief would perhaps respond more strongly ie more pleasurable feelings (endorphins, etc) upon given stimuli. For instance, rhythmic dancing is known to release endorphins so perhaps these people get a bigger buzz.
Why is this important? Consider that most of human evolution occured during our hunter/gatherer phase. Communal dancing aided in group bonding/solidarity so a more enjoybale experience during this ritual could have solidied the group. This could have been explained as resulting from possesion by spirits and so enhancing the experience even more. ie the group could have felt blessed and favoured by spirits and so more confidently gone out into the world to hunt/attack hostile neighbours, etc.
Fear played a major part in the life of early man so anything that took the edge of it while still allowing for caution would have been advantageous. I am not saying that this is what occured but only to illustrate that your example reflects a very mechanical view of the biological basis of psychology. Whithin any population there is much biological variation. We would expect that there are those that are strongly influenced by enhanced `religious' feelings, some that have only moderate such feelings and some that have weak feelings. For people to change their minds is indicative only that the sentiments are not that strong. A similar thing occurs with smoking ie some find it easy to give up, some very hard but doable and some impossible. This pattern reflects normal biological variation (and environmental variation).
A biological basis for the tendency towards religious feelings is highly reasonable and no doubt highly frightening to religious people. Can you imagine being given a drug to tone down religious feelings!!
The only reason it's called a god equation is the need of religious people to believe in a higher being.
I'll give you the secret meaning of the equation. Not a friggin' thing. It's an equation that describes something, so of course all the pieces fit.
Religious people start from the assumption that things had to be 'created' and back-fit any information to that.
That's all this is.
Not to be flippant back, but that's just you figurehead, who shares characteristics with Buddah, Mithra and the figureheads of others.
Personally I chose Moby Dick to be my personal saviour when I read about the assassination prophecies hidden within the text.
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html
These codes aren't about prophecy, it's shoe-horning. That's why they only seem to reliably predict events that have already happened.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Maybe it is as simple as - we need to believe in something. Maybe we need to believe there is something more to life than life. Maybe we need to believe that we are more than the sum of our parts. Maybe we need to believe that we exist for more than a handful of decades. What would you rather believe? That there is a God and an over all plan. Or that you spend 100 years getting up everyday so that you can work, eat and sleep and then in the end you simply die. I will take the plan any day. I do believe in God - because I choose to believe in God. I would rather have blind faith in something than no faith at all. Beside it keeps me honest. It is much easier for me to be the person I want to be if I think that someone is watching.
I dunno...most of texts of the Old Testament say, in a nutshell, "work with me and I'll bless you, don't work with me and I'll curse you."
Harsh as that seems on the surface to many modern minds (rules are t3h 3vil!), isn't that sort of the basic principle of all governance? Pay your dues and get, say, highways and Social Security, ignore your taxes and get a jail sentence?
You can apply the same general principle to the Bible (or to be fair, pretty much all the holy books out there). You can summarise various bits of wisdom in them as 'don't be a dick, and the world will be a better place'.
Personally, I'd rather that more people took aboard that particular message.
How about the idea that God hardwired a desire to search for Him in the humans?
thx for the Dawkins quote. That'll be my new sig.
Anyway this discussion about god does lead us nowhere.
One day we all see (or not) if it exists.
I'm just a little bit afraid of religion - not because of the gods but because of what the humans use 'em for.
I was raised with the stories of Jesus Christ - and it doesn't matter if those stories where made up or even if there's a god or not - they just show a good example of living in peace with each other. Why can't christianity be about that?
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
The concept that good and evil are mutually linked is a recurrent theme, particularly in Taoism.
In essence, if we had no 'light' it would be much the same as if we had no cabbages falling from the sky. We'd have no word, nor concept for the state, because one without the other is meaningless.
There's no point differentiating something that there's no 'alternative state'. So if everyone was good (or Good) then it would be meaningless. Not non-existant, because it's probably entirely possible that you'd have a group of people who were just fundamentally nice to everyone (although it's arguable about how much you have to balance 'good' with 'necessary' e.g. do you kill plants to eat them, or hunt deer because you're hungry).
The other thing that's very Taoist is being unable to explain. "The Tao that can be spoken (of) is not the Tao". I've always picked up on a very simple 'thing'. Namely that the universe itself moves in harmony. It's a complex machine, with emergent behaviour in it. What better name than 'God' for something so complex and unfathomable, and yet ultimately so intimately linked with our own existance.
But by the same token, it's hard to explain why and how these things mesh and flow together. We cannot put into words this thing that we cannot truly comprehend.
I've always assumed the Bible to be much like current theological studies. Whether you think it's divinely inspired or not, you still have some stuff, written by men, with some profound thoughts and metaphors in them.
If you don't believe, well ok. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't think about reading a 2000 year old book on philosophy. That'd be like saying you should read Harry Potter because you don't think wizards are real.
The thing is, absolute positives and negatives are hard to prove - it is almost next to impossible for me to prove that there is no Santa Claus just as it is to prove that there is a Santa Claus. Although, to be fair, negatives are harder than positives.
Similarly, proving or disproving the existence of God conclusively is quite impossible (at least given science as we know it today).
Therefore, we will have to settle for probabilities - it is very unlikely that there is a Santa Claus, just as how it is very unlikely that there is a God (as conventional religion believes anyway).
Atheims says probability is zero (without sufficient evidence, naturally) and religion says that probability is one (again, without sufficient evidence). Agnosts believe that there is not enough information to make a judgement.
To me, atheists and religious people belong to the same group - stating something without evidence.
Can one imagine a religion which believes "There are chosen people, but they're not us"
Yes. I'm pretty sure that's what most gentile Christians believe.
The big question is: what if? There could be a God, there could be seven, there could be millions, one for each grain of sand. Regardless of your personal beliefs, there is no way to know for sure.
I don't see that what you say is relevant to the post you replied to, indeed, it backs it up - that we don't know for sure is all the more reason why we shouldn't be putting so much faith and power into religion.
Religion is not "what if", and the OP did not suggest that philosophy on "what if" was wrong - the problem is that religion is "This is true and anything else is wrong".
Note, the post was attacking religion, and not saying that there doesn't exist a god. And the claim was that religion breeds ignorance - whether or not a particular religious claim might coincidentally be true or not is beside the point; the claim is that people are led to believe things "because some book said so", and disregard processes such as evidence and reason.
At the end of the day, your life will not be negatively effected by reading all the 'key' religous texts out there. You may not agree with what they say, but that's not to say you can't appreciate that there may be something to think about there, and will definitely give a better understanding of the human condition.
Lets call this unknown thing 'God'.
Labelling "the thing which started the Universe" as "God" is just wordplay, no better than defining "God" to be "the pencil sitting on my desk". But clearly when most religious people talk about God, they mean a lot more than that.
After all, we *knew* the earth was flat until we took a better look at it
Note that we've known the earth was round since ancient times, and there was never a scientific consensus or theory that the earth was flat.
You may as well believe - if religion is right then you get a place in the afterlife. If not, by your own argument, what have you lost?
No this one again. You only get a place in the afterlife if that particular belief is right - but instead, it might be that it's believers who roast in hell.
"Don't do this, but use condoms when you do it."
That's a mixed message.
A message without self-conflict could include marriage. Nobody suggests that abstinence apply in marriage. Get married if you want to fuck. Getting married is nice for a million other reasons as well. (economic, practical, mental health, kids...)
Pain, possibly, but I'd love to see a quote from the bible that describes hell as inflicted torture (instead of chosen suffering). You do know that the whole idea of hell as hot, firey and full of torture comes from Dante, right? Inferno is not actually part of the bible, although a lot of people seem to think it is.
He came up with some rules, and said "Live like this, and life will be good"
When asked why, said "Because God says so."
Now, just hypothetically, would his doing so have been any less influential if he didn't believe in the God he claimed?
It's hard to say whether the world is a better place or not, but... well frankly I think a lot of the 'basics' of religion are fairly positive ways to live. Regardless of whether you believe or not, following the 'rules' for being a Christian (or other religion, I use Christanity because I know it a littel better) is probably generally beneficial for society as a whole.
This was something I though of reading The Selfish Gene for the first time a month ago. The key to the Prisoners Dilemma is that it is to the individual's benefit to betray UNLESS there are more rounds to be played in the game, i.e. a continuing society instead of one time interaction. Not only that, but if you know when the last round is, it is to your advantage to betray on the final round. But if you know your partner intends to cooperate until the last round and then betray, then your best move is to cooperate until the second to last round and betray for both that and the final round. And that ends you up with a strategy of betrayal only and if both you and your partner choose this strategy (and your partner would be a fool to do otherwise), neither of you profits much. In fact, any information about when the game will end could lead to this kind of outcome. Thus, a belief that there is an afterlife or an outside frame of reference from which you are being judged, could confer an evolutionary advantage, as much as any other trait that would compel you to cooperate.
Ah, but what if the social moral codes were done by the priest, who, in general, were a bit wiser than average, and had a bit of control of what became 'doctrine'? So they come up with a bunch of stuff they think's a good way to live (not eating pork, for example, is probably pretty good health advice if you live in the areas where Islam flourished). Anyone who starts bringing in the ... less positive stuff, gets denounced by these guys as a heretic. I mean it's taking the basic uneducated peasant, and saying 'do this, because God says, and all these guys in the church agree'. As a form of directing the populace, it's pretty hard to disagree with.
I have never seen anything to suggest that athiests are inherently moral. In fact, there is little reason to believe such to be the case.
The point is that they isn't necessarily more or less moral than theists, but either way they have come up with their own moral code without taking it from a single religion.
What makes you claim that they aren't moral?
Many people come to envision God as a Big Beard In the Sky, because from their early childhood it's been their representation of supreme authority. and double so for Dwarves.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
As most non-christians seem to forget, Dante's Inferno was never actually part of the bible. But even if it was, then he was still not created evil. Evil was his choice, just like it is our choice. If you're upset about the existence of evil, blame mankind, not God.
nicely put ...
i always find it amusing how the religious ppl criticize the scientists because "they always want to explain stuff and cannot just believe" ... in fact the scientists accept quite often that they just don't know .. it is the religious ppl that cannot accept something without an explanation .. they are the ones that cannot live without an explanation for everything .. and they adhere to a beliefs-set or another in order to accomplish that... their god is a simple substitute for anything they do not know.
and it's also quite amusing how god's duties shrink more and more over the time .. he used to take care of the sun and stars until modern astronomy came into the game, he used to make fire until ppl discovered thermodinamics, he used to bring rain until ppl discovered the atmosphere .. etc .. etc ...
.. their mighty god keeps shrinking by the hour and those damn scientists are at fault .. burn them mofos! :)
i guess i can understand church's rage against science
i wonder if ppl will ever take religion for what it really is - a sort of "spiritual food" .. it has nothing to do with politics, science, morale or whatnot .. it is not religion's role to explain nature, to organize or control society, to define laws or morale, to etc ... religious "educators" should just provide that "spiritual food" and stop meddling into other ppl's business.
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Haven't viewed the video yet I see.
... by evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident or by a creator. Don't rule out creator simply because it sounds silly. Follow the facts.
is the the tendency to see patterns and relations when they are not there.
Nitty gritty from the video not watched... Using quantum mechanics it has been shown that before the big bang, it is entirely possible nothing existed, not even time, energy or mass. Seeing beyond the beginning of time is an excersise in futility. Most of us assume time is infinate and extend beyond the beginning of the universe and will extend forward into infinity. This may not be true.
I found the "tendency to see patterns and relations" an understatement.
I would have thought anyone looking at the universe in the past would have seen a static display and the assumption that it was always there. The idea that at one time in the past that it didn't exist was a long shot.
Now quantum mechanics is starting to show that the big bang didn't start from a super massive black hole that had all the mass of the universe. They are saying that it may have all come from nothing. That is the concept I never expected from science. That is what I found interesting. Now go watch the video. I assume you know the biblical 7 days of creation thing. I am not telling you to read a bible but update your science physics knowledge instead. It's like trying to prove something is dead wrong and being unable to. It does NOT mean that what you can not prove is true, it simply means you haven't proven it false. When what you are trying to prove wrong not only does not prove wrong but is in fact starting to show support as possibly being correct is when I took notice.
Many theories in the past have been easly proven false such as the earth being the center of the universe, it is flat, and such. Finding the universe may have come from nothing is the point I was making. This point does not prove the biblical creation is fact. On the flip side, it does not disprove it as many have expected who search the origin of the universe.
Which brings us back to the main discussion. Human brain wired
The truth shall set you free!
It appears that the IKEA catalogue has recently surpassed the bible as the most printed book of all time. Make of that you will.
TV and/or the reckless pursuit of money is one reason to pray for the collective soul of humanity!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
... but don't blame Dawkins for that. There's also a section in "The God Delusion" on how we tend to perceive inanimate objects as being imbued with purpose and will, which I think feeds into what you mean by "belief in the supernatural"--or would at least go a long way toward explaining it. I can't remember who it was at the moment (he had a huge beard, and gave a talk at a conference, which I read the transcript of), but there was also a theory (which Dawkins may have touched on) that schizotypal personalities found religions, and the visions and what not that people with that type of brain chemistry see are certainly the type that could found religions.
What do you mean by a pseudo-libertarian narrative? Dawkins' politics, so far as I've been able to ascertain, are pretty standard left-leaning ideas, but I don't see how they've influenced his ideas on the emergence of religion.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is not the first time I've seen christianity compared to taoism. I don't know a lot aboout taoism, but every time I read or hear about it, it reminds me of the teachings of Jesus himself. It seems like the only real difference is that the Tao is an abstract force, while God has personality.
Although I generally try to avoid any discussion about belief I can't help but be dragged into this one.
Personally I believe in a god, I just disbelieve in religion. I see the universe around me, I see all things and I see that as evidence of god.
An often used arguement against the existance of a god is that science disproves a god, I believe the opposite to be true, science discovers the rules and the building blocks of the universe and all things, if there is rules in place those rules were created.
I don't believe in the bible, I don't believe in any form of organised religion, I was bought up catholic and rejected that as soon as I was able to. I believe we all have a purpose in life, we are born with an objective that we must carry out in our life, perhaps an experience we must have or an influence we must give to others, regardless there is a reason for our being here. If you believe it is because you are supposed to believe, if you do not believe it is because you are not supposed to believe.
I don't agree with relgion because it doesn't fit with my idea of god and the universe but those that do are supposed to. This can be considered a form of destiny but in the end who cares? Your life and your beliefs are something that are personal to you, you can fight all day with someone about their belief system, but in the end none of us can prove we are correct, you can argue with me all day that there isn't a god and I can't argue right back that there is, chances are no one is going to change their opinions because it is 'hopefully' something you have considered carefully and you have choosen to believe what feels right to you.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
To the vast majority of Slashdotters who have grown up in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition spelt out in the "Book", it may be possible to contemplate a connection between genetics and religion, but for those of us who are familiar with Sanatan Dharma ( The Perennial Philosophy a.k.a. Hinduism ) the definition of religion or faith is very ill-defined.
Which faith ? Sanatan Dharma includes the entire range of faiths spanning from (a) the innocent polytheism of multiple gods (b) the monotheistic duality of God-and-Man and (c) the extreme monism of Advaita (the nondual singularity of the Knower and the Knowledge )...
Depending on your level of awareness, the phenotype moves through various levels(a through c) of ignorance(?) so which of these coded in the corresponding genotype ?
Or is it that each is coded differently. We need lots and lots of data and some high end statistical software to locate statistically significant differences between these.
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
Hi,
I believe religion is caused by a combination of two factors. The first one being genetics. I don't believe I ever was ever given the ability to believe in a religion. My mind is scientific by nature. When I see something beautiful I start envision the equations that make that happen. When I start having a conversation about religion, and I am simply not capable of truly considering the theists arguments.
The second factor is family / society. I believe that the details of any religion are taught, and not instinctive. You know that saying, "there are no atheists in fox holes". My response would be "there are no truly isolated theists"
Adam
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
After all, he gave the druggy son just as great a reward as the good son.
Did he? Reread the end of the story, what the father says to the faithful son. The druggy son gets a party, and is allowed to live under the roof. The good son get all that his father has...
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I think the Deity thing comes from a slightly different source (but is, nonetheless, hardwired), that happens to link very well into the desire by human beings to get an explanation for everything.
Essentially, as mammals, we instinctively have a pack mentality, we look for leadership, and we look for leaders of leaders, and so on. There is never, within the bounds of our comprehension, a real "ultimate leader" (who would that be? The Secretary General of the UN? But he doesn't actually have that much power, and it's been a long time, if ever, that the UN has ever really been seen as a source of leadership. Actually, politics is a great one to look at for this. Remember the entire US looking to Rudy Gulliani on 9/11? There's a certain mismatch between theory and practice when it comes to the people we look to for guidance, and politics really doesn't match it as much as politicians like to think. Sometimes the Presidency isn't the top if the person in that position isn't someone that can be looked to like that.)
So our brains, to a certain extent, have to find ultimate leadership (leadership of the top of our visible hierarchies) in the invisible and uncertain. And as it happens, such a "leader" can only be more knowledgable and powerful than anyone we can see, which means He makes for a great source of explanations for much of the inexplicable.
In this model, atheism is more than just a rejection of what atheists see as a supernatural construct, it is also a rejection of a hardwiring of the pack, and in some ways this is probably why leaders are rarely (yes, there are exceptions) atheists the further up the hierarchy you go, and perhaps, to a certain extent, why the entire concept seems so threatening to so many theists and vice versa.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Humans just looks for an easy way to explain things they do not or cannot understand. They then hammer that information into their children's brains thereby making them non-critical lazy thinkers, but with the advantage of keeping society somewhat in order through brainwashing.
Not true: the domain of science is the natural, and the domain of religion is the supernatural. Science doesn't make claims about things outside of its domain (though scientists, being fallible, sometimes do).
In his latest book, Richard Dawkins offers up his own interpretation of this. Using the analogy of a moth flying into the flame (seeing this as a normally useful trait - following the light of stars for navigation - that has been 'short-circuited' by fire) he attempted to offer an explanation of a 'short-circuited' human trait tat may lend itself to religion.
His best bet was that it is an evolutionary advantage for children to believe what elders tell them without proof. Kids that believe that [x] berry is poisonous; without testing it themselves; tend to survive more than kid who don't. It may be a little pompous to suggest that religion is popular because people have evolved to be gullible - but it is certainly entertaining.
That was my view for my first 25 years of life, the next 15 have been quite a bit different. If we have a genetic disposition to need God, why is atheism more common among the young people that I have known and still know?
You may have partially answered your own question .
Younger people seek out truth, answers, and meaning differently than older folks. It has to do with inexperience, but also with our need to set ourselves apart from mom and dad. Identity is so important to us when we're that young that we reject as much as we can that we associate with our parents including ideas about God and religion, politics, relationships (but not allowance money and food of course).
A young man wants to known for more than being his father's son. ...nothing wrong with that if he doesn't harm anyone.
A "Supernatural Deity"? Is there another kind of deity?
There seems to be a 10% difference in all of Nature. Homosexuality is base 10%, Non-belief in God is base 10%, Belief in George bush being smart is 10%.. etc. Environment then changes this upwards some or downwards some.
The old Hebrew word for God was also used for Nature. Its amazing how people tend to want to think that we are all Super Smart, and we all know what we are talking about. The 10% difference maybe hardwired as well, but we don't know just yet.
Belief in God, in something better than yourself, is paramount to improving yourself and society. What motivation do I have to better me and my fellow man without the foundations of God? or an afterlife?
If you are ranting and raving now.. consider that if there were no god, why would you not just walk over and take what you want? Have hedonistic sex parties (except this is slashdot and you have to have women.. well except for the 10%). If you think that society prevents, then you miss the serial killers, the gang bangers, etc.. the DEATH culture comes from not worrying about anyone else but yourself.
Religion is not the cause of evil, it is the Power that man craves over one another that is the cause. Jesus did not ask for Man to have power over you, but God. Thats different.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
What an interesting thought. My experiences are exactly the same. Someone walks up to my door and asks me that very question. I want to tell them to fuck off and stop trying to infect others with their religion, but I'm polite about it, accept whatever they're thrusting into my hand, and drop it into the recycling bag.
But if someone came up to my door and said, instead, "We're from XYZ church down the street and we're trying to get some people to help with ABC event. The event is not associated with our church or any religion; we're just out here trying to get some people in our community together to help out," I would actually seriously consider doing it. I love the area that I live in, and spending an hour or two of my weekend improve that actually does appeal to me.
Why don't we ever see this?
I hear you, but "Let there be light!" before creating the sun the moon and stars has always been a little hard to swallow.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I keep up with modern theories about the universe and its beginnings. I read your summary of the videos in another post (who has time to watch 2.5 hours of lectures?), and it contained nothing I didn't already know, and absolutely nothing that supports the biblical creation account. Is the fact that the universe may have arisen from a fluctuation in the negative vacuum energy -- basically creating itself from nothing -- cool? Absolutely. Does it lend any support whatsoever to the biblical creation account? Hell no.
First of all, just about every religion I've ever heard of, both modern and primitive, has a creation story. So the fact that the universe was created ex nihilo can't be said to be evidence of the biblical creation account in particular -- such a general fact would be equal evidence for every other creation account known, and therefore supports none of them.
Next, the biblical creation account is wrong in just about every detail, as already mentioned. How you can ignore all that but see a divine hand in the fact that the ancients called a 50/50 bet -- infinitely old universe vs. finite age universe -- correctly is utterly beyond me. (In fact, I don't even think it was a 50/50 bet for them -- I don't think they could imagine an infinitely old universe, so it was pretty much a given to them that it was created just a short time ago.) It's cherry picking at its worst. My previous post summed it up as best I can, so I'll just copy it here:
Anyone can take any mythical creation story with sufficiently general or vague creative steps (in this case, days) and make it seem predictive a-posteriori, in the same way the bible codes or Nostradamus are predictive a-posteriori. Until you can answer for the glaring errors in the creation account or show me where it has taught us anything of value about the actual nature of the world, it's all a bunch of hand waving. I have no problem with people believing without evidence (so long as they don't make public policy based on their faith), but I hate when people misconstrue the evidence we do have to try to make it back up their fairy tales.
Generally though, if you follow the Ten Commandments through your life, I don't think many would say you're making a mistake. OK, the atheists might argue that the bits about honouring God and idolatry are foolishness, but I don't think many would assert that you're harming society by doing so.
Other possibilities exist. The human race might have unconscious senses which detect the presence of the supernatural. Mine are less unconscious. I do detect his presence. Why is that a problem? Why always start with the assumption that there is no God?
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
This is the viewpoint I was taught in school.
However, over the years as I read and studied about various forms of "primitive" mystical experience, I have come to see it as a projection of a modern world view onto people to whom the very questions that matter to us would have no interest, if they saw them as meaningful at all.
The modern viewpoint is that religion is an obsolete form of natural science. By the way the thing that separates fundamentalist christians from what we used to call "mainline" denominations is that they buy this proposition completely, with the exception of the "obsolete" part. By this theory, myths and legends are merely garbled history; religious doctrines simply unsubstantiated propositions about the natural world. However, this does not really hold up on examination.
Take the well known myth of Cupid and Psyche. The idea that anybody thought of this as a historical narrative is absurd. It's clearly a sophisticated and self-concsiously literary allegory about the nature of faith. Cupid is the divine, and Psyche is, well, the psyche.
And there we have the rub. Faith is the important dividing line between the modern and premodern viewpoint. One might go so far as making a dichotomy between "belief" and "faith", characterizing the modern era as the era of belief, and the premodern era as an era of faith.
Belief is a cognitive assesment of how well a proposition matches externally observable reality. Faith is not a cognitive assesment of anything. Rabbi Steinsalz, a noted Talmudist famous for his commentary on the Song of Songs, compares faith to the feeling a child has when holding his parent's hand. In the Song of Songs, the bridegroom calls the the bride, but she does not open:
I sleep, but my heart waketh:
it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying,
Open to me, my sister, my love,
my dove, my undefiled:
for my head is filled with dew,
and my locks with the drops of the night.
I have put off my coat;
how shall I put it on?
I have washed my feet;
how shall I defile them?
The bride cannot be bothered to get out of bed and dirty her feet. Later she repents and opens the door, but he is gone.
In a way, this story is strikingly similar to Cupid and Psyche. By her actions, the bride loses the bridegroom and must win him once more. The detail about her feet is telling: she misses her opportunity for bliss becuase she is afraid of getting a little dirty.
These stories have a key that unlocks the ancient viewpoint on faith. In any ancient myths about faith, we see themes of death, sacrifice and rebirth, such as the Sumerian myth of Inanna (Ishtar) in the underworld, or Orpheus and Eurydice. Faith is a kind of emotional equipoise, in which the individual maintains openness to new possibilities when old ones are closed.
Faith is not about beliefs, it is about confidence and the openness to new possibilities. At the death of a loved one, belief in an afterlife may be a comfort. But it is faith that makes it possible to make a new life around the hole left by the departed. Faith and belief are not unconnected, but this doesn't mean they have to run an awkward three legged race.
Faith and belief have their different uses. We modern people have much more use for accurate, precise and consistent beliefs, because of our economic and technological capacity to alter external reality. Ancient people had relatively less use for accurate beliefs, but correspondingly more need for faith and the spiritual gifts it secures. This differnece in values can be seen by their attitude towards their sacred texts, which they modified quite freely. The famous story from the Gospel of John where Jesus says "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her" (John 8:2-11) doesn't appear in the earliest copies of John. It has been suggested that it was added at a later date by a scribe, an action that is shocking to modern se
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There is no God? Is that a statement of faith? ;-)
I was once asked if I believed in "deity" in a rather odd way that made me think that my answer was important to the person who was asking, and so he was asking it in a way that was as wide-open as possible. I replied in kind, by pointing out that the Drake equation makes it pretty clear that we stand a low chance of being the most developed race in the galaxy, and a sufficiently advanced race will match any reasonable definition of "deity", so yes, I suppose I do believe in "deity".
That said, I think it's clear where the adaptive feature of religion is: anthropomorphization. We understand things in the world by comparing them to ourselves and/or placing them in a scenario where an anthropomorphic entity is interacting with them. This turns out to be helpful in terms of survival because of the fact that it allows for paranoia: "that object isn't where it was yesterday... someone may have come by and moved it!" It's not clear to me that paranoia is something that other creatures are capable of (though fear is). This process requires that we evaluate our environment in terms of potential manipulation by another like ourselves... the ultimate conclusion of which is that our environment must have been created by someone else. It's simply paranoia (a survival trait) writ large.
From the summary: "Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God -- evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? "
How about God designing us that way?
Am I the only non-atheist left here?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Most religions of the world follow the idea that good works, religious activities (shaving your head, praying toward Mecca, not eating beef, etc.) and leading "a good life" will get you into that religion's version of heaven. Essentially, they all state that you can work your own way into heaven.
The exception to this is Christianity. And I'm not talking right-wing, conservative, flat-earth nutjob "christianity". (Note the small c and quotes.) I'm talking real biblical-based Christianity. The personal-relationship-with-God-and-all-that-jazz Christianity.
This religion states that nothing you can do will get you into heaven. Through sin, you're simply not good enough. Therefore, God paid for your sin through Jesus, reconciling you with him in heaven after your death.
I know where I stand on this, but based on your previous comment, I'd like to hear your opinion on how this single religion, among all the religions in the world, is the only one that says we're a bunch of losers who aren't good enough to do anything related to the afterlife for ourselves, and we have to rely on God for it all.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
And you're extension to the analogy doesn't make sense either since god doesn't pick up all the none believers after they die give them a stern talking to and drop them off at heaven, does he? Well, maybe he does but that isn't Christianity.
If you're not familiar with Raymond M. Smullyan, he's a mathematician and logician who has delved into philosophy. To give a small clue as to his credibility, he specialized in developing Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, having studying under Church. In other words, there are few people more credible than him when it comes to logic.
Well, he also wrote stories. One other them, entitled "Is God a Taoist?", is about a man who meets God and questions why God would give people free will and then hold them accountable for their actions, in very much the same vein as your line of line of reasoning. After a humorous dialog between the two, Smullyan concludes the only logical explanation is that God had no choice in the matter: a being who is both omnipotent & omniscient cannot possibly have free will. I recommend reading it in full, though. I found it in The Mind's I by Hofstadter and Dennett (yes, that Hofstadter and that Dennett), which has tons of other scientifically and/or logically compelling essays and stories on some pretty deep subject matter, so if you want to check out Smullyan's work, that's a really good place to start.
Cheers.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I was quite curious to see people's responses to this article and gain some further insight through their personal observations. Even more interesting was the lack of religious screwballs posting to this article. I went though many treads before coming across this whack-job.
Since this is Slashdot, I am sure that has an impact, but it was refreshing to see a majority of people discuss religion with out going into irrational fits.
So in other words "Actions have consequences"?
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
Pilate asked, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You have said it." (this colloquialism equates to "you said it" or "you are correct" in modern English)
"I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, but through me." (makes no sense unless he is God, because it is also written that "there is no one righteous; no, not one.")
"I lay down my life of my own free will, and as it is in my power to lay it down, so it is in my power to take it up again." What man can choose his own death, and raise himself? Not even Elijah could save himself from dying (God carried him up), and Moses remains buried to this day.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Prove that I don't have a wonderful magical blue puppy (fluent in five languages, including the long-dead tongue of the Hittites) in my living room. You can't?
Do you see the problem? The burden of proof is on the claimant, not the claimee. Agnosticism is not a logically tenable position to hold.
No, your example shows that atheism is not a logically tenable position to be held. Only an atheist would want to try to disprove your magical blue puppy. Agnostics wouldn't care. They aren't going to try to disprove the existence of your puppy, but at the same time they aren't going to assume you are right.
I agree with your parent poster. Agnostics are the only ones that admit that we have no fucking clue what happens after we die. This is a comfortable position for some people because it's impossible for them to be wrong. In fact, I think being agnostic is the ONLY logically tenable position. If there isn't enough evidence to prove or disprove something, then why would you commit to a decision? Sounds pretty illogical to me.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Which is exactly why religion has been used to oppress the poor over the course of history. Give the worker grunts something to believe in and work towards and they put up much less of a fight when they realize they're doing hard work for a crust of bread (be them legitimate workers or slaves). I think it's more inline to say that religion serves as a point of self-validation when you see what you don't have and, bitterly enough, a way of justifying and repressing ill sentimates towards others have more than you do. This is a very simplistic breakdown, and I'm certainly not hinting at the fact that this is why people accept religion into their life or that there is no God(s) (I'm openly agnostic). But, when you see a phenomena such as religion across the entire world, even in cultures that have been isolated from other cultures for long periods of time, you have to start making logical breakdowns.
I think it's sad that theologians try to skirt around science so hard, when a discovery such as this (if the theory is correct), something deep rooted in the human genome, is as much a win for science trying to understand human nature as it would be for a theologians. After all, if you created life on a planet and wanted to stay out of its way to see how it developed, wouldn't you want to at least give what you've created a clue that you're out there? Maybe it was a mistake, look at the bloody history of religion throughout the world, but could you honestly say that you may not have made the same mistake if you created life?
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Calling faith stupid doesn't make it true. You add nothing useful to this discussion.
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This seems to be one of Richard Dawkins's favorite things to say. I don't know if you're simply repeating what he says or if you came up with this yourself. I don't mean to offend, but this argument makes you sound either:
i d=Mozilla-search&va=theism)
1.) Ignorant (if you don't understand what theism is) or
2.) Malicious (if you are trying to warp its meaning to suit your argument)
Since Dawkins is a well-educated man, I would guess that his use of "theism" in this way is malicious. As for you, you may simply be ignorant (nothing wrong with that, but until you learn the most basic terms of arguments about God/gods, you probably should simply avoid the arguments).
The definition of theism is simply:
"Theism is the belief in the existence of one or more gods or deities." - wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theism)
"belief in the existence of a god or gods; specifically : belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of the human race and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world" - Webster (http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?source
So you see that Joe, who is a Lutheran and believes in the Christian God is a theist even though he does not believe in Zeus.
Having come to the US from the UK 5 years ago, one of the obvious differences I noticed is how seriously most people take religion in the US. Its also obvious how much radical christianity is rammed down your throat on TV here, especially in the bible belt, and how 'athiest' is now as much of dirty label as 'communist' was in the mcCarthy era.
I think this highlights cultural cause and effect much more than the likelyhood that its in our DNA somehow. If it was in our human makeup, then there wouldn't be such a difference between the UK and the US in this sense.
Adults must seem like mysterious all-powerful beings to a child that's just becoming aware of its surroundings.
So, in a nutshell: God is your mom.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
People who end up in Hell choose to consign themselves to the outer darkness of non-entity rather than submit themselves to God. - maybe I am wrong, but it sounds like you are afraid of death and also you are putting too much stock into this entire 'life' thing. Non existance is not hell, you are not there to appreciate the difference. Existance on the other hand quite often can turn hellish.
You can't handle the truth.
FTFA:
This thinking is what really bothers me. Atheism is not the beleif; theism is. If you're an atheist you are not practicing a form of religion, you're not practicing a form of religion.
America is the MOST religious developed country in the world. We're also sinking dramatically in the world on math, science, and dead last in clean politics. Ignorance is strength only to those who control the ignorant. Religion has been disproved more then people have proved one and one is two (based on the decimal system of course). People are TRAINED by the media in which they have become mentally enslaved by in to unnatural twisted forms of mental thoughtlessness to hate that which is most naturally appealing, learning, ambition, power. This is sadly why it is so easy to make money in this world.
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
The fine poem above delivers,
its truth can give one the shivers,
how I wish to annoint,
you with a mod point,
but alas, empty are my quivers.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Indeed, if you had proof that He existed, it would no longer be faith. Of course, what does that mean for all the people who claim that there is, in fact, proof that He exists? Are they without faith? Or do they have faith, but are without honesty?
Truly, it a question to cloud the mind of even the most ardent Pastafarian.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I would say this dubious honor falls humanities need for sexual contact and perceived notions of love.
Never underestimate the stupidity of the masses.
You could just as easily have said, "I have never seen anything to suggest that atheists are inherently immoral. In fact, there is little reason to believe such to be the case." I'd say my version is a bit more accurate.
I've beleived this for a while now. I guess our temporal lobes, along with hyperactive pattern recognition come together to give us a combination "I'm not alone..." and "There it is!" response that becomes the belief in a god/angels/spirits watching over us.
Personally, I'm one of the exceptions to the rule - When I'm alone in a room, I'm the only one there. Nothing mystical here. I do believe that humans of all cultures naturally lean toward religious behaviour though. I'm not even going to judge if that's a good or bad thing, since it's way too broad to qualify...
Given the absence of any hot chicks loving me out of choice, I'll take one with no choice in the matter.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
The comment you cite makes two dangerous assumptions/premises.
1) People are reasonable
2) People are informed
In the case that these are true, of course it would be impossible to not choose God. However, I had yet to meet a person who is either of these things, let alone both. I'm a generally reasonable person, but certainly not all the time. I may be very informed about a number of things, but not 100% on any subject.
One need only take a cursory glance at the state of the world to see that mankind is neither reasonable nor informed.
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Take for example the University. In that environment, those with religious beliefs that conflict with popular activities of their peers (in the case of Christianity: abstaining from indulgence in excessive alcohol consumption, use of illicit drugs, premarital sex, etc.) can and often does lead to ostracizing and ridicule.
My point is that peer pressure in any environment is a powerful element in determining personal morality or the expression thereof.
History as it is, I wouldn't call giving humans religious leanings a mistake -- atheist cultures have, thus far, been just as bloody as theistic ones. We just happen to be in a generation where the "global threat to peace" is religious, as opposed to the last, when it was political. And banning Christianity or the like today wouldn't help any more than banning capitalism would have before. It's the ideologues what are the problem, not their ideas.
That said -- I agree that theologians are silly to disregard findings like this. The findings have no bearing as to whether any given religion is true -- the idea that the religion grew out of an evolutionary mechanism is no more intrinsically valid than the idea that the evolutionary response was selected for by the object (deity) of the religion.
"...measure of faith God has given you."
Romans 12:3
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans %2012:3;&version=64;
Would deities and gods described from anew today have as many human character flaws and titillating stories to go with them?
The Soap Operahs will always fill a certain need (Jerry Springer re-runs for the rest of us) and before those existed that need was filled by books, gossip and the mythology that builds up around every religion over time.
Would the story be as "humanized" if told today? Or would it be sensationalized in more modern terms?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
In short...
Isn't this just another case of correlation =/= causation?
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Well then, God must be letting out a chuckle every time he condemns someone to Hell. "I will design them to be unreasonable beings, driven mainly by emotions, and throw them into a world that does not make much sense. Let us see who believes in me now, bwa-ha-ha-ha..." Of course people are at times unreasonable and uninformed, but the main point here is that it never does make sense to blame a person for making a wrong choice between Heaven and Hell. If in one person's understanding it is good to go to Hell, then it is solely because God is OK with it. It would not be much of a contradiction if Hell was not advanced by the same people who argue that God is benevolent and is a sole designer of the universe and everything in it, including our very thoughts. Is God so stuck up that he would not fully inform us and give us an ample time to make a calm decision even after we die? That is not what I would call "benevolent"; that sounds more like he is a sadistic bastard who enjoys torturing people and playing smoke-and-mirrors games while it would be just as easy for him to place them in a position from which they may come to see the truth, or to mercy-kill them.
It is sometimes said that evil came into being so that an even greater good might be born out of it (e.g., Paul). What possible good can be born out of evil that is Hell, after the end of time?
Imagine an entity observing the earth's evolution from far. Not a very intelligent entity, certainly not one that can see the future: Scene 1: Earth has just come out of the big bang, there is only mud, water, fire and rocks: Entity: What a desolate place! There can never be anything else here a few million years later: Scene 2: Plant life arises on earth Entity: Wow! Well okay. Green things that stay where they are...thats what earth is and ever will be. Another few eons later: Scene 3: Animal life evolves Entity: Wow, what are these things! I could never imagine. Stupid apes although, swining on trees, eating each other, fighting. Never will they be anything better and finally end in a disastrous end of their race. Scene 4: Reason develops, human life emerges: Entity: Hmm Intelligent beings, but still with so many flaws. Diseases, death, not even full knowledge, but only a semblance of knowledge. Reason but no ability to see the future or know, others' or even ones' own thoughts. Humans are destined to die. Scene 5: ??? What's next? I know there is something unlike the entity above. Impatient Disbelieving entity or patient believer? It's your choice.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
I understand atheists do not believe in a God. I do. Nevertheless:
Truth is: Everyone is a Believer. You can not not believe (regardless of _what_ you believe)
And every belief (in whatever) is based on faith of some sort. For example, do you trust evolution? - your trust is then in exclusively the material, on chance, on life becoming more complex through mutation, on evolutionary research, on beauty by chance. Do you trust in a Christian God? Well then you put your trust in Christ because of eyewitness accounts (not your own), the authenticity of Biblical documents (information from outside), a description of the state of the world fits with what we see around us, and the personal experience of salvation with fulfillment of that restlessness I believe we all feel, what is "missing."
Science has limits. And I believe that evolution and the existence of God are not sufficiently "provable" by science.
Nietzsche is dead! - God
So gods don't get angry? Or jealous?
You must've read a different Bible than I did...
And by the way, the Old Testament does still apply, and Jesus said so.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I have the highest regard for Philosophical Taoism, and I do not think that Tao is fit to be described as a "Force". If I had to compare it with an Occidental notion, I would choose "Logos" or "the Way of Life" in the early Christianity. (Incidentally, the Chinese Bible translates "Logos" as "Tao".) Tao is the natural way of the universe. It is the way in which all things undergo their transformations.
No. This entire presumption is incorrect. We know that people have not changed significantly in the last few thousand years in terms of mental capacity. Therefore, for any intelligent adult primitive and any intelligent modern adult physicist, the starting line is the same at birth, the ground to be covered is just as level, and the runners have equal capacities to run. If the concept needed to be explained, it would be no more difficult for God/Aliens/Whomever to impart that knowledge to an ancient than it is to educate a physicist today. There is no scientific basis for presuming that peoples of those days could not have been educated to the literal truth, if some entity was around who knew it, and particularly if said entity was omnipotent. Ergo, the odds hugely favor the idea that no such entity was around, and the stories are purest malarky.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I, for one, would like to see a place in the Bible where the modern concept of Hell is described at all.
I researched the bible in order to determine if an experiment had already been performed. I found one, summarized here: "Two altars are built on Mount Carmel, one for Baal and one for Yahweh. Wood is laid on the altars. Two oxen are slaughtered and cut into pices [sic]; the pieces are laid on the wood. Elijah then invites the priests of Baal to pray for fire to light the sacrifice. They pray from morning to noon without success. Elijah ridicules their efforts. They respond by cutting themselves and adding their own blood to the sacrifice. They continue praying until evening without success.
Elijah now orders that the altar of Yahweh and its sacrifice be drenched with water (twelve barrels of water). He asks God to accept the sacrifice. Fire falls from the sky igniting the sacrifice." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah )
I proceeded to construct three fire rings, appx. two meters apart, and lay in them piles of wood with tender, observing proper fire construction/safety/permits/etc. The wood was seasoned (in a woodshed for 1 year), however, moisture content was not checked with a meter. The wood was cut from the same tree a year earlier.
Ring 1: Baal
Ring 2: Yahweh
Ring 3: control
I asked two friends for assistance, one a wiccan and the other a southern baptist. The wiccan was asked to pray to Baal and ask that he light his fire. The southern baptist was asked to pray to Yahweh and ask that he light his fire. After four hours, nothing happened. Remembering that Elijah ordered the Yahweh altar to be doused with several barrels of water, I proceeded to pour 20L of H2O from a tap onto Ring 2. Having no oxen, I laid a steak (new york strip) on top as a suitable appeasement offering. The wiccan volunteered to cut her palm and drop blood on Baal's altar for historical accuracy. This was assented to after much discussion and queasiness on my part. She made an incision into her left palm and drizzled blood onto Baal's altar. Her palm stopped bleeding after a couple of minutes and appeared to need no bandaging (miracle?).
Prayers began anew, respectively. After four more hours, and a few green bottleneck flys gorging themselves on blood and steak, I declared a halt. I then proceeded to take a box of strike anywhere lucifer matches and remove one match. I struck the match on one of the stones surrounding the control fire. Touching the lit match to the tender produced a flame. After a few minutes, the flame appeared to be growing quite nicely.
Conclusion: This one is quite difficult. The wiccan claimed a success because Baal was clearly inferior to the goddess and was probably kicking it up with Bacchus (sp?) and with all the drinking and wenching, didn't have time to bother with something so mundane. The southern baptist claimed success as his god wasn't to be tempted with such display of frivolity. Meanwhile, I managed to cook a few hamburgers and hotdogs and we all enjoyed a nice meal.
Funny you should mention that book! I read The Minds I almost 10 years ago and it was a huge influence on my views on religion, god, and probably everything else. It was hard to read at times because it caused me to rethink a lot of what I had believed growing up, but at the same time it was such an amazing feeling. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. At the time I actually kept a copy of Hofstadter's GEB next to my bed as some people do with their Bible!
I don't remember that particular essay, but maybe parts of took up residence somewhere in my subconscious mind. I definatly ought to read it again.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
For me, the "message" in pi was the whole fricking point of Contact - that they left it out of the movie smacks of someone afraid of pissing off religious people.
Let's say someone does walk on water, turn water into wine, multiply bread, and so on.
Well, can't Lucifer do all those things? If he can't, how do we know?
If a God or a Jesus did start to show me miracles and claim divinity, I'd give them a chance, but I certainly wouldn't worship them right away. Worship is something I don't do -- not to anyone on Earth today, and I'm not sure I would to someone in Heaven. And again, where is the proof, really? Maybe it's all a dream and I'll wake up soon. Maybe this God is evil. It could be any number of things.
Where can there ever be proof? That is, I think, one of the points of agnosticism (versus atheism) -- if God is impossible to disprove, he's equally impossible to prove.
There's a bit of stubbornness there, but I do believe that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and actually benevolent God wouldn't eternally damn me for a bit of healthy skepticism.
And by the way, I imagine if I really believed in the consequences of rejecting God, I probably would not reject him. (Probably. Better to rule in Hell...) But once again, that would be difficult to prove. I could kneel and pray, but I doubt I could believe.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I guess maybe the OT stories of war and vengeance get the kids attention better in Sunday School. Who are we kidding, the adults like them better too.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Jesus does share some characteristics with Buddha and leaders of other religions. However, I think he's unique in that Jesus claims that his death grants us salvation--being able to know God--if we believe. Buddha, Mohammad, Moses all told us how we should live, but we still had to solve the problem of our salvation (Buddha: give up all desire; Mohammad: worship Allah the right way; Moses: obey the Law and make sacrifices). Jesus said that you don't have to do anything, just believe. In fact, Jesus said we can't achieve salvation by doing things. So he's more than a figurehead. Without Jesus, Christianity is just Judaism.
I'm sorry if you've met so many shallow Christians. Actually you've probably meant a lot who weren't--they didn't just advertise their beliefs or wave it in your face. They did, however, lead by example which is what they're supposed to be doing. You probably did notice them--you just never got around to finding out what they believed.
It's true that Christians believe in being saved by faith vs. works and there is a logical reason for this. The simplistic version is God is perfect, man is imperfect and so God reached out a built a bridge from man to Himself. Since (after the fall) man could never be perfect on his own, he needed a divine way to get back to the Creator.
OTOH, James (James 2:20) says that, "Faith without works is dead." God did not just "save" Christians and then not expect them to help others. If you were of a mind, it would make one question that the person was truly a believer if all they cared about was their personal salvation like they had crossed the final finish line.
I think this topic is interesting. Because it makes total logical sense that if God created man, of COURSE he would wire something in the DNA that allows us to know instinctively of His existence.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
That was not my intention.
The article talks about possible biological factors favouring religious belief. It does not claim that religious faith is genetically determined. Please read the original article before posting.
The rest of your post is irrelevant.
God doesn't send or condemn anyone to hell. You, as a father, can teach your son to live right and you can love him unconditionally, but he can still choose to ignore you, get drunk, and slam a car into a tree. Did you pour Jack Daniels down his throat and push his car into that tree? Of course not! If he does that and survives, you will still love him, but he will have to live with the consequences of his own reckless behavior. See the pattern here? As far as not believing in hell, what we believe has no effect on whether it is there or not. Believe the sky is yellow with green spots if you want; the color won't change. He made us with free will - to know Him or not.
When you read it, do you read that he turned on a light, or that he actually INVENTED light?
Since light is fundamental to both time and matter, it makes sense that the creation of light has to come first.
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No knowledgable and religious Jew of the time would have accepted any other Jew as being literally divine (as opposed to figuratively, in the sense of all Jews being "children of God"). There is no evidence that Jesus proclaimed himself to be the literal son of God, and there's little reason to think he would have -- as no one would have believed him
"The high priest said to Him, 'I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.'
'Yes, it is as you say,' Jesus replied." (Matthew 26:63-64)
"When Jesus saw their faith, he said, 'Friend, your sins are forgiven.'
The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, 'Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?'" (Luke 5:20-21)
Jesus did claim to be be divine, and the Pharisees did know that that was what he was claiming. That was (one reason , at least) why they had him killed.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I don't have time for a reply right now, but I wanted to thank you for all of your thoughtful responses. I'll try to get back to this again after work.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
This goes back to the whole point that the cited comment was debating. Namely whether faced with God people would conciously choose against him.
God isn't condemning anyone, we're condemning ourselves. We make the choice to be separate from God, or inseparable from him. The core of that choice is formed in our time here on earth, but the final say does not come into play until the hereafter. There, shown the truth of God face to face, we make a choice.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
A variety of people, throughout the ages. There is a decent summary of the process of canonization here. Basically, when deciding what books were "in" they looked at three things:
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Hell, eternal suffering, flames and torture: these scenes are there to scare people into obedience by rather crude methods
That's your analysis, based on your assumption that it isn't true. A Christian analysis, based on the assumption that hell is true (and the Bible is generally written to those who do believe that), is that those descriptions exist as a warning, to save people from Hell, not as a threat.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
> The Universe knows nothing
The universe knows everything
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Our brains are adept at pattern recognition (one could go even further than that.)
We know nothing, the more we learn the more patterns we have to apply against the unknown. (and the more likely you are to try to fit stuff into what you know, IMHO.)
When we see a cause-affect pattern we tend to apply it, sometimes its correct and sometimes it is not (ex: gravity, global warming, lucky charms.)
Therefore, it makes sense than humans are wired to come up with "explanations" which have zero tangible or logical backing, with the degree of ignorance increasing the possibility for error.
Superstition comes out of the most 'reasonable' people when they are gambling, about to die, etc. It doesn't really ever go away.
To clarify, religions explain the unknown using known patterns/concepts and from there create a foundation of patterns/concepts upon which even more is built. It is similar to how science or math builds upward, and it can become every bit as complex a field of study (in fact, more so because of heavy use of unproven and untestable theories.)
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That's based on what? Knowing as it is defined in English is a state available only to conscious entities. There is not, nor has there ever been any evidence whatsoever that the Universe is a conscious entity. Even if it were, it would not necessarily mean it knew anything. Give me evidence (proper verifiable evidence) of a conscious Universe and that it knows anything, let alone everything, and then we'll talk.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
> Give me evidence
I'm not giving you the sweat off my nutsack, buttercupcake. Give me evidence that God doesn't exist and then you might have a leg to stand on.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I am not sure if you are personally agreeing with your second paragraph or just reciting it from above, but I will say something against it anyway.
I understand that. We make a choice, but who is responsible for actualizing this choice? Is it really in our power to be separate from God if he desires us to be in communion? Or to be in communion if he desires us to perish? We can choose all we want, but in the end it is up to God to assemble our destiny. If God allows evil to exist eternally in Hell and people to suffer, even though they chose it freely, he is a sadist. It would be better to just kill these people off without their consent, just like they were born without consent.
Haha. I'll take that as a "OK so I'm talking bollocks" shall I?
I never told you to find proof of God, simply that the Universe is a conscious entity. If that's what you consider God then fine, but if the Universe is conscious then you're working within the grounds of science and therefore it is up to you to find proof of that or at least provide a consistent theory that can predict behaviour not already predicted more accurately or in a more simple manner by existing theories. Otherwise you're just another nutjob whose reasoning boils down to "because I said so".
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I personally believe in the "Authentic Love" argument regarding God's reason for allowing humanity the choice, the whole point of which is God wanted people to choose to Love him rather than automaton-like yesmen. If he forces us to be in communion with him regardless of our choice, then there is no point to allowing us the choice, or allowing evil, in the first place.
Giving us the option to say no belies a fundamental respect of our ability to say no. While it is true that whether we say yes or no God technically has the final say, my understanding of God leads me to believe that he would respect our final choice whether it is good or not.
I also do not agree that God is a sadist if he allows people to choose Hell. He is not inflicting this upon them, but rather allow them their free will. Were he to force them to do otherwise he would be callously murdering their ability to choose, and their sense of self or pride.
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> you're just another nutjob whose reasoning boils down to "because I said so"
Maybe you missed my original post in this article. I'm not surprised that a lower class debate reject like you couldn't be bothered to remember where the discourse began.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
You sort of had me going until you said "I've never heard of a follower of Mithras or Ganesha...so I can't say its been of real importance to me to evaluate their value."
So, you are dismissing all Hinduism.
"In Hinduism, Ganesha is one of the most well-known and beloved representations of God. As the lord of beginnings and eliminator of obstacles, he is said to be the most worshipped divinity in India"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesha
While your ignorance is understandable, it shows the failure of your system of evaluating religious systems: you come to sound conclusions about the import of religions based on your own **lack** of information. This is generally a logical fallacy called "the argument from ignorance" and your argument of "I've never heard of it so it can't be important" falls squarely into it.
What you have carefully avoided is the question of "fact." You talk about compartmentalizing religion into belief and behavior. While it may be pragmatic to evaluate religions on their relative "good" or "harm" to society you leave open the metrics for such an evaluation. You especially ignore the harm caused to society by the perpetuation of non-reason over reason.
You claim that you analyze religions only "in terms of their precepts (which are generally unprovable) but rather in terms of their value." Value as what? But, even before trying to answer the question you beg, one must point out that many religious precepts can be tested, e.g. "prayer cures all ills", "this relic could not have been created by human hands", "you'll be struck down by our god if you blaspheme," etc.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
As my original response to your post pointed out, your rant was nothing more than meaningless words that proved nothing and made no more sense than my "cabin in the forest" speech.
I find it interesting that you apparently consider yourself a Christian and yet would refer to me as "lower class", as if you think yourself better than I. I've always found those who try to uphold the ideals of class systems to consistently be the most arrogant and vile people I've come across in my life. You might want to consider what you truly believe in life and decide if Christianity really preaches the ideals you practice. Your words would suggest otherwise.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Well c'mon, the wiring in the Sun is complex enough without having to do it in the dark. Obviously God turned the light off again after the Sun was burning nicely.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
I agree wholeheartedly up to this point:
In which case you should give some thought to the annihilation of the soul as an alternative to the eternal suffering. The "second death" does not disrespect one's choice, and, unlike Hell, it is merciful. One just goes back into non-being from which he came. The end result is also quite awesome: Heaven for everyone, no pointless suffering anywhere, no more opposition to God's will.
I understand that his works were never translated from Russian, but S. Bulgakov (an Orthodox priest, by the way) had a very insightful thing to say about this. As long as there are people or angels who, in their sense of self-pride, oppose God's will, Christ's work has obviously not been completed. As long as Satan or anyone else burns in Hell, Satan wins. To be God's spiritual adversary is exactly what he wanted, and the popular doctrine says that he will persist at that forever? But that only means that Christ's sacrifice, as the means to reconcile God with his Creation (which includes even angels) was ineffective.
Whether or not I'm an athiest is usually dependent upon how who I'm communicating with defines 'god'.
If god has a white beard, then yeah, I'm an athiest.
If god possesses things, experiences anger or love, has desire or manifests itself in human forms. Then I'm an athiest.
If god is more akin to something like omnicient consciousness or beauty itself then I'm agnostic.
If god is whatever is containing the universe or the prime mover or somehow intimately tied with space and time itself then I'm agnostic.
If god is that than which nothing greater can be conceived then I'm a believer.
.....We find that both evolution is true.......
Evolution is a belief, not science. Science is about facts, observations and measurements. The interpretation of these facts is not always part of real science, but is guided by the basic world view of a scientist. They are all human and every human, even an atheist, has a specific world view, their basic belief system.
One of the cornerstones of Darwinian Evolution always brought up is the subject of fossils. It is a science fact that we find fossils all over the earth. However, nobody has ever made a fossil nor watched one form in nature. Today when a living thing dies, it decays. It never makes a fossil. I order to make one, the creature to be fossilized has to die quickly, along with all decay causing organisms and then be buried away from air. A massive catastrophe of water, such as the flood of Noah could make fossils, but no slow process we know anything about could.
Evolution is faith, in lots and lots of time. It basically substitutes billions and millions of years for the creative power of God. The evolutionist's God is time, lots of time. Without all that supposed time, evolution is a dead farce, pure belief, masquerading as science. Evolution is the atheists way of interpreting the facts of science according to their belief.
(...There is plenty of atheism to go around,...)
Indeed there is. An "a" in front of a word, originally from Greek or Latin means "without" or "not". Amoral means without moral, amuse means not to muse, that is to think. An atheist is therefore someone without God or belief in him. Even so, atheists do think and ask some important questions, such as their origins, purpose and destiny after death. Their answers to these are faith based just as much as any theist's is.
(.....The brain is the seat of our very being...)
That is definitely NOT a fact in any way shape of form. We simply do NOT know where the seat of consciousness is physically located nor even if it is physical. In computer terms, firmware is still software, only more intimately connected to a particular hardware. The most detailed physical examination of the circuits of a computer with tell you absolutely NOTHING about the software it is running. A Mac running OSX or WinXP will not change physically by so much as one atom while running one the other or both. That is why consciousness has no more to do with neurons and neurology than gates and registers have anything to do with the OS as such.
Our brain is of course vital to the execution of both the OS and the applications. An infant is born with a complete OS with little application software. That is all learned later -- programmed in as it were. The OS is in part determined by other software stored in the genetic code inherited from our ancestors. The brain is indeed a wonderful organ, hardware specifically designed to allow the efficient execution of unimaginably complex software. You, the real person lives inside a marvelous body for a short time. After that you WILL meet the programmer personally.
All theory is gray
I'm going to be perfectly honest here. Death does not scare me in the context of an afterlife of any sort, but the idea of "non-existence" scares the living daylights out of me. My consciousness is completely repulsed by the very concept, and frightened of its potential truth. I'm going to state publicly here that I'm flawed enough of a person that if I had to choose separation from God over non-existence, I would likely choose the former.
We could probably get into a lengthy debate over the nature of Christ's sacrifice and its meaning for life, the universe, and everything, but I think that might be digressing a little too far.
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Religion has served it's purpose. It was required during the formation of early civilizations. It was something more powerful than all of us and kept everyone from killing each other. Now (and for the last couple of thousand years) it is instead the reason we kill each other.
Have you considered that religion today is still doing what it has always done, and it's just as much an evolutionary advantage today as it was in the past? Yes, religion causes people to band together and kill the other bands. But from an evolutionary perspective, if your religion is stronger, your tribe is stronger, and you kill more of your competing tribes so there's less of you and more of them. That's pretty much the definition of an evolutionary advantage.
Religion is a tool of social control, and having a well controlled society is what has made us such a spectacular success, in evolutionary terms that is.
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Alas this is not the case, and the preponderance of belief, then, is a consequence of the wide reach of our culture and the extreme efforts of many religious to actively convert people to their specific system of belief. This would, of course, only succeed if the converted were already predisposed to belief of some sort (although there have been notable examples of "Convert or die" in our history), but that doesn't mean *religious* or diety-based belief is necessarily itself predisposed.
The specific form of belief (even so far as to imagine a higher power called 'God' or any other name) would seem instead to be a cultural phenomena. It would be just as perfectly reasonable to consider the plants and animals around you to be endowed with sentience, and imagine that you will become one of them when you die (as in fact, many extant cultures did and still do).
And this tells you just how wide a reach our culture really has - if 96% of the world has an essentially equivalent view of God, but other equally meaningful views are possible and equally as likely from our predisposition to belief, that seems to suggest how well our culture really has spread its own view of the world.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Funny.. my experience has been precisely the opposite. Every person of religious belief with whom I have ever "gotten into it" has given up theological ground of some sort, and this is simply because even the most entrenched mind, when faced with the absolute contradiction of their beliefs, is forced to re-evaluate them, at least in part. It's hard to deny pure logic when it's staring you in the face.
I have largely given up such exercises though, partly because I find it boring (it's just too predictable) but mostly because there's no point: always, without exception, very shortly after the confrontation, the person falls right back into their own mental constructs. Changes of vision come only from within, not from external proof, and this is the fundamental point very few people ever understand:
You will never convince anyone they are wrong. If you 'succeed', it is only because you gave them the tools to convince themselves.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
But believing is doing something. It's just as much doing something as 'giving up desire' is. It's just not a physical something (like Mohammad or Moses), it's a mental somthing. It seems that Jesus is saying 'Do the something I tell you to do, not what other people tell you to do', just like all the other religions. (Though I do believe that the Buddha didn't actually discuss salvation, that was tacked on later because the people wanted a god and/or heaven. As I understand it Buddha was atheistic, he was more talking about how to not suffer.)
Most psychoactive substances have their effect in crossing the blood brain barrier and doing something like binding to receptor sites on neurons down stream, blocking reuptake of neurotransmitters, increasing secretion of neurotransmitters by binding to the sending neuron etc. What's interesting is that the body often has its own chemicals to produce these effects often regulated by our glands. Runner's high for example triggers the release of endorphine (endogenous [from within] morphine). So it need not necessarily be ingested but may in fact merely be internally present and stimulated under the right conditions.
Listen to Reality!
Atheims says probability is zero (without sufficient evidence, naturally) and religion says that probability is one (again, without sufficient evidence). Agnosts believe that there is not enough information to make a judgement.
To me, atheists and religious people belong to the same group - stating something without evidence.
Actually, my atheistic viewpoint, as inspired by Dawkins, is not what you describe. Rather, my viewpoint is: "You [religion X] make a rather extraordinary claim. Do you have a single shred of evidence with which to back that up? No? Ah, then I will not base my life upon your hypothesis, and I shall waste no time in exmining it further. If you get actual evidence of any sort, feel free to let me know".
An agnostic point of view, however, would be: "You make extraordinary claims, sir. Do you have any evidence? No? Then I choose to neither believe nor disbelieve you, along with Santa Claus, faries, and Evil Pixies who cause people to vote Republican."
Though, as other posts have pointed out, my stance is "soft" atheism, rather than "hard", which IS what you describe...
Which was news to me.. sheesh.. we need more terms for atheists already?? Why hard and soft? Let's call ourselves Protestant and.. well... maybe not.
'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
Well let's drop religion then, shall we?
Instead, let's engage in the civilized game of politics, where members of one band are calling for the death of the leaders of an opposing band.
Hey, it's all the same, isn't it?
There are beliefs that drive us to reject possible avenues of knowledge, for example, the current push by Fundamentalist Christians in the US to ban stem cell research. There is no way to measure the price this behavior costs us, but at the very least, the intellectual price of rejecting whole areas of investigation simply because you have a belief that already fills that void is, to me, astronomical.
It's also inexcusable, for someone who values knowledge, wisdom, and to whatever degree possible, truth. While religion doesn't *require* blind faith, for the vast majority, that is precisely what it amounts to.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
You want to distinguish between "religion" and "organized religion together with a hierarchical power structure". The latter one has done all of the evil things you have mentioned, but it is not a "motivational force", it is a power structure. Every power structure has a conceptual framework on which it is reliant, and it is rather irrelevant what the details of that framework are. It could be something to do with God, economics, evolutionary biology, environmental science, philosophy, etc., etc. A power structure can only exist if every participant is speaking the same moral language, so that there is no confusion as to what is "good" and what is "bad". Once this condition is met, the meaning of "good" and "bad" can be manipulated on a grand scale through broadcasting.
The religion, on the other hand, is a motivational force, and it caused a lot of good. In my view, religion itself caused much more good than bad: there is not a single mainstream religion which does not advocate what we think of as humanist ideals. People who do evil things and say that they are acting on behalf of gods, etc., are liars, and can be easily shown to be liars by comparing their actions with those commended in respective holy texts. As an easy example, Bush junior says that he acts on behalf of the Christian God, while at the same time bombing the shit out of Iraq and making it impossible for a civil war to end. Here we all know that his motivation is not religious, but it is rather a mix of greed for money and power. The motivation of poor voters is not religious either: it is the desire for a sense of security together with a hypocritical aspiration to "help the spread of Democracy". (Hypocritical because there are still people alive who remember not being able to vote on the account of being black. If I was a US citizen, I would be worried about spreading Democracy at home first.) In order to justify their actions, everyone is forced to use the Christian moral language. The fact that they are justifying what the holy texts did condemn does not faze them, since they are getting what they really want: money, power, security, self-satisfaction. My main point is, this theater is made possible thanks to the work of hierarchical Christian churches, and never by ideas exposed in the New Testament.
As to ignorance, Christian ideals are demonstrably hostile to it (while most power structures, regardless of being religious, are obviously not). Wisdom is regarded very highly in the Bible, and is mostly meant as what we today would call "expertize". Great many Church Fathers, starting with Paul, were brilliantly educated and not ashamed of it. (Some, like Origen, were a little bit too proud of it.) Many hard scientists (Newton comes to mind) had true religious aspirations, while the main proponents of blissful ignorance were usually motivated by their desire to retain the control over masses.
This isn't a very good test. There are thousands of conceptions of "God" out there. It is eminently reasonable to say that we do not know if there is any kind of supreme being or power or unifiying force of some sort of spiritual nature out there, simply because it takes so many possible forms that how could you rule them all out?
For instance, I'm pretty positive there is no big bearded white guy hanging out around some pearly gates. I'm most definitely not a believer in a God as presented by Christians, Greeks, or any other personified form of a "God" that I am aware of.
But I'm not at all as confident in our 'knowledge' that the universe itself is not concious, or unified, or directed in some way. Since we do not even understand what conciousness is yet, it would quite arrogant to say anything with certainty about that; I don't see any evidence yet that you have to have a small pile of meat in a skull in order to be "concious". And this possible 'concious universe' could very well be something that all of these religions have touched on, labelled "God", and are interpeting in some peculiar way. Or, I could be on totally the wrong track, but that does not mean that there is NO force, power, or entity in the universe sufficiently powerful, connected, whatever to be called "God", or A god.
This would be an agnostic point of view; we DO NOT HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE to know with reason. We can believe or not believe, but what you choose to believe or not believe is simply a limitation of your own imagination; there is ALWAYS an aspect or a possibility that you couldn't have even thought of that could be a reasonable path to reasonable belief in SOMETHING that could be called "God".
That said, "Santa", "faeries", and other mythological/literary figures are distinct, discreet, fairly well defined entities that are very easy to believe or not to believe.
LOL, it does not matter if we digress at this point, no one is reading this sub-thread anymore.
You should not be afraid. Death is natural, and it feels just like sleeping. We will have to drink this cup no matter what. Waking up in Heaven is a pure bonus.
I guess the point I was actually trying to make was that in Christianity salvation is a gift, while to my knowledge, all other religions you earn your salvation in some way (proper worship, obedience, eliminating desire). Since we can't earn our way to God, He had to die for us, so that if we choose to be with Him forever, we may. Our ticket is Jesus' death. I suppose one could argue that choosing/believing Jesus is how you earn your salvation, but choosing to cash a $1 million check that some random stranger gave me doesn't seem like earning it, to me.
There is a very major anti-intellectual focus on some very dumbed down versions of Christianity which I think is what people are talking about. I see it really as more politics than actual religeon - people that were unable to get to positions of influence in existing groups started their own, put in a simplistic framework and disparage anyone that would question this like mainstream groups or the educated - surpisingly intolerant of other groups despite the fact they only avoid being persecuted as heretics due to the tolerance they do not wish others to have. These people are loud and get noticed so look like the prevailing view. The real classic I could barely believe was watching some film of a US born again group distrupting an Easter parade in St Petersburg in Russia by blocking the road and yelling out "turn to Jesus" - what did those idiots think the Easter parade was about in the first place?
I'll add I'm agnositic, but I think the anti-intellectualism is just a symptom of various groups that currently get a lot of attention. I paticularly despise the ones that give God orders, think Jesus hates poor people, ARE the merchants in the temple, call for Fatwahs on people or are just pyramid selling schemes pretending to be a belief system for tax purposes - but it's not all bad.
You are telling me that a magical guy who created everything in the universe is outside the realm of the science? Are you telling me that there is a realm which cannot and does not have any effect on the material/natural realm and has no effect on our lives? Basically anything more than talking about a nothing with no effect on us at all, is within the scientific realm. Science has slowly whittled the supernatural realm from just about everything down to nothing. Such that now you need talk about things which, by definition don't effect us and can't matter, to still talk about the supernatural.
The different domains idea is really an amusing exercise in special pleading. Religion has over the years and still today made a number of very testable claims. They claimed the sun traveled around the earth, diseases were caused by sin, and that God man all the living things on Earth. So long as religion goes around making claims about the world, science will go around testing those claims.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Evolution is a belief, not science. Science is about facts, observations and measurements. The interpretation of these facts is not always part of real science, but is guided by the basic world view of a scientist.
Evolution is a theory and a group of facts which that theory explains. The theory explains everything we see about animals not only the skeletal evidence we find in fossils but the modern evidence we see in the organs and habits of modern organisms as well as the coding of the DNA and the changes in proteins between species. People certainly believe evolution, in some kind of mutual exclusive relationship with science, rather because it is science and one of the most powerful and predictive elements of science we have. It is the cornerstone of all of biology.
One of the cornerstones of Darwinian Evolution always brought up is the subject of fossils. It is a science fact that we find fossils all over the earth.
No. It is also a prediction of evolution and common ancestry that we should find specific fossils in specific areas. If we found a mammal in the Precambrian, evolution is screwed. We find fossils of organisms which would have lived in that biome in that time. We find fossils geographically everywhere, however we find specific fossils geologically on in rocks they specifically belong to. We don't find, for example, fossils of dinosaurs less than 64 million years ago. So, finding a T-Rex embedded in 30 million year old rock, would send shockwaves through the scientific community.
However, nobody has ever made a fossil nor watched one form in nature. Today when a living thing dies, it decays.
Actually a group of Israeli scientists have managed to make petrified wood. It is true that things usually decay, and there is a pretty rare set of conditions needed for fossilization. However, it is nothing more than an argument from ignorance to note that since many things decay that they all decay.
It never makes a fossil. I order to make one, the creature to be fossilized has to die quickly, along with all decay causing organisms and then be buried away from air. A massive catastrophe of water, such as the flood of Noah could make fossils, but no slow process we know anything about could.
Hate to break it to you but Noah Ark is a myth. Geologically there is no evidence for it. And the counterevidence is overwhelming to say the least. The original story is copied from the much earlier Assyrian work the Epic of Gilgamesh, and does not depict real events. Futhermore, you can't make a natural fossil within a couple thousand years. It takes much longer than that to replace the bone with minerals.
Evolution is faith, in lots and lots of time. It basically substitutes billions and millions of years for the creative power of God.
Actually there are dozens of way to determine the age of the Earth, using those methods we have come up with a rather hard value of 4 billion years. That isn't faith, it is what the evidence tells us. Multiple independent methods finding the same value. Whereas your evidence consists of, I assume, nothing (on account of the evidence all pointing to 4 billion).
The evolutionist's God is time, lots of time. Without all that supposed time, evolution is a dead farce, pure belief, masquerading as science.
Well, I must admit that without the 2 billion years life has been evolving it would have have been hard to evolve the life we have today. It is a good thing that we have pretty clear verification of time periods we are talking about, from multiple radiological clocks. Again, though amusing belief and science are not mutually exclusive... in fact when science is done right it should heavily inform beliefs. You can, in fact, believe in things science has proven.
Indeed there is. An "a" in front of a word, originally from Greek or Latin means "without" or "not". Amoral means without moral, amuse means not to muse, that is to think. An atheis
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Tibetan Buddism is specifically what I had in mind.
http://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/SoYouWant
"In some cases, the teachings of Buddha have become intertwined with local polytheistic traditions, as in Tibetan Buddhism."
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Never attribute to genetics what can be explained by simple stupidity. There was a point at which six or seven out of ten people believed that the world was flat, too. Should we have looked for that in our genes as well?
StoneCypher is Full of BS
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Like I said, it isn't death that scares me, it's the idea that afterwards there is absolutely nothing. I reject that idea outright. Partly because there is absolutely nothing to lose by doing so, and partly because I have experiences which leads me to believe there is more than nothing after death.
And you never know, I'm the kind of person who delves deep into sub threads anyway.
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If it was hardwired into our genetics, we couldn't help but believe. The result would have to be 100%, not 92% or even 99%. Religion is part of culture. You find it all over the world, people have different but similar beliefs. It's learned from and shared between other people in their society - just like language. Religion was great. It has helped us survive, deal with strong emotions and explain things in the natural world we didn't have an answer for. It's still useful as an easy device for some people to fall back on in emotional situations such as when people die. Religion is also a source of power, control and authority which individuals try to hold on to. This is bad. Law has given us all the rules we need to live. Science has taken it's place to explain the natural world, as well as to deal with human emotion for those who are strong-willed enough.
No, not all of them, since I am a Christian, and I do not believe Christ is the LORD. Jesus never stood up and said it himself; therefore, in keeping with the first commandment, I won't say it either. I believe he is the savior and the SON of God. That is all he ever claimed to be. His apostles started saying Jesus was the LORD after he ascended into heaven; I believe they were probably breaking the first commandment when they did so.
There are several verses that reinforce that belief:
When the Jews were about to stone Jesus for blasphemy his response was "why would you stone me for claiming to be the SON of God, when it is written in your own scripture 'ye are gods'". Now stop and consider the fact that Jesus could have just said "sure, I'm God", but he didn't.
Then there's when Jesus was in the garden before he was arrested, and he prayed and asked the LORD to excuse him from the burden of being crucified. He asked the LORD; he didn't ask himself.
When Jesus was on the cross being crucified, he asked "Father, why have you forsaken me?" He did NOT ask "why have I forsaken myself?"
When Jesus was in the desert, and satan had been tempting him to do wrong things, and Jesus resisted, afterwards, angels came and preached to Jesus. Be clear about the order of things: The LORD made (and taught?) the angels. Not the other way around.
The first of the 10 Commandments says "Have no other gods before the LORD." I'm saying that to worship Jesus might very well break that commandment.
I sustain the possibility that Jesus was the same being as the LORD, but scripturally it is not established.
If somebody were trying to put words into your mouth, what would you respond?
"You have said it." [and not me]
Now, perhaps you could tell me what Jesus would have said, if he really intended to say what he's quoted as having said. He might have intended to convey that it was Pilate, and not Jesus' own self, who had made [or reiterated] the claim.
On the other hand, Jesus said that his kingdom was "not of this earth". However, that could mean Jesus was a servant of the LORD, [i.e. he was of the LORD's Kingdom] and yet not the LORD Himself.
Abraham was alive in 2100 B.C. However, at that same time, there were living angels in heaven, as well as whatever else the LORD has in Heaven. Consider the fact that angels guided Lot and his family to safety (from Sodom and Gomorra). That was in the same time period as Abraham. Therefore, Jesus being that old does not establish that he was the LORD.
Well, of course nobody reaches the Father, but through him, if Jesus is the Father. But I don't believe Jesus went around saying truisms. The claim actually specifically shows that Jesus considered God the Father to be a seperate entity entirely.
What
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
.....there is a pretty rare set of conditions needed for fossilization.....
I don't think I'll reply in detail to everything. I'll just point out that fossils. regardless how you interpret them are very widespread. There are in fact few places of this planet that do NOT have fossils. Even if they made some petrified wood, is that the way it really formed? Time is the biggest enemy of fossil making. The is NO known mechanism for making fossils over long periods of time - period. Using fossils, any fossils, as evidence for evolution is a wishful fairy tale.
(....from multiple radiological clocks...)
To use any clock, you have to assume (believe = have faith) that your clock has always ticked at the same or a known rate over the total time measured. There is evidence that clocks based on atomic properties have drifted as much as by a factor of 300 million times since the "big bang". This drift is related to very fundamental properties of space itself changing as the universe expanded. The equations for atomic behavior include Planks constant. Evidence that evolutionists like to keep silent shows that the some of the so called "constants" are anything but constant over long time periods. There are few things in nature that are really constant other than change itself. So your clocks are based on faith.
(....pretty much hardcoded.....The instructions...)
These are software terms. Early computers were programmed by the way they were physically wired. When source code is compiled into machine code, there is no change in information content. Translating a story from English to French and then having that read onto a tape still doesn't change the content of the story. It is still software, information, an immaterial product shown to be arising ONLY from the activity of intellect, a mind. The software in the brain and DNA is different and vastly superior to anything we have yet invented or even imagined. Information, such as a novel or play cannot be explained by the chemistry of ink on paper of the letters of a language. Neither can the operation of the brain be grasped in any way by describing the wiring of neurons. Information is a distinct, nonphysical quantity that interacts with and controls physical matter and energy. The brain itself is physical, but its product is not. That's why even a separate large body of law dealing with INTELLECTUAL property is needed.
The universe obeys specific laws. All human laws, without exception always come from human minds. Why is it then such a leap to propose that the "natural" laws are also the product of a mind?
All theory is gray
Would be nice if it was true, but I don't imagine that idea will get the backing of any churches. If the odds of going to hell are the slim anyway, who would need the churchs?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Mathew Alper's book The "GOD" Part of the Brain postulated this years ago. At least my copy is dated from the year 2000.
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Actually, Amazon says the book was first published in 1996. More than a decade ago...
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I don't think I'll reply in detail to everything. I'll just point out that fossils. regardless how you interpret them are very widespread. There are in fact few places of this planet that do NOT have fossils.
Not generally fossils but, areas where specific fossils are not found. If you are in a layer of rock formed in the Precambrian you aren't going to find any bones. Due to certain issues with the oceans we don't find many fossils in the water.
Even if they made some petrified wood, is that the way it really formed? Time is the biggest enemy of fossil making. The is NO known mechanism for making fossils over long periods of time - period. Using fossils, any fossils, as evidence for evolution is a wishful fairy tale.
No petrified wood forms in a very specific way, we simply made the fossilized wood by forcing the process to happen in a few days rather than a large number of years. Having extra time at your disposal wouldn't cause an inability to make fossils. That's just stupid. Secondly, there are many well understood chemical and physical properties which lead to fossil formation.
http://www.safossils.com/fossil.html
http://www.scsc.k12.ar.us/TuttS/fossil_formation.h tm
http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/prehistoric/what/howf ormed.html
http://www.fossils-facts-and-finds.com/how_are_fos sils_formed.html
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/earth/fossils/f ossil-folklore/how_are_fossils.htm
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/education/energylesso ns/coal/gen_howformed.html
Really, it isn't hard to figure out.
(....from multiple radiological clocks...)
To use any clock, you have to assume (believe = have faith) that your clock has always ticked at the same or a known rate over the total time measured.
No. That's why one uses multiple clocks. Firstly, sometimes there are slight (1% or so) fluctuation in the initial content of the radiological clock material. One need only believe that all of these radiological decay rates from the half a dozen methods you use remain constant, as would be expected if the laws of physics hold roughly true. Though, to be fair, they have only held true each and every time we checked, perhaps they magically stop working when we aren't looking.
There is evidence that clocks based on atomic properties have drifted as much as by a factor of 300 million times since the "big bang". This drift is related to very fundamental properties of space itself changing as the universe expanded.
Respectfully, no there is not. It took a long while before heavier radioactive particles even formed and from that time, the half lives have remained constant. It is extremely silly to suggest other wise with "there is evidence", as if that is some forgiving phrase with which to preface lies.
The equations for atomic behavior include Planks constant. Evidence that evolutionists like to keep silent shows that the some of the so called "constants" are anything but constant over long time periods. There are few things in nature that are really constant other than change itself. So your clocks are based on faith.
There may have been some slight change in such things as Planks and the speed of light, these are really really small and only true for the first split second of time. Radiological decay and half-lives are extremely consistent. The idea that some error exists and thus the universe is 6,000 years old is downri
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I agree that psychology and literature might be a relevant tool to evaluate the quality of different accounts of a given event. That is not relevant to when I question that central facts about the universe can be deduced by a literary man reasoning in a domain far from his expertise.
Morals are (genetically and culturally) evolved and some things will be mostly universal, just because of game theory. (Postmodernists or marxists might disagree, but afaik this is widely accepted today.) So some values will be mostly universal for humans and (at least) higher primates. Some probably even for aliens. Some change with increasing wealth (e.g. women got better rights when society had technology enough that it was possible).
Your claim that C S Lewis makes a believable god proof without even understanding how game theory relates to behavior (research starting mostly from the sixties) seems really strange. I can't see how Abolition even makes a serious argument for the existence of god.
Here is the book. Could you give exact references to what you consider the strong god argument? And also reasons for the Xian god to be the real one and not the Norse gods, the invisible unicorn, the Jewish one, etc etc.
From some fast skimming of the book and reviews, it fails to realize that the sum of morals has evolved genetically as well as culturally -- so its absolute moral is a slowly moving target. Otherwise, it is an interesting argument -- if you accept that the basis of human instincts and built in morals are "sacred". I can agree with that it would be really dangerous, immoral and illegal to mess with the basic design of emotions!
And another question -- as I understand, you claim that your belief in Oden is based on an intellectual argument and not hearing voices like Son of Sam? If you found this argument to be bad, would you change position? I just note that philosophers (not literary people) have tried to write arguments showing religion to be true since milennia -- and everyone are embarrassed afterwards.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
I think I can present that 'special reasoning concerning God', at least for santa claus. I am agnostic but I do not believe in Santa Claus, and I'll explain why. There are arguments for the existence of god that are quite complicated, such as the various ontological arguments (not Anselm's, that one is quite weak). Until I have unpicked them, I will reserve judgement on whether god exists. Note that I do not comment on the nature of god, be it the christian god, FSM, Invisible Pink Unicorn etc., as they are all types of god and therefore not relevant to this argument - when discussing aetheism and agnosticism we are primarily questioning the existence of god, not god's nature. There are no even vaguely convincing arguments for the existence of Santa Claus, and lots of arguments against - the total absence of free presents on Christmas day, for one. Fairies may exist somewhere (not necessarily on earth) so that could well remain unsolved.
pandnotpian.org. The untruth will set you free!
A genetic tendency towards belief does not equal belief. We do have brains you know. We are all capable of believing things that contradict experience or common sense (quantum physics, anyone?).
I think you are grossly overstating the effect of a tendency when you suggest that it trumps free will and the exercise of intellect.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
What I wrote was that morale was a result of genetic and cultural evolution -- I think few if any argue that morale is primarily genetic in humans. So... you base your opinions on how the world is built on how you feel it should be? I'd argue that the world is never how we feel it should be (-: where are my yachts?! :-) Your next sentence make me think that you don't really understand the subject:
Frankly, this sounds a bit naive -- are you trolling me?
At the time C S Lews wrote, it was impossible to rape your wife in most of the Western world. I am not aware of CSL making speaches against that exact law? But law, morals and culture change. You could write a good argument for the most constant thing over the centuries is an inability to realize how much morals change about "obvious" subjects...
For instance, rape of slaves was socially accepted in many places, as was rape in war time. Rape is also a common tactic among animals. Even war in itself -- with abduction, rape and sale of females etc -- was mostly seen as a good and necessary fact in all historical cultures -- while they were clan societies.
To get a more insight into what is the "best behaviour for survival", I'd recommend you to get "Selfish Gene" by Dawkins and read up on evolutionary analysis of behaviour. It is both a really fascinating subject and one of the best written books I've ever read. (Don't claim to have already read it after that naive statement -- if you did, you didn't understand it.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
A good point, actually.
Perhaps, perhaps not, according to the geneticists, right? That is within the domain they were exploring. My argument is simply this: their argument took aim at human spirituality and (in an iconoclastic way) attempted to boil it all down to physical matter. According to the level on which they have been arguing, even if the genes didn't account for the person's beliefs, other material phenomena would be taken up to account for the remaining free will. Their argument [that material circumstance accounts for matters of the God and Spirit] is spiritually dead.
The LORD has dominion over all of it, and genetics are the wrong instrument, when it comes to matters of God and Spirit. I've seen things (supernatural things) that genetics will never explain. When they bend their [potentially fruitful] field of study to the end of making it look as if religiosity were the cheap result of material events, it is 100% clear to me that Satan works through them, and they're probably in for a rude awakening.
The "effect of a tendency?" Is that akin to the "length of a string?"
I didn't suggest that anything trumped free will. If anything, it's the geneticists who suggested that genes trumped free will. And if they didn't give the whole show to genetics, they carved it part and parcel for physics to take the rest, in the epiphenominal claim that consciousness and free will are just physical by-products of material events. But they are dead wrong, and the "best" they can achieve in their line of analysis is to spiritually mislead people.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Well, I certainly didn't misunderstand it, since you didn't say it. If we have a choice then we aren't really programmed at all, are we? Perhaps we are educated, trained or conditioned, etc, but we are not programmed. =D
There are no facts of science. Science is a process. It is a method of drawing conclusions and making predictions based on emprical analysis. The process of science involves
(1) making an observation
(2) forming a question about what was seen
(3) studying the facts surrounding the question, and framing it as well as possible.
(4) forming one or more hypotheses to explain the phenomenon
(5) devising an incisive, well measured, repeatable experiment (that also include control groups, and hopefully a "double blind" study) in order to test the hypotheses
(6) conducting the experiment(s)
(7) study the results and draw conclusions
(8) if an hypothesis survives enough experiments, it might be upgraded to "theory."
Darwin's "theory" of evolution has never been tested. It should honestly be called the "hypothesis of evolution." That is because there was never a single experiment conducted which could have confirmed or denied it. It is investigative forensics that resulted in Darwin's Hypothesis taking a believable form. Forensics are not the same thing as science, however.
Many of the forensic conclusions which have been drawn from scientific realms are completely at odds with the scripture. The Hypothesis of Evolution is an example of that. The LORD created the Heaven and the Eart in 6 days, and he rested on the 7th. That is why the sabbath day is hallowed, and we are not supposed to work on it.
If you were telling me that the LORD really lied in teh scripture, adn he took billions of years to accomplish what he said only took him 6 days, well then it would be about a billion years until the first sabbath day, right? But that's not how the sabbath is timed. The sabbath is once a week. Every 7 days, there's another one.
That's an example of a forensic conclusion at odds with the scripture.
There are forms of dating (for instance) that place terrestrial things as if they were older than the Bible says the earth is. That is a second example of scientifically founded forensics being at odds with the Bible.
In order for Jonah's whale to travel to Nineveh, it had to travel over 10,000 miles in 3 days, and part of that was swimming up a river (either the tigris or euphrates, which had dericks).
Fish don't swim that fast.
Scientific hypothises and theories are often at odds with the Bible. So are conclusions that have been reached by means of forensics. Since the scientific method is a process, however, the process is not, and cannot, be at odds with the Bible [no more than the process of performing addition or division]. The scientific method can either be applied or not applied, but the conclusions drawn from its used can be accepted or not; the process [the scientific method] is not a sin.
There. I hope that helps.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
That only applies to Catholics & Protestants. But in the Russian church, anyone who chooses Christ chooses CHRIST!!!
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I think it's funny that we can determine what is imbedded in our genes by only surveying Americans.
My father was a soldier. A proud atheist as well.
He needed none of all the religious nonsense to feel for his buddies and to survive very bad situations.
Religious people fail badly to understand people that do not need those crouches to lead moral, positive lifes.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Comparing belief systems based in mental machinations and wishful magic thinking with an attitude informed in scientific facts is frankly intellectually disingineous.
If you have no interest in preserving the environment, say so, but doing cheap shoots against people that do by smearing them via a completely unrelated issue, is frankly almost beyond contempt.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I guess you're making an assumption that the church would be the sole (obvious) sponsor of the activity, and I was making the assumption that they'd be one participant of many (perhaps the event was organized by the city itself). I would be uncomfortable attending an event if everyone thought that I was there for the church. "Look at all of those volunteers the church put together!" Um, no. And perhaps this is part of the reason you never see this happening. Churches are about the church first, and community second. If they're not going to get "credit" or new recruits, they're not going to organize for the community's benefit. This seems a little hypocritical to me.
Any such being, if it exists, is outside the realm of science. Science by definition limits itself to natural explanations, and nature does not include magic (again because of definition: magic is by definition supernatural.)
No, I make no such claim.
Science is the process of hypothesis and experimentation through which we seek natural explanations for our observations. The supernatural, if it exists, is the concern of philosophers and theologians, not scientists. That's why Intelligent Design is not science: it allows supernatural explanations alongside natural ones.
.....Where did this mind come from?.......
It is hard for us time bound creatures to even imagine someone or something that has always existed, someone that just IS. Moses was given the name of God as "I AM" the eternally self existing one. You just have chosen to completely deny His existence, because if you even admitted even in the slightest that there possibly could be a Creator after all, who made you, a very uncomfortable series of thoughts will come into your mind. Some are: If there is a possibility, even a small one, that there is a God, then what, if any is my responsibility to Him? Is there maybe a judgement after death? If there is, what are my chances? Was Jesus who He claimed to be, the Immanuel, 'God with us" the "I AM" come to earth? When he claimed to be THE truth, was He lying or deceived?
What if there is a heaven and a hell and physical death of only the body, with its brain, is not the end of my existence? After all, in the physical world there is no extinction either. There are conservation laws. When you burn a piece of wood in your fireplace it doesn't go out of existence. It only changes form. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed and neither can the eternal spirit person that is the real conscious you. Right now you still have opportunity to determine the CORRECT answer to these and other important questions concerning your eternal destiny. I suggest you don't fool yourself, but earnestly seek true answers to these questions.
All theory is gray
.....Agnosticism is the idea that you can't know whether or not god exists....
The fact is though that many so called agnostics don't really want to know whether God is. If they admit to that possibility, then a lot of uncomfortable questions arise which they'd rather not have to deal with.
All theory is gray
..... It would be better to just kill these people off .......
If God did that, he'd have to 'kill' himself first. Death doesn't mean going out of existence. Nothing in the physical world does that. Things change form and place, but still exist. You are made in the image of God. That is why you are an eternal being, extremely valuable to Him.
The Bible mentions two deaths. The first one we are very familiar with as our loved ones bodies die, one by one. The second death is eternal separation from God's presence. God has given us the ability to want to be with Him or not. We can only want. However He alone has the made it possible to actually make it happen by taking our sin upon Himself at the cross. Anyone who truly wants to be with God forever WILL come to accept the gift of salvation by faith. God will never use His divine power to force anyone to go to heaven or hell. He is limited by His nature, love and justice. Love will never force anyone into heaven and justice will never allow evil to enter there.
All theory is gray
....One just goes back into non-being .......
That is unfortunately neither in accord with what Jesus clearly said nor with God's laws of physics. Nothing goes out of existence, but only changes form and place. Part of that 'image of God' in man is our eternal makeup. The same word "eternal" as applied to happiness in heaven is also used for the anguish of hell. Hell is an awful place which Jesus described in terms of the worst kind of pain we humans can physically experience - that of fire and burning. If hell were not such a bad place to end up, then Jesus would not have to go through hell himself on our behalf. After all if there is no hell, we go out of existence or hell is NOT really so bad after all, then Jesus went to the cross for nothing.
All theory is gray
The "effect of a tendency?" Is that akin to the "length of a string?"
Yes. With two tin cans, I can communicate over a much broader range with a long string than a short string.
But they are dead wrong, and the "best" they can achieve in their line of analysis is to spiritually mislead people.
Perhaps. But, I personally do not find a conflict between what these geneticists have hypothesized and Christian belief, but your mileage may vary. People have all kinds of built-in psychological biases, like the strong bias towards self-preservation. A person's ability and decision to override that particular bias can serve evil, in the case of suicide, or good, in the case of risking one's life to save others. It doesn't obviate free will although it certainly influences it, just as any of a hundred other psychological tendencies we come equipped with. It is no small facet of Christian belief that one must overcome all kinds of natural tendencies to live a moral life, and yet there is recognition that some instincts and inclinations are beneficial.
That this has been expressed in terms of science does not, in my opinion, come into conflict with a belief in God or the moral obligations that this belief implies. However, like I said originally, it will certainly be seized upon by people with all manner of opinions to support their cases.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
one might with as much validity claim that all Americans are hardwired for stupidity.
Excuse me, have you looked around?!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
....i reckon Mother Teresa....
She came to God the only way anyone can - by faith in Jesus Christ. It is because she believed in Him and truly loved Him, that she lived such a exemplary life few of us manage.
As far as who to believe -- believe in the One who is alive at this moment. Jesus is the only one who is not dead. For starters, read the Gospel of John as many times needed until you are able to act upon what Jesus says therein. Ask God to help you understand it. After that read the other Gospels, the rest of the New Testament and then wade into the old. Maybe you'll change you mind about God after that.
All theory is gray
I've found the smartest person on Slashdot.
And they're an Anonymous Coward.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
.....There is no evidence that Jesus proclaimed himself to be the literal son of God.......
He did more than that. He claimed to BE God. 15 times he uses the "I AM". When He uttered that phrase at His arrest, it is recorded that those that came to arrest Him fell backwards to the ground at those words of supreme majesty. (John 18:5-6) The Septuagint, the old testament translation into Greek uses that same phrase "ego eimi" in Exodus 3:14 where God tells Moses who is sending him back down to Egypt. That is the "I AM", the name of God the rabbis would never pronounce. The pharisees help us here also. They too understood Jesus claim to deity and were very upset. (Luke 5:23 & 7:49)Either Jesus is God, Immanuel, God with us, or He is the biggest, most arrogant deceiver that ever walked on this planet. If He is God, we do well to pay attention and give Him our obedience.
I suggest you study scripture a little more closely before making statements about Jesus.
All theory is gray
....Do you stop them from taking those keys and inform them that they need to take another car .......
God has not chosen to stop us from taking the car, but He did tell us not to and informed us of the consequences if we do anyway. Apparently most people decide the car is OK, but truly believe the warning that the brakes are out only AFTER the crash. The problem is that anyone who takes the car anyway is calling the owner who warned them a liar. Neither God nor people enjoy being called a liar.
All theory is gray
....so one reminder seven thousand years ago in a document in an obscure language is sufficient notice .....
Apparently Abraham thought that scripture is enough. Jesus lifts the curtain into eternity a tiny bit in Luke 16:20-31. He concludes the lesson with: "And he said to him, If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded, even though one rose from the dead." Anyone unwilling to believe the written records of scripture is not going to believe a miracle either.
After Jesus performed what was arguably His greatest miracle, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, Jesus unbelieving enemies were ever more determined to murder Him.
John 11:53 Then from that day they took counsel together that they might kill Him.
So, no, God is not going to give you more notice than He has already. There will be nobody who will have a valid excuse at the final judgment.
All theory is gray
That is circular reasoning. All of the reasons you provide are only worth something if you are assuming that the Bible is accurate.
If I said I was perfectly reliable and accurate, would you believe me? Obviously you should because a perfectly reliable and accurate source would not say it if it wasn't true, right?
That's the same argument you are making for the Bible being accurate.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
No, God did not tell us any such thing. An ancient document in some foreign language contains the warning. It is one of several ancient documents in foreign languages that contain various contradictory warnings. You believe the Bible but you don't believe the sacred texts of the Egyptians or the Aztecs or the Romans, or the Maori or any other of the worlds various religions.
Which one is right? If God wanted to clarify for us he is more than capable of literally manifesting himself to the people of Earth and putting and end once and for all to all the bitter disagreements. He has done no such thing so clearly he is not really putting much effort into saving people from the mistake of disbelief.
I know what you are now thinking. Oh just wait, he's going to do just that, Revelations, the end times and all. So my presponse to that would be first off that does nothing for all millions of nonbelievers who already died. Secondly, get back to me when it happens. Literally every generation since Christ has had believers who insisted that we were living in the end times. Even the apostles who lived with him thought he was going to return before they died. People are going to hell by the millions each year. What's he waiting for? Again that goes back to my original point, he's obviously not trying very hard to save people from damnation.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Yes and no. Of course theologically speaking there is a large difference, but to the layman it might not matter that much. As an example, one thing that Catholics did when converting Africans in the Caribbean and Brazil was show them how similar the saints were to the African gods. It was easier to teach them something that was similar to the belief system that the slaves already held instead of completely reversing the beliefs of previous religions. Saints serve a similar purpose to the believer as the various Gods do in a polytheistic religion. Although theologically distinct, praying to the god of the ocean and praying to the patron saint of fisherman both accomplish the same thing. As a result of adapting already existing African beliefs to Catholicism in order to more easily convert the slaves, you see many bizarre religious beliefs that are completely unique to the Americas, even in areas that are mostly Catholic and have been for centuries.
As I said before, theologically they are distinct, but it is easier to adapt existing beliefs than to completely introduce a new system. Another different type of example is holidays. The holiday we call Christmas has existed for a very long time, much longer than Christianity has been around around. Instead of completely changing the holiday or adding a new one to the calendar, Christians just adapted it to celebrate Jesus' birth. No one knows for sure when Jesus was born, and it probably wasn't in the middle of winter, but it works. Ideas adapt in the same way. Some ideas may die out, but others change and stick around for a very long time.
As for the Romans and Christians not getting along, that had nothing really to do with whatever needs their respective religions fulfilled. I think you would agree that the French government and the German government both fill the same set of needs for their citizens, but that doesn't mean that they don't occasionally go to war with each other. Even people that have the same religious beliefs fight wars against and persecute each other.
There are so many inaccuracies in what you are saying that I do not even know where to start. For one, there is no word "hell" in the New Testament. "Hades" means, more or less, the purgatory where everyone awaits God's judgment; "Gehenna" is a bad part of that purgatory; "Tartarus" is the worst part of that purgatory where only fallen angels go. If you cannot understand these simple concepts, do not even bother replying.
....Hell isn't God being vindictive....
Exactly. Hell isn't confined to the hereafter either. God created the earth for man and gave man stewardship over it. He intended and still intends man to take care of His property under wise counsel of God Himself. Man rejected Gods right to rule and has made a huge mess of this planet and humanity as a whole. Jesus said it best in the parable of the vineyard in Matthew 21:33-46. His hearers understood this story and were ready to put an end to Jesus right then and there.
In the parable of the tares of the field in Matthew 13:24 tells us that right now good and evil are mixed up together but that at the harvest they will be separated. Later Jesus interprets the parable and tells us that no human will do this separation, but God will through His holy Angels. Then He concludes this in V43 with: "Then the righteous shall shine out like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
The present state of the world, with evil and good side by side was not so in the beginning and will again not be when Jesus rules in righteousness right here on Earth. Heaven and Earth will be united as one and filled with good. Those who do not want to participate in that will be given a place where they can do as much evil as they want, unhindered by any good whatsoever.
All theory is gray
--"I think most people associate Germany's defeat in the second world war with some rather ugly stuff about death camps."
That's why I am bringing up those estimated 1.6 million deaths at the hands of Eisenhowers troops.
--"Sorry, but there is no uglier "truth lurking beneath the surface" than what was found in Germany at the end of the Second World War."
There is nothing magic about Zulu, German, Jewish, Zulu or Chinese blood unless you're troll enough
to obsess here over religion. You will find that human blood regardless of race is pretty much the
same cocktail of proteins and cells with little evident difference in DNA in both the cell nucleus and
the Mitochondria. I wonder where you find it in you to rank one man's cruel murder after another's
and mind you well that these were for the most part regular German Armed Forces troops and civilians.
I will make a distintion, here, for the sake if differentiating a physical bias, and intellectual bias and a spiritual bias, there could be personal or emotional bias. There are probably other forms, as well. Of course, the distinction might not be perfect. There could be gray areas where those domains and biases overlap.
Naturally, there could be cases where biases conflict. For example, if we're talking about the physical bias to eat food, that could come into conflict with a spiritual bias to eat only kosher food.
The importance of that distinction might vary, but in this particular case it is important, since the argument of the geneticists is that there is a gene-based spiritual bias. But the human soul is not a slave to matter. Idolatry advocates might tell you otherwise, but it is not.
A minor re-edit to strengthen your point. [_inserts_]
Well, this is specifically where we have disagreement, since I'm saying that indeed, yes, it does.
Stop and consider Daniel, Shadrak, Mishak and Abednigo, who were thrown into the furnace because the King's jealous advisors had provoked him to anger. Leave it to the genes, and there's no telling what those four would have done. A Godless, evolutionistic prediction of their behavior might have them cowering before the King, telling him they were sorry and eating the un-Kosher food, but they held their ground, and stood for their religion, and for the LORD, while they were in the King's court. So the LORD protected them while they were in the furnace.
That there is a difference between basing your understanding of human behavior on the soul & spirit, vs. basing that understanding of human behavior on purely physical grounds is clear. Those who hold themselves to the higher standard are rewarded, insofar as Jesus made this claim "blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled."
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
....but I'd love to see a quote from the bible that describes hell as inflicted torture......
Look at Revelation 14:10-11 and Rev 20:10 for starters. Jesus also talks about hell and pain. This is the payback for those, both demonic and human who who have inflicted pain and suffering on millions and are still doing so at present and will yet on those unborn.
All theory is gray
"You either have to regress infinitely ..., or you eventually have to come to something that was not created. We can apply this more broadly. Where did all the matter/energy in the universe come from? Either it is infinite, or at some point it was created."
Which is what makes a Creator less probable: An eternal complex being capable of building the universe is less probable than a large amount of eternal matter and energy.
Interesting thought, but I am not sure how valid it is. How would you come up with the probability of either case? Since we are talking about origin, be careful not to include any assumptions taken from the way we interpret things. Something complex existing being less probable than something simple seems to be a very evolutionary concept, which would be an invalid basis for your probabilities if an "eternal complex being" exists. We could go into other evidences for or against an eternal God or eternal matter, but that would probably stray more into philosophy than science.
Hell, you could break it further down: if all matter was created by the condensation of energy as the universe initially cooled, then we only have to account for eternal energy.
Naturally. That is why I referred to "matter/energy" in one place. As best we can tell (and I understand it), it seems matter and energy are two forms of the same thing. At the very least we know we can get one from the other. Oh, and we weren't discussing Hell here ;-).
I mean, at the very least, we can see and interact with matter and energy.
Some science deals quite a bit with things we cannot directly see or interact with. Just because we cannot observe or interact with something does not mean it doesn't exist. Makes it very hard to do science on it, but says nothing of its existence.
Still, none of it REALLY matters, except in how we proceed. The answer, for research, need not be correct, just more likely.
I disagree. The way you see the world and interpret science can change drastically. I know science is supposed to be objective, etc. but let's face it, scientists are human and we all interpret things. How we interpret depends on our view of the world. Also, see my quote at the end. It does make a difference.
"Did the algorithms used in genetic programming happen by chance?"
No. They were written to emulate an existing process. The remainder of questions there are irrelevant.
There are no parameters that must be externally controlled? I think that is relevant. If there is no God, there is no external control or input in the real life system.
The process, by the way, is the natural extension of any self-replicating matter. One could suggest that a self-replicating amino chain was the only thing in the history of life to come about by chance. Since there were a couple billion years available for that to happen before the advent of life on earth (and to take for long enough to grow more complex), and since SRAs come about pretty frequently in conditions similar to primorial earth, I'm willing to see it as sufficiently probable.
Looking at the bigger picture of producing all the forms of life that we see from that single piece of self-replicating matter that just happened, the probability begins to shrink rapidly. I have seen no direct evidence anywhere of evolution between species (macro-evolution). Micro-evolution (that within a species, aka natural selection) does happen and on a scale that we can observe it. It seems to be this process that genetic algorithms use. The jump from micro to macro seems a difficult problem that is rarely addressed or even differentiated. When you cannot observe something, it moves outside the realm of science. When have we observed macro-evolution?
Look, you can argue 'till you're blue in the face, but a Designer just isn't a plau
--It is hard for us time bound creatures to even imagine someone or something that has always existed, someone that just IS.
Why can't the universe "just IS"? Seems a bit of a stretch to demand something just exist because the universe can't just exist.
--If there is a possibility, even a small one, that there is a God, then what, if any is my responsibility to Him?
Clearly, any superpowerful being who created this entire universe with a trillion trillion stars wants to be worshiped unconditionally by some intelligent ape on some small planet around an average star within a fairly average galaxy.
--Is there maybe a judgement after death?
The existence of a creator doesn't actually have any bearing as to whether there is something after death. And even then it seems like a dumb question.
-- If there is, what are my chances?
Well, an infinite number of possible mutually exclusive gods. I would gather they would be 1/infinity or 0.
-- Was Jesus who He claimed to be, the Immanuel, 'God with us" the "I AM" come to earth?
Was David Koresh? The Koran was better written and that Immanuel is simply a silly contradiction between Isaiah and the Gospels. I daresay the odds of that crazy absurd nonsense is zero.
-- When he claimed to be THE truth, was He lying or deceived?
I don't think there is any real basis to the story. Beyond a lack of historical evidence, it's patently absurd.
-- What if there is a heaven and a hell and physical death of only the body, with its brain, is not the end of my existence?
My brain, contains, everything I am. I daresay it could easily rot away and I would be non-existent just like I would be non-existent before I was born.
-- After all, in the physical world there is no extinction either. There are conservation laws. When you burn a piece of wood in your fireplace it doesn't go out of existence.
It changes form and no longer exists as a piece of wood. Just as if the order in my brain didn't exist I wouldn't exist. "I" am the order and arrangement of my brain. Just because the atoms which make up my brain will still exist after death, does nothing to imply that I (as the order and arrangement of my brain) will continue to exist.
-- It only changes form. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed and neither can the eternal spirit person that is the real conscious you.
I only have seen evidence for once conscious me, located firmly between my ears.
-- Right now you still have opportunity to determine the CORRECT answer to these and other important questions concerning your eternal destiny. I suggest you don't fool yourself, but earnestly seek true answers to these questions.
They aren't hard questions. And again, no evidence for eternal anything or destiny. You should really stop reading books written by bronzed age con-men. Your claims are absurd. The truth is rather simple: what you see is what you get. By the way, if you don't believe that my left sock created the universe as a video game, you will go to hell and burn forever and ever. But, beyond belief, you must eat at least one sock before you die. You see salvation is gained by faith and deeds. Believe my sock is that awesome, and eat at least one thing made in her image.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
-- Any such being, if it exists, is outside the realm of science. Science by definition limits itself to natural explanations
Science limits itself to things which exist. If such a being exists it is scientifically relevant. Moreso if you toss in all the stuff this thing is suppose to have done. Create life, grant prayers, make the universe. Though, though are natural things so there's a problem. Either God is completely irrelevant or you are just blowing smoke.
-- No, I make no such claim.
Well, that is the claim you need to make to put this character outside of the natural realm. You can't just declare something supernatural and make it immune to being questioned. Oh, don't ask about black holes, they are supernatural. Sure they have natural effects, they grant prayers, etc... but, they are not subject to scientific inquiry.
-- Science is the process of hypothesis and experimentation through which we seek natural explanations for our observations. The supernatural, if it exists, is the concern of philosophers and theologians, not scientists.
If the supernatural exists, it would easily be subject to the same processes of experimentation. The reason we seek natural explanations rather than supernatural ones, is that supernatural ones have thus far never existed. Each thing we check has a reasonable natural explanation, and each thing which has a natural effect and a consistent natural effect is easily subjected to science.
Why can't gardeners or coopers be concerned about the supernatural? I mean, if there is no way to detect it, or find any changes or effects in the natural world due to the supernatural (what would be needed to dodge science). Then why philosophers and theologians? What special powers or abilities do these people have to discern the non-existent in all its ineffectualness?
-- That's why Intelligent Design is not science: it allows supernatural explanations alongside natural ones.
Actually it could call for super intelligent aliens to have created all life on Earth. Which would certainly be a natural explanation. The reason Intelligent Design is not science is because it doesn't actually have any theory or facts behind it. It is simply the next evolution of creationism (set to dodge the unconstitutional God angle), with the same song and dance of arguing that evolution isn't enough to explain the world or that it's just too damned complex to have evolved. Sure, you can have a few changes over short periods of time, but large numbers of changes over a large period of time is impossible!
Intelligent Design is not science because it doesn't predict anything, it doesn't have a theory, it doesn't have facts... it just sits around making tired flawed arguments about real science.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
You are certain some Absolute Moral exists beyond genes and game theory, but can't give arguments or examples. You can't even make an good case about rape!!
Religion need that morale is absolute -- since the argument is important to you, read up on the evolutionary arguments on behaviour so you can begin to think/argue about it. My honest opinion is that you just don't have the mental tools to discuss the subject.
With that I end the argument. The rest is discussion.
But we both do, or are you active against e.g. this or Sudan? In a few decades, the obvious moral answer to what I'd guess a future morale is -- "What, not your country? What has that to do with anything?!" I'd guess that the next logical step is to take responsibility for more than your own country. Then they will argue that is the Absolute morale...
And you don't need to think something is right -- it is necessary in some cases, because the alternatives don't work. These days, we in the west have a larger leeway in deciding what we do -- in the west. I see it as morally wrong to condemn others for what they had to do.
(See what I quoted from you.) This is the sum of my position:The point of morale is that it is adjusted after the technical reality (population density etc gave very different cultures) -- perfect for a generalist species living in. That is why it is so fluid and change so much. They didn't have the luxury to choose as much as we do -- since there is no world police, we can't control Human Rights in e.g. Sudan but that will probably not stop future generations from condemning us as totally inhumane.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
... and then had tom embarrass yourself with your parting sentence.
You can't provide evidence to probe a negative.
Otherwise please do provide me of any evidence of the non existence of the invisible elephant stearing at your computer screen behind you.
Atheists, like truly yours, can provide evidence that something does not exist, I hope you can get your brain around that one before you equate us with religious people...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is impossible to prove, using science, whether or not the supernatural exists. The supernatural, if it exists, might or might not be limited to the laws of cause and effect that govern natural processes. Cause and effect is necessary for science; without it, predictions are meaningless.
I don't. You can certainly question the supernatural, debate its existence, discuss it, etc. You can't examine it using science, though: you have to use theology and philosophy (which, fortunately, includes logic).
These three assertions cannot be scientifically proven, though lots of people believe them through faith.
Pfft. Same difference. Accept christ as your saviour and try to follow the rules (if you fail, confess and get another try. but you REALLY have to try.), go to heaven. Don't accept christ, ignore the rules and don't repent your sins, go to hell. Be born too early, so you couldn't have possibly known about christ, go to hell.
After all, if it didn't matter after all, why try to follow the rules at all?
Free as in mason.
.....If I said I was perfectly reliable and accurate, would you believe me?.........
Yes, provided that there were other witnesses whom I do believe. If these testify that you have never, ever lied as far they have known you, I would believe you. In general it is better and more charitable to assume someone is telling the truth, than to automatically assume them to be liars. Most people tend to be truthful, but some are liars. I would assume you belong to the larger, truthful group. I may find out otherwise later however, and that is always sad.
All theory is gray
"The jump from micro to macro seems a difficult problem that is rarely addressed or even differentiated. When you cannot observe something, it moves outside the realm of science. When have we observed macro-evolution?"
Hah! Attempting to differentiate between micro- and macro-evolution. There is no difference; small change*lots of time = large change.
If you MUST ask the question, though, ask it right: Have we observed a species diverge into two separate breeding pools that cannot breed with one another? The answer's "yes". Over a very long period of time, one would guess this leads to a heirarchy of flora and fauna, and soo-prize, soo-prize, that's what we have.
"I might argue that some of the greatest scientists that ever lived believed strongly in God (take Newton or Einstein for example)"
Um. Einstein was a deist at best. He had the Church all over him for telling them he was misquoted. He believed in the wonderful complexity of the universe, and referred to that as 'God', in the philosophical sense.
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." - Albert Einstein (Google 'Einstein Religion'; it's on the first link there).
"My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance-but for us, not for God."
As for Newton; one can hardly blame a guy in the 16- and 1700's for being religious. There was little choice. Philosophically, you might say that's why atheism is becoming a 'problem' in modern times; lack of church control.
Still, especially in the field of biology, established religion and science are usually at odds. When this conflict occurs, I'm sorry but Science must win out if there is to be any progress.
That's not to say that Einstein's particular breed of spirituality can't come along for the ride - that's not an established religion - but the direly ignorant rules and regulations of the God of Abraham (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) should generally be ignored in favor of a simple set of ethical rules (no making clones and killing them, stuff like that).
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
As someone else said here, this isn't a very good test.
The main problem is there's a huge gulf between "God" and Santa Claus, the FSM, etc. "God", while more strictly defined in some particular religions, can be a very nebulous concept overall. Actively disbelieving the Christian god is different from actively disbelieving in any god.
Santa and the FSM are very different entities. The big problem with them is that we pretty much know that they're NOT real, because we know their history and that people made them up. The FSM in particular is not real, because it was admittedly made up by a guy a few years ago as a joke. You can even email him and talk to him about about it. No one (sane) actually believes in the FSM. Santa is similar, except it has a longer history, and for some weird reason, parents like to convince their children he exists while they're young.
Fairies are probably a slightly different matter since they're mythological, so there have been people who've believed in them, but they're on the same level as demons, unicorns, etc.
.....People are going to hell by the millions each year.....
What gives you the idea that you are GOING to hell? You're in it right now. We all are. We are all guilty criminals in God's sight, already in prison for our crimes. Did you ever tell a lie? Ever take something that was not yours? Ever got so mad at someone you would like to have killed them? Yes? I thought I was right that I was communicating with a lying thief and murderer. But guess what? The Governor has issued a pardon, signed in blood, for you, or anyone who is willing to admit their crimes and promise to at least attempt to live by the rules. You don't have to accept the pardon however. You may choose to remain in prison. Don't fault the Governor for leaving you in prison if you don't accept the pardon and its conditions. I have accepted that pardon and so I am now free. Jesus said "Therefore if the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed." Are you still in prison?
All theory is gray
.....There are so many inaccuracies in what you are saying......
I used the word "hell" in the generic sense that most people do. Of course there are nuances. The point is, none of us know what hell is really like, nor can we really imagine heaven either. We are right now closer to hell than heaven. In fact Jesus said we are all like accused prisoners awaiting judgment since we have all broken the law.
In the Bible we are told about heaven and hell in terms that human language can express. Then Jesus added: "If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things?" (John 3:12) There are no human words or concepts whereby either heaven or hell can be fully described. The concepts of relativity are part of this time-space dimension we are presently living in, yet few people fully understand relativity. Because the spiritual dimension is so far beyond our present understanding, that the only avenue left is belief, faith.
All theory is gray
I agree absolutely about assuming someone is telling the truth. I avoid dishonesty as best as I possibly can at all times and I expect as much from others. There is a world of difference however between assuming someone is being honest and assuming someone is always right.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I don't know what form of Christianity you practice, but growing up as a Baptist there absolutely was a distinction made between the normal discontent of life on earth and the suffering awaiting unbelievers in the afterlife. Life on earth is not perfect, but we are also not completely separated from God. If we were then Christians wouldn't see any point in praying, but they do. The Christian idea of hell on the other hand is a place where we are completely separated from God and the suffering of that existence is supposed to be far worse than here on Earth.
If my life right now was hell then that wouldn't be so bad frankly. The afterlife would certainly be a bit boring at times, but I could deal with that. That however isn't the idea of hell sold to me in Sunday School for most of my life.
Really though the distinction between us being in hell now or destined for hell later is not really relevant to my original point which is that an all powerful God could do a lot more to ward off our suffering then posting a warning in an ancient book which not everyone trusts. I thought there where a lot more interesting points raised in my post then the one you singled out for response.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
What we can tell you is that the oveewhelming body of scientific evidence points exactly to that conslussion.
When you can come up with a coherent, fact based, peer reviewed, theory about the origin of the species as a consequence of carbon's crystaline structure, then come back to us and let us know. We will be all ears.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
....what you see is what you get.....
I suppose that after you and I are both dead, we'll find out who was right. If I am right, then you are in big trouble. If you are right, then I'll just go out of existence also.
All theory is gray
Are you trolling me? Sigh, I guess this is more my lacking pedagogical talent. :-(
You took rape as an example -- and I pointed out that in CS Lewis' time it was legally impossible to rape your own wife, since you owned her sexuality. This lack of human rights for females was embraced as an obvious part of Absolute Morale in the west just a scant few decades ago -- and almost certainly still is by the majority of the planet's population.
I am not arguing that rape is morally right in any Absolute Moralistic way -- I am arguing that your argument for Absolute Morale as metaphysics is weak.
Then I noted that you need to read up on the relevant research on evolved behaviour.
That was my argument... my discussion afterwards wasn't that well written and I'm sorry if it was confusing.
If rape was accepted someplace in my country (not USA, obviously), the majority would see it as a moral objective to force the politicians to stop it -- my point was that in a few decades it will probably be an obvious part of the Absolute Morale to stop that kind of atrocities wherever they happen to humans. And the future population will probably judge us as bastards without compassion.
For another example, consider the outrage against child labour -- we did that in the west less than a century ago when we probably still had better economy than the areas where it is implemented now. We condemn it is as immoral and Absolutely morally wrong, since children should play and study. (While human children, of course, has worked as long as there has been humans!)
You could say that history and trends seem to show that the argument about Absolute Morale will continue to be universal -- but the content of the Absolute Morale changes time and again...
There are limits to human plasticity. When we change how humans work and interact in groups, there are bound to be mistakes... shudderI am sorry if this wasn't clear. Consider again women's role -- before the modern times a family needed a slave at home to keep everything going. (before the high child mortality went down, people had to have many children.) Also, see my argument above for how morale will change when resources increases and we can implement human rights for everyone. Interpolate that backwards (hmm.. backwards? Should be another term) to earlier times for an analogy about what we e.g. think of accepting ownership of women.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
....Really though the distinction between us being in hell now or destined for hell later is not really relevant to my original point .....
The distinctions is that the condemnation is already, but the sentence is yet to be carried out. Jesus said:
He who believes on Him is not condemned, but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. (John 3:18)
The only way out is to accept the pardon. You may have heard about the availability of the pardon in your youth, but until you actually personally accept this pardon Jesus offers, you are condemned person awaiting execution of the sentence pronounced -- death -- eternal separation from God. The conditions are faith and repentance. Accept or reject? Your choice.
All theory is gray
Doubtful, when we die. We die. Hardly a figure it out then kind of thing. Usually when you do an experiment you want to get the results *before* you are dead. In any event, there's still no reason to even suppose an afterlife of a God, so what's the point of ignore the argument and never getting an answer?
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
--- It is impossible to prove, using science, whether or not the supernatural exists. The supernatural, if it exists, might or might not be limited to the laws of cause and effect that govern natural processes. Cause and effect is necessary for science; without it, predictions are meaningless.
Sorry dude. Quantum mechanics works perfectly fine and the laws of cause and effect don't apply. There are plenty of uncaused events. We don't need causes for science we need consistent results. We don't have a cause for why radioactive particle decay (and not naive even to say it's supernatural) but we can predict with remarkable accuracy the rate of the substance's decay and how it will decay.
--- I don't. You can certainly question the supernatural, debate its existence, discuss it, etc. You can't examine it using science, though: you have to use theology and philosophy (which, fortunately, includes logic).
There are no skills found in theology or philosophy which make the undetectable, detectable. In either case you are forced to argue about something which doesn't exist and has no affect on the universe. I dare say a talk with a gardener or cooper would be massively more productive. And thankfully philosophers have other areas of interest which actually matter. Only the non-existent is immune to science.
--- These three assertions cannot be scientifically proven, though lots of people believe them through faith.
Faith is a fallacy. You can use it to conclude the contradictory things. The point of science it to discovery what our universe does and why. If something doesn't do something in our universe, only then does it avoid science.
Beyond your rather silly lines drawn in the sand, you are still missing a pretty critical point. There aren't any supernatural questions anymore. Everything people give credit to the supernatural for, has been firmly busted. This isn't anything amazing. It simply is what it is. Everything credited to the supernatural, to date, has been anything but. Start of life, existence of life, start of the universe, function of the brain, order of the planets, structure of the atom. These things are scientific. So long as you want a God that does anything, or exists... you have a problem. You could argue that your God is just extremely sneaky and has no connection to this universe, but few theists do that. Theology is nothing. The root is theo (god) and there is no god.
The idea that there are different subject areas is amusing but false. Staking claim on everything non-science doesn't help you very much when everything that interacts or exists in this universe is subjected to it. You are staking claim on nothing, and not even the empty space of nothingness (that's scientific), you are actually getting zippo... not even spacetime or artificial time.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Death is death. Can't figure anything out. You're dead. We are restricted to figuring things out while we are alive. And, as far as we can tell, religion is completely bunk.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Yeah. Not so much. I don't think being gnostic about the idea of werewolves raises odd points. Should I buy some silver bullets just in case.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
This is obviously not about what went on _during_ the War. I'm concerned here with what
happened _after_ to 1.6 million German soldiers and civilians at the hands of the "allies".
Personally I don't think you're doing yourself a favor belittling one mass murder for another.
OK, then, it's on you: prove whether or not the supernatural exists.
Are you asserting that the supernatural is undetectable? If so, prove it. Note that lack of detection is not proof of undetectability, or proof of lack of existence, or proof of lack of influence in day to day life.
On the contrary: you appear to use it to believe the three assertions above. Faith is nothing more than the axioms of a person's belief system. What do you or I believe without proof? That's faith. Here's something that I believe through faith: the scientific method is a valid way to determine how things work. It can't be proven, but I believe it anyway.
This is very close. The point of science is to discover what our universe ("nature") does and why. The supernatural, by definition, exists outside of our universe; it is not natural. That doesn't preclude it, in theory, if it exists, from affecting our universe; the concept of "supernatural" is not bound by natural laws.
You have quite a bit of faith. Investigate further and you will find that scientists studying the start of life, existence of life, start of the universe, function of the brain etc. have more questions than answers.
Others disagree. That's why they call it "natural science". If the supernatural does not exist, then the domain of natural science is all that there is, but we can't prove that scientifically one way or the other.
--- OK, then, it's on you: prove whether or not the supernatural exists.
I never claimed it existed, it is really on the one making such claims. I am simply disinclined to be agnostic about the absurd. The fact that there is no evidence for any such things and the universe exists exactly as we should find it if there wasn't a supernatural is pretty strong evidence is reason enough to discount something that absurd.
--- Are you asserting that the supernatural is undetectable? If so, prove it. Note that lack of detection is not proof of undetectability, or proof of lack of existence, or proof of lack of influence in day to day life.
If it is detectable, it is natural. Your argument is that the supernatural is somehow a different and magical realm where science cannot address it. The only way for that to be the case is if it is undetectable. If you would like to change your definition and say it can be detected... then you've reduced it to a natural detectable thing. Furthermore, everything given as an example of the supernatural has thus far, been natural in origin.
------ Faith is a fallacy.
---On the contrary: you appear to use it to believe the three assertions above. Faith is nothing more than the axioms of a person's belief system.
No faith is acceptance of beliefs without regard to evidence. Such is easily a fallacy.
--- What do you or I believe without proof? That's faith. Here's something that I believe through faith: the scientific method is a valid way to determine how things work.
Nonsense. You believe that on the grounds of evidence. Certainly the scientific method doesn't prove itself, but the results are testable. We are chatting away on some of the results right now. Science is accepted as a valid way to determine how things work, because either science is a valid way to determine how things work or modern technology is really really really really extremely lucky. Chalking such things up to faith, is simply pathetic. As if the ability to use the concepts of physics to make a cell phone (which probably isn't just luck) to the blind acceptance of gods, fairies, angels, jinn, and goblins are not in the same ballpark, much less the same league.
--- It can't be proven, but I believe it anyway.
Again, until things start falling up... science is pretty immune from most criticisms. It seems extremely desperate to think that belief that Einstein's relativity is valid (discovered via science) is roughly on the same grounds as accepting something without even a suggestion of evidence. Weak.
--- This is very close. The point of science is to discover what our universe ("nature") does and why. The supernatural, by definition, exists outside of our universe; it is not natural.
Natural things are those things which exist and interact with our universe. Limiting supernatural things in such a way is to argue that they are the set of all those things which don't exist. You cannot eat your cake and have it too. Either it exists and interacts or it doesn't exist and doesn't interact.
--- That doesn't preclude it, in theory, if it exists, from affecting our universe; the concept of "supernatural" is not bound by natural laws.
In what theory? You're just pulling this crap out of your ass. You are talking about beyond the natural, and you still want characteristics of the existing like "thing", "exists", "interaction with natural stuff". These are rather outlandish claims, which need substantiation... though that's only something which could be done for natural things.
--- You have quite a bit of faith. Investigate further and you will find that scientists studying the start of life, existence of life, start of the universe, function of the brain etc. have more questions than answers.
More questions about the minor details. The main details are pretty well understood. Furthermore, simply because they aren't understood doesn't mean they aren't natural. This sort of supernatural gaps nonsense is nothing more than an argument f
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
And if he isn't, he isn't.
Saying "I am" a bunch of times doesn't change this, that, or the other.
Unless something really important changes, I intend to keep the 10 Commandments as long as I'm able. Especially the first one.
Your water example is prime: If you need a glass of water, the same amount of vapor won't do you any good.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Religion is that shared moral language you mention. One not open for discussion, not up for change. The power structures that grow from it are much more enduring and dangerous than those built on the idea of mutual defense or shared resources. By its nature - enlightened wisdom from the creators - religion can't be matched by works of people. This is an elitist system which further solidifies the power structure.
As for the truthiness of religious people who claim they follow a faith - there are many different interpretations of this obvious divine wisdom. Many claims are contradictory so not everyone can be right. Do the 10-commandments matter, or is Jesus all you need? Was Jesus a nobody? Or a valid prophet, but over-ridden by this other guy? How many gods are there?
As for the objective truth, if thousands of Muslims are strapping bombs to themselves in the name of Islam, it's either not a religion of peace, or maybe they meant "pieces", as in bloody chunks of. The families of these people (and the bombers themselves) feel they're truly religious. Who are you to say they're wrong? Not to imply for a second that I want to pick on Islam, it's just the current joke. "Oh, don't read our holy book, let us explain it." Christianity has enough strange loopholes and contradictory passages to justify anything you'd want.
The problem is that people like you lie to the world, claiming that religion doesn't say these things and doesn't contain these messages. It's obviously false, to anyone who has ever cracked one of these books open. You may be a pacifist, and the books may contain many loving ideas, but there are also sections commanding followers to kill.
Your very freedom to believe one meaning of the books despite their implicit words is exactly what suicide bombers use - different passages, but the same selective reading.
So no, while religion is ultimately just the actions of its participants, it doesn't seem like it's had a net positive effect across the world. Much tragedy has been committed (and worse, accepted) in its name, and what good is done is usually to extend a net around those helped. Missionaries bring help, and religion, to those in need of help. But the worst thing is how bad things (ethnic cleansing, etc) are accepted by people because of religious answers. If religion wasn't black and white, neither would the guilt of the Jews be...
You claim it doesn't exist, because of lack of evidence. In the absence of evidence, science is agnostic; it knows that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.
The supernatural is defined as everything that is not bound by the laws of nature -- magic is a good word to use. If magic existed, why couldn't it be detectable?
No, faith is belief without proof. People change their "faith" every day when it disagrees with the evidence they observe. Faith describes our belief in things that have insufficient evidence, which is probably the vast majority of the things we believe (very little in our day to day lives has been scientifically proven, or proven to the extent that it would hold up in a court of law.)
My belief is consistent with my observations, but correlation with observations is not proof. Logically, we know that just because something happens 100 times in a row doesn't mean that it will happen the 101st time, but in practice humans tend to believe it anyway.
That's what "super"natural means: "Unexplainable by natural law or phenomena."
It says "The scientific method seeks to explain the complexities of nature in a replicable way." Also: "Natural sciences, which study natural phenomena, including biological life." (emphasis mine) The point is that science is about nature, not about things outside of nature, if any such things exist.
I don't claim that the supernatural exists, I claim that science can't tell whether or not the supernatural exists. If I'm wrong, please explain why (continuing to assert that the supernatural doesn't exist isn't explanation).
Theologians have personal testimony, which isn't scientific evidence, but is still evidence; they, and philosophers, also have logic and reason. Testimony, logic/reason, and domain-specific vocabulary are the tools of theologians and philosophers that I referred to a few posts back.
I don't claim that the unsolved problems in science are supernatural, but I do claim that the unsolved problems in science disprove your claim that science
If you had said "UFOs" or "Aliens", instead of obviously fictional things like FSM and Fairies, your little metaphor there might have had some legs.
"God" may not be "proven", but there's a HELL of alot more data out there to sway belief in God than there is for the other things you so chose.
An Agnostic stance on God is similar to an skeptical stance on time travel, or aliens, or faster-than-light-speed...all "way-out-there ideas" with no real factual proof, but alot of "what-ifs" and "maybes"...it isn't "fence pole sitting", it's skepticism. Or do you see everything in black and white? Every answer has a "yes" or "no" for you? No "perhaps", "maybe", and "possibly"? If so, I find that very sad. I've never really understood this unhealthy obsession atheists have with attacking agnostics, belittling them as if they're braindead retards or something. They are NOT confused about their beliefs.
Well, if it is so obviously false, may be you can crack one of them open and quote? May be you can justify how any of us, living today, are qualified to be the followers of Moses? (There is a problem: Moses is dead.) Or may be you can explain to us how can we possibly kill people who prevent Moses and his tribe from settling down in the promised land? (These people were also dead for 2.5K years.) You are the one who is lying. Seriously, take either the Bible or the Koran and try finding a single verse to justify your statement, i.e. that it commands the contemporary audience to kill.
There is a world of difference between Moses commanding his followers to kill and the book documenting it, and, on the other hand, the book commanding us to kill, do you not agree?
--- You claim it doesn't exist, because of lack of evidence.
I don't believe in it for three reasons, the first is lack of evidence, the second is absurdity, and the third is because I refuse to be agnostic about the absurd.
--- In the absence of evidence, science is agnostic; it knows that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.
Science doesn't tend to address non-claims. However, if you check back you'll find your original claim had to do with cause and effect, which science is perfectly okay without (such is the case with QM). Attempting to bend over backwards and make the supernatural as absurd as you can, such that it escapes science is to make it, ultimately moot. You are, in essence, defining it out of existence to try to make supposing it plausible while removing (as a consequence) the ability to make it relevant or able to exist within the natural universe.
---- The supernatural is defined as everything that is not bound by the laws of nature -- magic is a good word to use. If magic existed, why couldn't it be detectable?
If magic existed it would be detectable. It would also be testable. Each time I say "Llaberif", I create a fireball in my hand and it drains 200 calories from me. Magic would be quite natural, if it existed. You are simply looking at the idea of magic from the known perspective of being rather absurd and trying to force it into existence while somehow keeping it out of the natural realm. Magic would make for odd laws of physics, though they would still be the laws of physics.
--- No, faith is belief without proof. People change their "faith" every day when it disagrees with the evidence they observe.
They can certainly look at the evidence for their beliefs, but faith is belief without regard to the evidence in question.
--- Faith describes our belief in things that have insufficient evidence, which is probably the vast majority of the things we believe (very little in our day to day lives has been scientifically proven, or proven to the extent that it would hold up in a court of law.)
No. Faith quite often applies only to those things without good evidence because typically when there is real evidence we accept it on the grounds of evidence. We have evidence that computers function because we use them, we don't have evidence of ghosts and thusly they must be accepted on faith (because no evidence can exist for the non-existent). Most of the things in our day to day lives are proven because they consistently work. If they don't consistently work they are probably wrong. When we say that such things can only be accepted on faith, we are at the understanding that there can be no evidence for such a thing.
--- My belief is consistent with my observations, but correlation with observations is not proof. Logically, we know that just because something happens 100 times in a row doesn't mean that it will happen the 101st time, but in practice humans tend to believe it anyway.
You are equivocating belief with faith and proof with strong evidence. You are arguing that since your wireless telephone has only worked the first 100 times you tried it, that it is a belief completely devoid of evidence that it will work the 101st time. If a certain theory predicts something, and after 100 tries nothing has falsified the theory... there might be some merit to the idea. That's the way science works. What ever fails to fail... is science.
--- That's what "super"natural means: "Unexplainable by natural law or phenomena."
Would you argue that a photon splitting into an electron and positron is supernatural? There is no cause and effect at work, and we can naturally describe a causeless event. Then if the supernatural existed and had a naturalistic effect we could describe this effect and thusly make such a thing natural... by definition.
--- It says "The scientific method seeks to explain the complexities of nature in a replicable way." Also: "Natural sciences, which study natural phenomena, including biological life
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Exodus 22:18 - in any English version you'll find, the bible commands followers to kill people of other faiths.
Islam is easier. If you're honest you'll admit that in fact there are many calls for ethnic cleansing and religious war.
Go back and reply to my message again, seriously, without bringing up another strawman. There are many issues in it that you left untouched.
Calling faith stupid doesn't make it true.
If you read my post again, you might notice I didn't.
You make a claim about the world -- there exists an Absolute moral that should be followed by all humans -- without being able to give any reasoned support or even examples. Except belief.
To make claims about how the world is made without any reasons (and with thousands of competing theories at least as likely) is very similar to religion.
Again. You are arguing against Catholic dogma -- and you supported your own position with a non-representative quote... that breaks my moral.
The support for Hell in early Xianity is well documented by researchers (no English references but here are two WikiPedia pages).
Some churches don't want their god to be much worse than Hitler raised to Stalin, so I must applaud their humanity -- and they also do a service by entertaining me with Absolute Definitions from god about how the world is (Morals, Hell, etc) which are rewritten completely every second century... I think the relevant expression among non-computer people is "LOL".
It is also fun to read e.g. arguments that consistent descriptions of the afterlife in the New Testament etc are just parables without descriptions of what the different parts in the story are shown to be in the "real world". (The bible authors invented some other world with a Hell -- and wrote morally uplifting stories about that world without mentioning that little fact and assuming everyone would guess that circumstance?!)
I'm sorry, but that was just naive ("good for the species" argument?!) Read up on the subject instead.
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You are doing a straw man. I was obviously not discussing the nature of religion, I was claiming that "To make [extreme claims without any basis in proof or reason -- when there are many competing theories and no reason any of them should be true] is very similar to religion".
And re "nature" -- I could not care less what religious people see as the most important in their political/religious beliefs (-: symbolic cannibalism? No more details, please... :-).
I am beginning to be certain that you have been trolling me.Again -- that contradicts the position of most Xian churches since very early years. You can continue to cherry pick quotes all you want, but that is well documented.
You didn't quote -- "Read up on the subject instead.", since you seemed really confused -- and you earlier admitted to not know the subject. I only discussed efficiency because you wrote "efficient stratagy for survival for humanity" (which looks like pre-1960s "good for the species"-thinking.)
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Just an obvious note re the status of support for your theories re religion -- i.e. lots of contradicting theories that make claims about reality without support outside of people's heads.
I am certain that religious people see something else as the "nature" of their theory of the world's reason to exist. I don't really care any more about that than philosophical implications for the flogiston theory. (-: I won't read books about string theory until it is testable either. :-)
Gud i Helvete! (Anachronistic Swedish curse from the west coast, "God in Hell". A milder version is "Gud i London").
It seems you are right! Catholicism has rewritten.. sorry, reinterpreted ... the basic facts about their religion's afterlife that they were given by divine inspiration! After a couple of thousands of years!!
This is really funny. I am quite old, so I read up on the subject more than a decade ago in books that were older. The Catholic encyclopedia is quite old, so it has not been updated to show the new reality yet!! More modern references show the less sadistic version. (-: I didn't even read the content on Wikipedia, so sure was I... :-)
I thought the Catholics if anyone would stay with integrity above details like their religion making Hitler look good... :-) Let me guess, in a decade the muslims will reinterpret their Hell?? He he he... I almost fell off the chair laughing.
For the third time -- just read up on the subject instead of arguing about things you don't have even a popular background in. Partly because I'm a bad pedagogue and don't have much time now -- and partly because Dawkins really got "Selfish gene" right (read the notes in the 2nd ed, they are as good as the book itself).
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As far as I'm concerned, Christianity has actually harmed morality. Many Christians believe that you are saved not by works, but by faith. So whether or not you "walk with God" depends not on whether or not you help the poor, show kindness, or are decent, but purely on whether you have accepted Jesus as your savior.
Well, this bit about saved by faith not works was never said by Jesus, but by Paul, and if you read carefully all the epistles where Paul brings this up, he is talking about the specific problem where Jews were telling gentile converts they must follow the law of Moses, which had things like stoning adulters, stoning people who broke the Sabath, etc., all things Jesus repudiated by his actions and teachings.
What Paul is really saying in the epistles is, it is not by works based on law of Moses you are saved, but by faith in God's promise of the messiah, given by Moses and the prophets, and as Moses said, when the prophet (messiah) comes, do everything he tells you.
What Martin Luther and the churches have done is twist this around, and what they are saying is one is not saved by doing the works Jesus said to do, but by faith in Jesus. Something Paul never said or meant, and something which ultimately makes no sense. Its like being stuck in the Jungles of Nam, surrounded by Viet Cong and outnumbered ten to one. But fortunately, you have the greatest soldier of them all, Rambo, to lead out of this mess. But you need to rally the troops to follow him in order to escape from this mess. So you have one soldier going around saying to the men, do whatever Rambo tells you (his works), and another going around saying, we will not be saved by obeying the orders (doing the works) Rambo tell us to do, but by faith in Rambo. Its nonsense.
Jesus never said this distortion of Paul, and in fact says the opposite. In Matthew 25, 31-48, he welcomes into his kingdom those who have helped the sick, fed the poor, and clothed the naked, and he condemns the hypocrites who praised his name in synogues but did none of this.
To me the hypocrites he condemns sums up many evangelicals and other Christians.
Most Christians do not follow Christ. If you knew anything about Christ's teachings, you would realize this. These evangelicals who are big Bush supportors and all in favor spending money on war and giveing big tax breaks to the rich, but are opposed to spending anything on aid to the poor are no more Christian and no more follow Christ then some hard core nazi the went to church every Sunday during WW II, then went out and killed people the rest of the week.
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He he, you use solipsism to prove existence of god?! :-) That was ... new. Now, how can you use solipsism to prove the existence of just the hanging god Oden -- and not any of the other thousand theories about existence which people are certain of? (Buddha, allah, etc?)
For the fourth time... Not only do you sound naive, you didn't understand when I used the terms "game theory", "evolution", "animal behaviour" as discussed in the uniquely popular treatment of Williams' research -- the "Selfish Gene". Check e.g. Wikipedia for a too shallow overview of the interesting game theory. (You claim to live where it would take weeks to get one of the best selling books about science in all of history which still is in print... I won't call you a liar but note that I envy you -- is it cold in Antarctica this time of the year?)
Here I call you straight up dishonest. The full quote re Catharinus is below (my emphasis). That teaching is something
In short, refusing the physical existence of fire was not
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So, you are dismissing all Hinduism.
absolutely not...read again. Refusing to opine is not rejection.
you come to sound conclusions about the import of religions based on your own **lack** of information. This is generally a logical fallacy called "the argument from ignorance" and your argument of "I've never heard of it so it can't be important" falls squarely into it.
Again, I'm not rejecting Hinduism as valid, or invalid. I acknowledge my ignorance of it and move on. I think you are, like most people, assuming that by refusing to take a side on the existence of a higher power I am in fact taking the atheists view. I am neither theistic, nor atheistic. I believe the concept of a higher power is unverifiable (in most cases by definition).
While it may be pragmatic to evaluate religions on their relative "good" or "harm" to society you leave open the metrics for such an evaluation.
Well, there's a good reason for that. The meaning of "good" and "harm" are personal and deeply complex. I have my opinion and you have yours. we aren't discussing that. I'm not attempting to convince you that religion X is good or does harm. That's too simple in any case...*people* act, people do good, people do harm. The religion can only be evaluated based on the characteristics of the people it attracts/develops.
You especially ignore the harm caused to society by the perpetuation of non-reason over reason.
My answer to this always gets people riled up, but since you brought it up: Can you prove a net harm over the course of human history? Can you reason out what human society might have become if the notion of a higher power had never occurred to us? I can't. It is *way* too entwined in our nature. Now, I might be convinced that we can at some point learn to do without it. But even that requires that we understand the reasons for its prevelance. Religion provides something that is nearly universally sought in groups of humans. Until you can identify and replace that you can't reasonably say that "perpetuation of non-reason" is, in fact, a negative trait. Human society is like any ecosystem. Elimination of any subset of the system can have unexpected consequences.
While your ignorance is understandable, it shows the failure of your system of evaluating religious systems...
I saved this till last since I think it is the most imporant thing. You are making a subtle assumption about my beliefs. Why do you believe that I should be responsible for evaluating every religious system under heaven? The question that no one seems to ask is whether this whole discussion is significant. If the question of a higher power is unprovable why do we ask it? There are plenty of questions whose answers are unknown yet provable with effort. Why then do we expend *vast* amounts of effort arguing the sides of an unprovable question.
1. You argue philosophy as a basis for your world view -- and that was the best you can do as support?! :-(
2. You strangely didn't comment on: Now, how can you use solipsism to prove the existence of just the hanging god Oden -- and not any of the other thousand theories about existence which people are certain of? (Buddha, allah, etc?)
I realize that I attack something which is as central to you as anything in your personality, but please... at least use a good argument for explaining why you should assume that there is a god and it has to be a xian one (if there are any good arguments, which I doubt), that was sad.
As I wrote in my comment, too shallow overview of the interesting game theory. I seriously doubt that you are arguing honestly here. But maybe you just do mistakes on this point since you don't know about Williams' research (see e.g. this, it is still not comprehensive. Read up on different genetic interests for e.g. children and parents, between the sexes, etc.).
AGAIN: You are certain about the existence of an Absolute Moral -- while obviously not even having learned about the relevant research. It seems you are arguing just to bury that in lots of text.
I argued for Hell-as-torture and it is very well supported by the Catholic Encyc (as I quoted). The exact implementation of Hell's torture is irrelevant (physical or not, the fire seems to be pain according to all sources). That is my position --
Everything you read an argument for/against is controversial?! :-) (Please note that I wrote about when they argued for the Xian god as a sun god...)
Lazarus and the rich man: Also irrelevant, since that doesn't contradict torture.
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For the third time: You haven't answered when I wrote: Now, how can you use solipsism to prove the existence of just the hanging god Oden -- and not any of the other thousand theories about existence which people are certain of? (Buddha, allah, etc?)
(I'm still laughing at your argument for god's existence, btw... :-)
At last you accept that evolutionary stable strategies etc are new for you. They are best described in Selfish Gene, of all sources I've seen. This is a step up -- you refused repeatedly to believe that any of this could be new. (The insults because I wouldn't find alternative sources for you than one of the best sellers of all time in popular science books weren't exactly impressive...)
You also missed commenting on: AGAIN: You are certain about the existence of an Absolute Moral -- while obviously not even having learned about the relevant research. It seems you are arguing just to bury that in lots of text.
The next step is reading quite a bit more. Then you'll realize that it is immoral to argue for a strategy (moral) that can never work in a given society and e.g. will degenerate into clan feuds. Which quite neatly kneecaps arguments for an Absolute Moral. (Which was why I brought it up from the beginning.)
You argued against that the theory of torture in Hell wasn't a central part of Xianity, despite central bible quotes. By misusing quotes that seemed to be arguing if Hell's torture came from a physical fire or not. Or if the tortured souls were visible from Heaven or not.
This description of the argument don't only do a straw man argument not only on my position -- but on your own!!
So you are arguing it is equal to torture people for eternity if they say they might like it once? That was an interesting Absolute Moral you have! Makes Hitler look like a humanist.
And also... ah, why bother. That "argument" must be trolling.
I quoted old catholic dogma about Hell's existence and torture -- I didn't embrace that.
My conclusion is that either the Hell with fire exists (which makes god much worse than Stalin and other beginners) or the churches rewrite thousands years old dogma so they don't have to defend their god as the ultimate torturing bastard (which makes xianity just a theory that is rewritten for social reasons, not an Absolute Truth).
He he, I admitted that it seems that even the catholics have rewritten their millenia old absolute truths(!!). I doubt you can admit being wrong in this subject, because as a religious person you identify these opinions as a central part of your personality.
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"The jump from micro to macro seems a difficult problem that is rarely addressed or even differentiated. When you cannot observe something, it moves outside the realm of science. When have we observed macro-evolution?"
Hah! Attempting to differentiate between micro- and macro-evolution. There is no difference; small change*lots of time = large change.
Umm, no. First off, micro-evolution requires no real changes in DNA. It is just genetics. The strong survive to breed and pass on those traits to their offspring. Nothing more. Macro-evolution requires that new DNA be "created" somehow, so that what was animal X is now animal Y. Also, especially in biology, the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. Take the eye for instance. It would be pretty useless unless it was fully developed as it is now. Why, following the guides for evolution, would the small change that started the evolution of the eye continue, since it would be a pretty useless trait?
If you MUST ask the question, though, ask it right: Have we observed a species diverge into two separate breeding pools that cannot breed with one another? The answer's "yes".
Oh really? Care to provide an example? But let's be careful with definitions here. Take domesticated dogs for instance. There are breeds of dogs that cannot breed with each other. Yet that does not make them not all dogs. What I'm looking for would be more like from a dog you eventually get a split such that you get dogs from one line and cats from another. Got any examples like that?
Over a very long period of time, one would guess this leads to a heirarchy of flora and fauna, and soo-prize, soo-prize, that's what we have.
I'm not sure what your point is here, but if you are arguing that the different forms of life that we see is evidence of evolution, that's ridiculous. I can easily explain the different forms of life by saying that God created it. It has no real significance for either argument. Why is evolution a more likely (or even likely, for that matter) explanation for the existence of life?
"I might argue that some of the greatest scientists that ever lived believed strongly in God (take Newton or Einstein for example)"
Um. Einstein was a deist at best. He had the Church all over him for telling them he was misquoted. He believed in the wonderful complexity of the universe, and referred to that as 'God', in the philosophical sense.
I didn't say Einstein was a Christian, just that he believed in God. I am certainly not old enough to have even possibly known him personally, so I cannot say for certain what he did or did not believe. From the quotes that I found, it seemed he had some belief in some sort of God. That was my point.
As for Newton; one can hardly blame a guy in the 16- and 1700's for being religious. There was little choice. Philosophically, you might say that's why atheism is becoming a 'problem' in modern times; lack of church control.
Oh, so there were no atheists back in the 16- and 1700s, huh? There is always a choice of what you believe. You might not get to believe it for long in your current state (alive), depending on where and when you lived, but you always have a choice.
Still, especially in the field of biology, established religion and science are usually at odds. When this conflict occurs, I'm sorry but Science must win out if there is to be any progress.
Who is to say that "science" is right and "religion" is wrong? And why are they usually at odds? Most of the time they are at odds because the "scientists" don't like God so they try and look for ways around having God. That involves a lot of explaining and hand-waving (a lot of cumulative random chance) to get where we are. On the other hand, God explains things quite elegantly.
Besides, I could argue that origins (how did life begin) is not a topic for science. Is it observable? Testable?