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Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong
rollcall writes "'Galileo Was Wrong' is an inaugural conference to discuss the 'detailed and comprehensive treatment of the scientific evidence supporting Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe.' The geocentrists argue that 'Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the [Catholic] Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.' I, like many of you, am scratching my head wondering how people still think this way. Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
I hope there is live blogging from the conference.
Committee meets to discuss how light is actually extreme dark.
My mom says I'm the center of the universe.... or is that just the basement?
...even they know the earth goes round the sun.
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
If your mechanic thinks that "The Little Mermaid" was a Shakespearean drama, that really doesn't affect his ability to fix your car. Same with this.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans
In other news, 17% of Americans were found to exhibit a sense of humor when called by pollsters while most of the rest just get upset.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Now if you take the Bible as the literal truth, as so many do, this is to be expected.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
In the rest frame of the Earth the entire universe revolves around it.
Why do the websites of lunatics always seem to be based on the same template from some horribly awful site made for Mosaic in 1995? Does crazy dictate design? Or does each wackjob just copy the code from the previous wackjob? Or maybe these sites are all made by the same escapee from the insane asylum? Maybe they are still in the asylum, and the computer in there is running Windows 3 on a dialup modem?
I thought Galileo Darwin had conclusively proved that the Earth evolves around the sun?
90% of the world believes in God(s), and there's nothing but imaginary evidence for that, too.
But by all means mock the fringe dimwits who don't actually negatively impact society.
A compendium of bible quotes loosly supporting this:
http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/geocentric.shtml
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Let's see... 18% of Americans believe that the Earth is the center of the universe? For real?
No shit.
I now understand a little more about the stalwarts that support Obama no matter what.
Works just as well this way, too. :p
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
At the risk of starting a shitstorm, see the people who believe the Holocaust never happened. If an idea exists, it's likely some entity believes in it and will find/shape evidence to support it.
Pick a lagrange point between the sun and the earth as the center of the universe so that neither one moves.
There's no preferred point of reference, so you could just as well say that the Sun revolves around the Earth as vice versa. It's not like the Sun is a fixed immovable point around which everything revolves either, at least once you get beyond the solar system. Nor is there any other single fixed immovable point. You can pick any fixed immovable point you like and construct a model to match it. (The big problem with a geocentric model is retrograde motion--that is, the planets appear to go backwards from time to time.) The thing is that it's a lot simpler to look at it from the point of view that that the Earth goes around the Sun--both conceptually and mathematically, which is why astronomers do so when they are looking at the solar system. But it is possible to construct a description of the universe in which the opposite is true that is consistent, just damned inconvenient and not very useful.
So, in that limited since, Aristotle was as right as Galileo. Galileo just happens to be more useful.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Look, these guys know what they're talking about. They have a book published by Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, a non-profit corporation. Since it's a non-profit you know they're not out to make a quick buck.
And the authors both have a Ph.D. The primary author, Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D. holds advanced degrees in Theology and Religious Studies. He has authored ten books including a five volume compendium on the bible. How can you argue with that? If this man says the Earth is the center of the universe, I for one will take him seriously!
In his book Galileo Was Wrong The Church Was Right he authored the entire book except chapter 10. Chapter 10 was written by Robert J. Bennet, Ph.D. Dr. Bennet has a doctorate in General Relativity from Stevens Institute of Technology. He provides a detailed, technical and mathematical explanation of the various arguments for Geocentrism.
With these credentials I am shocked you could so boldly proclaim they have made an error.
The Earth is pretty much at the center of the observable universe...
the good news is that the dinosaurs are fine, and not extinct; they now inhabit the shell of the topmost Turtle.
The summary should read:
Catholic] Church's historical position on the immobility of the Earth was not only scientifically supportable, but it was the most stable model of the universe
The Roman Catholic Church long ago accepted our current scientific understanding of the organization of celestial bodies.
Oh, and evolution through natural selection as well.
And one of its greatest thinkers believed that reason and faith were both equally valid ways to truth and not in conflict at all.
These nuts are in no way affiliated with official Roman Catholic Church positions. So let's just halt the Church bashing before we begin, ok?
I've always been curious about how these polls that show that n% of the population believe geocentrism to be fact are conducted, but not curious enough to actually read up on them.
Do they ask, "do you think the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa?" -- implying a quick, pragmatic exposition of the subjects understanding of the matter.
Or, do they ask, "do you believe that the sun revolves around the earth?" -- implying that the subject has considered both choices and has come to some conclusion for himself?
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if someone has a day-to-day mental model that states that the sun "comes up in the morning" and "goes down at night". I do think it's a problem if ~1/5 of all Americans have spent some amount of time reasoning about both models and have some belief that geocentrism is fact.
Nearly every early elementary school classroom I've been in has some form of the typical solar system diagram (with the sun at the center), I'd be really surprised if ~1/5 of all students coming out of that experience would veto that model and "believe" that the Earth is at the center of the universe. I hope I'm not wrong...
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
What does the claim that 17% of the population believe in a geocentric earth mean? Even assuming that there's no one in that population that is simply saying that for kicks, it seems probable that a large part are simply answering that way because they don't know anything either way and are just guessing. At some level that's not as bad as having people who actively believe in geocentrism. But at another level, that means that one should expect that around 34% are really ignorant and have of them just got lucky when asked. That's not good. However, I suspect that some of these answers really are just people messing with the polsters or not bothering to thing.
But one thing to note is that many of the geocentrists are religious. Not only is geocentrism common among Christians but there's a substantial fraction of ultra-Orthodox (charedi) Jews who are affirmatively geocentrist. This is especially common among the chabad chassidim who are often geocentrists because their guru, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, made pro-geocentrist comments and because they want to preserve the word of Maimonides as inerrant (of course some of these are the same sort of people who refuse kidney transplants because the Talmud says that one kidney is the seat of your good instincts and the other is the seat of your bad instincts. So we're not talking about highly enlightened individuals). There are however, some very disturbing studies by Alexander Nussbaum showing that even among modern Orthodox Jews, anti-science views are disturbingly common. See for example http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n03_orthodox_judaism_and_evolution.html .
However, one thing to note is that although the conference in question in the top post is Catholic, affirmative geocentrism is not nearly as uncommon among evangelical Protestants as one would hope. Indeed, it is common enough that Answers in Genesis, one of the world's largest young earth creatonist ministries, feels a need to have essays that talk about why Christians don't need to be geocentrists. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/geocentrism.asp . Incidentally, There's some evidence that anti-Copernican sentiment actually started in Protestants and only spread to Catholics a few years later. Thomas Kuhn discusses this in his excellent book "The Copernican Revolution" although my understanding is that more modern historians disagree with him on this point and many don't think that there is a strong case for anti-Copernicanism as an originally Protestant ideology.
Finally, note that there are still some flat-earthers out there although they are very rare. They aren't as uncommon in the Islamic world. See for example this segment on Iraqi TV http://haha.nu/interesting/iraqi-tv-debate-is-the-earth-flat/ . In the West there is still some flat-Earthism but it is often more conspiratorial than religious in nature. See http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/ although some of the people there are trolls, some are quite sincere.
I suspect that 18% are just incredibly daft, and can be led into answering a question such that they appear to support geocentrism.
"Do you think the Earth is the center of the universe?"
"Uh, yes?"
"Might the Sun not be center of the universe?"
"Uh, oh yeah, sure, yes."
If you gave me a survey with questions like that, I'd claim to be a Republican and tell them I thought Obama was a kenyan muslim who worshiped Stalin and wanted to make America a sharia-communist country. Especially if they conducted it over the phone and irritated me. What people believe and what they claim on surveys are entirely different things.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Damn Jews hoarding all the modpoints.
No, it's just a problem with approximation. They believe that the Earth is the center of the universe due to small errors in the measurements. I am actually standing on the Earth, so it's an easy mistake to make - they're not off by much.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Their error, as I understand it, is they imagine the universe entirely in terms of geometry, without trying to understand dynamics. How do they account for the path a satellite in a polar orbit takes over the earth?
You do realize that the widely accepted cosmological theory for the creation of the universe, the big bang, was introduced by a Roman Catholic priest?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
Also the Vatican operates an observatory and does real research:
They study meteorites to "give us insights into how these samples were formed more than *4.5 billion* years ago when the planets themselves were being formed." Did you note that number rather? Not the 6,000 or so you were expecting is it.
While looking for dark matter they were involved in the discovery of two extrasolar planets.
They have helped explain perceived anomalies as background stars appearing in a sparse portion of a nebula, unrelated to the structure of the nebula.
They are researching why an unexpected amount of UV radiation is emanating from some young active stars.
They are helping to map out the geography of some galaxies and identify regions of star formation.
etc...
http://vaticanobservatory.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=38&Itemid=145
Have you ever gone door to door in a rural environment and met people? Seriously, you select your friends, your friends select you, your family members were raised by the same people, there's a lot of bias going on.
So the death camps with Zyklon B showers, tons of discarded shoes and clothes, with photos of inmates and a wealth of other things left there, is not objective enough for you? You can go and see them for yourself, you know. Arbeit macht frei and all that.
I surely hope we don't equate the holocaust to the earth position because then it would become a matter of point of view. IMHO geometrically speaking you probably can take the earth as fixed and the universe revolving around it, and all the phenomenons like wind, coriolis acceleration and stuff should hold anyway. Maybe the centrifugal force applied on bodies on the surface would prove if we are rotating or not but that would require knowing the mass of the earth. I guess our current estimate is derived from g hypothesizing a rotation ;D
Arguing against a fixed earth is like arguing against solipsism. The only weak argument is about asymmetry. Why i imagine other bodies similar to mine? or back to the earth, why does the other planet revolve around a star, why there is the milky way instead of a more pleasing distribution of stars.....
As for the meaning of the earth as the center of the universe or man as the objective of creation, I think that if you proclaim yourself a believer then from your POV science just weeds out wrong interpretations of the scriptures, so I don't see the point of going against science. Try to learn what the god you believe as existing meant with the phrases he inspired people to write. I don't think the apostles insisted that a temple was literally rebuilt in three days, no?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
But isn't 'yes' the correct answer anyway? Or at least the centre of the visible universe since you can only see as far as light could travel since the Big Bang and that distance is the same in all directions from whatever point you happen to be observing from...
What the crazies are pushing and deliberately confusing the truth with is that everything in the universe orbits the earth which is just wako...
[The Universe] has gone offline.
[quote]I thought Obama was a kenyan muslim...[/quote]
No, he's a "Keynesian muslim."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I was always reminded of this ridiculous stand by Sherlock when I watched the Married with Children episode where Kelly shows to be doing this exact thing: she was able to hold a number of things in her head perfectly in a FIFO queue but only that number of things and if she learned anything new at all, she would lose the last thing from the queue. So with this ability she was in a contest and would have won if the last useless thing that was thrown at her didn't push out the fact she had in her head that it was her father, who won 4 touchdowns in a single football game at school, the look on Al's face was priceless both, when he heard the question and was sure she'd be able to answer and then, when she lost.
So the question is of-course this: was Sherlock a gorgeous blond girl from Chicago?
You can't handle the truth.
Their stupidity could be important for the survival of the species. It looks a lot like civilization could fail in the next 50 years, thanks in part to the things science brought us (oil, pollution, habitat destruction, etc), and if so, we'll need yahoos like these to say "see?! science failed us!!" to rally the remaining survivors behind a religion that's all about suffering and having tons of kids in order to repopulate the species. Catholicism was pretty handy as a bootstrap religion.
Next up on Slashdot 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons hate being asked stupid questions in surveys.
that religion is on its last legs. First you had religion - it ruled all. Then science came (post christianity),
I think you may be mistaken, science has been around for a lot longer than Christianity... and you will find with a little research many scientists (including Darwin) who claimed to be Christian.
Most of modern science is the result of hundreds of years of research by people who were religious to some extent.
Yes, because people had less of an understanding back in the day of how stuff actually works. Being religious was also compulsory in those days. Bach, one of my favorite composers, glorified god in his music while he was fooling around with maidens in wine cellars and beating up his musicians in street fights.
Anyway, back to your point. Religion is stifling "modern science" rather than advancing it forward. We all know what happened to Persia after Islam, and about Europe in the dark ages, etc. I think it's safe to say that the world as a whole would be much more advanced if magical thinking was abolished somewhere in its history.
That is simply not true.
Of course, religion did play a big part throughout history, and it even helped human kind advance a very long time ago. But saying that religion helped man get organized, leave by a certain set of rules, and develop the wheel millions of years ago is one thing, and saying that it still does that today is just plain stupid. Religion has been nothing but our biggest problem for at least 3000 years.
Remember, even in the golden days of Greece, religion was already trying to murder science.
And, really, why am I supposed to treat religion different from other mental diseases?
You wouldn't dare take seriously a scientists that was also an astrologist, or one that claimed aliens visited him daily ... then why do we accept those that believe in that creepy guy in the sky? It's certainly just as crazy as all those guys that keep their head wrapped in tinfoil to prevent the government from controlling their minds, and we love to lock those away at mental institutions. Instead, we grant tax exceptions to those that believe in the crazy guy in the sky. But beware, the rule of thumb is: if your guy in the sky is green and lives in a starship, you get locked away. If your guy in the sky has a badass beard and a jewish son, you get a tax exception. Just remember that, it might come in handy if you ever choose to become schizophrenic.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
But saying that religion helped man get organized, leave by a certain set of rules, and develop the wheel millions of years ago is one thing, and saying that it still does that today is just plain stupid.
Actually, they're both equally stupid, which is why I didn't say either of those things. RTFP.
You wouldn't dare take seriously a scientists that was also an astrologist, or one that claimed aliens visited him daily
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies
And, really, why am I supposed to treat religion different from other mental diseases?
Because it is not.
My mother is very religious. She attends mass every Sunday, she's a roman catholic so she believes in God, Jesus, Virgin Mary, the apostles and the saints. Yet she doesn't believe the Sun goes around the Earth, or that the Earth is the center of the Universe, or that we actually came from Adam and Eve. She's a smart, balanced, and certainly not mental diseased person. I think what you should consider a mental disease is fanaticism. Over anything. Specially religion. That's what really distortion reality for some.
How is believing in two inconsistent theories of the universe view not the sign of a mental illness?
If you believe that somehow your deity is not affected by the laws of formal logic, but simultaneously believe in science, which is based on the faith (for it is faith) that underlying all things is a universal set of rules which can be expressed using math, you are believing things which cannot simultaneously be. You are then forced to train yourself in doublethink -- and people do that: they terrify me. Basically forcing yourself to be schizophrenic is not a sane attitude. That is "being religious".
Now some are more honest, they just don't want to think about it, and will become angry when pointed out that their view of the Universe is absurd. This is infuriating, but not the sign of mental imbalance. These people may think of themselves as religious, but they will probably become either non-believers or religious depending on what people around them pretend to think.
Fanaticism, to me, is not a mental illness. It is just people who have picked the religious view of the Universe and stuck with it. They are logical and consistent. This is why religion is in essence dangerous: because if you are just religious, you are trained in doublethink, and if you are really consistent, your are a fanatic.
Do you really expect me to do coordinate substitution in my head while stuck to a spinning ball of rock hurling through space around a gigantic thermonuclear reaction?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Galileo was wrong. This is not in dispute. To whit: Einstein was right.
Every point of the universe is the center of the universe.
Actually, that's not quite what Einstein's theories said. They said that every point in any inertial frame is equivalent to any other (and could thus be considered a "center of the universe".
In Einsteinian terms, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, because it's not an inertial frame. It's moving in an accelerated frame in its orbit around a much heavier object (the sun). Therefore, it's not a candidate for centerhood. At the time of Galileo, the sun could have been considered an inertial frame, and therefore eligible as a center of the universe. We now know that the sun is also orbiting the galaxy, but in Galileo's time, that orbit couldn't have been measured, even if they'd known what the Milky Way is. So, to within the precision of their instruments and observation powers, the sun would have appeared to be stationary relative to the stars, and would have worked as a center of the universe.
Actually, astronomers have recently measured a slight acceleration of the Milky Way (though I've forgotten its direction). So, if your instruments are good enough, our galaxy isn't quite in an inertial frame, either, and thus is ineligible for "center of the universe" status. But not very many of us have instruments that good, so for everyday purposes we can treat the galaxy as the center of everything.
OTOH, we might note that shipping companies (including airlines) routinely treat the Earth as stationary in space, and for their purposes, this is good enough. Once we establish interplanetary trading, however, it won't be good enough, and shipping operations will have to change to a model in which the solar system is stationary while everything in it is moving in some sort of orbit.
(It turns out that this includes the sun. The barycenter of the solar system is slightly outside the sun, at the common center of mass of the sun and Jupiter. Strictly speaking, the sun is in a close orbit around this barycenter, and can't be treated as stationary relative to the rest of the solar system. Jupiter is slightly too big, and accelerates the Sun measurably. However, Galileo probably couldn't have measured this effect.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If we're picking our axioms, then why can't we choose to believe in a universe which operates on a universal set of rules unless its workings are altered on a case-by-case basis by some being existing outside of those rules? That would sort out the inconsistency - you can get general rules like gravity, electromagnetism etc. but also leave room for "acts of god" which may not be subject to such rules.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Sorry, that is not right.
You have described the Specific Theory of Relativity accurately. However, the General Theory of Relativity expands the equivalency to any point in any reference frame, hence the "General".
You mean the dark ages where fear of heresy stifled secular innovation, or the dark ages where the core of hellenic, roman and islamic learning was preserver in monasteries while the kernels of the renaissance and the core of modern thinking and the scientific method was born between the rabbinical, islamic and christian scholars of the convivencia,?
By your tone, I'm not so sure 'we all know what happened to Europe in the dark ages' - one thing I know is that the foundations of *non-magical thinking* were preserved by the clerical population, not the secular one. Any reasoned study of the Inquisition (the catholic institution, not the spanish one under secular authorities) would be a good exposition of how the simplistic is the idea that removing religious authority out of the picture would suddenly make intellectual advancement flourish.
I say this not as a 'believer' but as someone who divorced himself from a religious tradition for very similar naive intellectual pride - only to rediscover later that much of the scientific and philosophical heritage that I so prized was due to the intellectual traditions that were preserved, cultivated and brought unto the world by brilliant scholars from religious traditions and dispositions.
You can disagree with them all you want (for what's it's worth, I do), but if you feel "it's safe to say the world as a whole would be more advanced" if they had not been there, I'd have to say you have a poor understanding of history.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Maybe I'm criticizing where I need not to, so if this wasn't your in-built bias leaking through, and I just read you the wrong way... my apologies.
That aside:
hey asshole! Nice biases there!
You can safely assume that most truly rural folks -- you know, the farmers who depend on accurate predictions governing the sun and weather -- know a heck of a lot more about what the sun and earth do relative to each other than their urbanite counterparts -- who's knowledge of the cosmos is typically limited to how fashionably their scarves revolve around their fashionably-stubbled necks.
You will find stupid people wherever you find failure. Not just in rural places, not just in urban places, not attached to any race or age or nationality or anything else.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Very good. Thank you.
More people should take a longer and more precise view of history, such as yours.People should realize that religion and science are two sides of the same nature, our inquisitive mind, which evolved along with millions of neocortical columns relatively quickly such that we became able to ask such questions as "What the fuck is that?" and "Why am I here?" The same impulse that drives science drives religion . That doesn't make science and religion equivalent as modes of explanation, but it does connect them.
Religion may seem like a silly vestige of prehistorical and ancient mythologizing. It may seem like a leftover piece of our brains that we should have learned to think around by now. But science is no less hardwired into our brains than religion. It's all about explaining experience. Some of us do it more with our left hemisphere than our right hemisphere, and situations where it's not lateralized so neatly blur the line between complete and incomplete explanations even more.
Religion is not stifling science. Idiots are. It just so happens that some (maybe even many) of them happen to also be religious.
Actually, no. I don't think even the idiots are because science is still advancing faster than they can attack it. I mean, more than 80% of people know better. Assertions to the contrary aside, I am not of the belief that we need to worry about the remaining ones.
Except that large majorities of people are wrong about universal facts all the freaking time. Sheer numbers don't make a valid source of experimental validity, unless their claims are based in evidence. Mass faith is still faith. Nothing against it, but atheism doesn't stop being rational just because most people aren't atheists.
You do remember that this article started with a discussion of geocentrism, right?
I don't think it's as inconsistant or 'scary' as you think.
I believe in God, and I also believe in his work (science). My experiences and my heart have lead me to my beliefs. When I reflect on what's important in my life, I don't really pay much attention to things I can measure or quantify with numbers - science has it's place, but science itself doesn't even attempt to make any guess as to how 'science' came to be in the first place.
That's not to say I don't enjoy looking at the numbers we do have - I think God would definitely like us exploring how the universe works; physics has always been a passion of mine. But I've felt God's presence many times, and feel I have a close relationship. You may call me schizophrenic for that - and I can understand that, if you are only considering what you can measure. To me, that sounds a little incomplete - considering the nature of human life.
People just don't like to look inward very much - drawing the conclusion that what we can measure is somehow enough evidence to make staments about things we cannot measure.
Maybe I have a chemical imbalance in my brain that is causing me to feel connected to God. Maybe everyone who believes in God has this same imbalance. Or maybe the imbalance is found in non-believers?
Disclaimer:I do believe 'religion' is the cause of untold amounts of suffering. Religion is not God - religion is a (mostly)corrupt human ordeal.
You have no idea what religion actually is. You are tarring every people of a faith with the wacko brush. My wife is a religious catholic biochemist, involved in nervous system basic research. She doesn't doublethink. What you are confused about is that she doesn't treat the bible as a literal history, but as a book to be inspired by. She looks for love and comfort in Jesus, not astronomy. Why can you read a sci-fi history and enjoy its message, but she can't read her book and do the same?
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
I think your view on atheist is completely wrong. I would love for their to be a god. More importantly, I'd love for there to be a loving, kind, forgiving god who cares about it's subjects.
I am an atheist because I refuse to spend my time on something that can not be proven, has no quantifiable useful value to me, and is championed but a bunch of men who for the most part are no better then psychics who claim to speak to the dead. There is no compelling evidence that would require me to take this more seriously then I do santa claus or those christian leaders telling every generation that their generation is the 'end times'.
I also came to my conclusions at a young age. I was punished for them. I was raised catholic, but allowed to read. I read all about mythology because I loved the stories. Eventually it dawned on me that if all those gods were not real and thousands (probably millions) believed in them, then it stood to reason that my god was just another story and that one day people would read the bible like I read stories about Zeus. I brought this up to my parents and my priest and instead of answered with some kind of evidence, I was told that thinking like that would be the path to hell.
It's not that I don't want to accept the stories. I would love for there to be a wonderful afterlife with my family instead d of the unknown. The unknown is fucking terrifying! There have been nights (after a few drinks) when I've talked with people about death. Those nights sometimes lead to sleepless thought about the fear that when this life on earth is over that I am gone. That all that will be left is what I've done here and that is almost nothing. Even eternal punishment would be better then just being gone (Such is the desire for life).
Show me a shred of real evidence that supports god and I'll believe. You must however accept that proof does not mean I'll worship god. If it is the christian god I would rather burn in hell. That god is a hateful, spiteful, jealous god and nothing in the bible has shown me any reason to give him my respect. I'm fully willing to sit down with anyone who has new and useful evidence to the existence of god and how it can benefit me (and let's face it, the worship of gods is all about benefiting one's self). I am not however interesting in creating lies to make myself sleep better at night.
While the Galileo fiasco was not one of the Catholic Church's finest hours it was note because the Church was anti-science. For all of the Dark Ages the Church's monasteries is where all of the scientific learning was happening in Europe. They rediscovered the ancient writings of the Greeks which were preserved in the Islamic world. The study of Heliocentric was encouraged by the Vatican. The rub with Galileo was instead of just making scientific theories he then moved to try to interpret the scripture which is what got him into trouble.
The whole reason science started when it did in all of human history is because of the was Christians looked at the world. Other faiths had active Gods where if you didn't do certain things the sun wouldn't rise or the spring wouldn't come. For the first time with Christians you had an idea of a hands off God. He created the universe and pretty much lets it run according to the set of rules he made. What this did was allow people to try to discover the rules that God set up to run the universe. This was the birth of science. The Church all during the dark ages said that when empirical scientific results conflict with the interpretation of the scripture that it is the interpretation that must be changed because reality is what it is.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
No, no it isn't. The nondeterminism in quantum mechanics is understood and circumscribed, and we absolutely can be exactly sure.
I am trolling
The problem is that for all the good religious institutions have collectively done for science, they have done at least as much bad. It would be reasonable to argue that without religion's involvement, mankind would be more intellectually and scientifically advanced today. And I'm not counting the work of individual scientists who happened to be religious as contributions from religion, as they could have done the same work if they were atheists (and maybe could have done more work if religious institutions weren't causing them trouble - Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin immediately come to mind).
And what about religion's general negative effects on science? "Oh no need to investigate that, god did it!" "Why do you question this, is your faith weak?" "Man shouldn't play god!" are all lines we still hear today, and in the western world theists are a lot less fundamentalist than they were in the past.
For at least the last 200 years religion has only been yanking the brakes on the science train, so for today it would be safe to say that with religious authority out of the picture, intellectual advancement would flourish.
Another poster further down argues that it's just idiots who happen to be religious that stifle science. I agree that many stupid people would be anti-scientific with or without religion, but religion's ability to organize and support people with such viewpoints (and even encourage these views in some cases) can't be ignored. In a world without religion, if all the anti-scientific idiots formed The Organization for the Abolition of Scientific Thought (TOAST), they'd be no more powerful than any other similarly-sized think tank of idiots. But in the real world if the pope says investigation into the origin of the universe is an attack on their religion and their deity's authority, this is much more powerful.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Erm, if there was no religion, there would be no need to hide some selected intellectual works in monasteries.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
The poor understanding of history is on your side. We know a lot about what kind of works were lost during the dark ages from the references to the documents that don't exist anymore. We know that there were works in which scholars argued that stars are like the sun, but very far away. We know that there were other Homeric books around. We know of the lost works of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Aristophanes and many more. You can read the handful of their works that survived - and they are works of genius - and wonder how much brilliance was lost.
The dark ages we are talking about are not to be praised by how works were preserved, but condemned for how many books were lost and destroyed. Go read your Name of the Rose again because that is the true picture of the ages.
I was kind of with you until you started making blanket statements about atheists. Many atheists I know (including myself) did not just wake up one day saying "geez, religion is blocks". Generally, the path to Atheism is a journey which begins with questioning some of the precepts of the given faith in which one is raised. For some, that's enough to completely shatter faith in any religious views. For others, its a process of questioning, and searching, and eventual trend from believer to questioning to agnosticism to outright atheism.
I'm not qualified to speak for all atheists or agnostics any more than you are, but for myself, I can say that the process of "losing my religion" was drawn out and painful. Think about this for a second: if you believe in a God, you probably believe that there's an afterlife of some sort - you probably believe that the universe makes some sort of sense - that something greater than yourself gives a flying fuck what happens to you. In your deepest, darkest, most troubling time, you've got someone/something to pray to. Now, imagine what it's like for those of us who do not believe... we are ultimately alone and insignificant in an uncaring universe. We only have such a very short time to live, love, and figure out what gives our lives meaning before we take a very long dirt-nap.
Tell me now, do you think for one second that I CHOSE that? Don't you think that I'd LOVE to believe - that I'd love to feel that some god in the sky was looking out for me or that I had some shot at life-after-death? That this isn't all that there is? I have stood at the precipice and have stared into the abyss, an deep down inside, it scares the crap out of me, but I keep looking anyway, and I'm a stronger person for it. YES, I've looked at various (but by no means all) belief systems / religions, and in the end, I just can't bring myself to believe in any of them. I'm pretty sure that many other atheists have similar experiences.
To use an analogy: I have stuck my hand on a hot stove and gotten burned. I have found that other hot things cause similar pain, so I do not now need to stick my hand in every single fire or hot thing to know what it is to be burned or to know the signs that I will be burned if I touch it.
The Digital Sorceress
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
That's first assuming the story of Julius Caesar accidentally burning it down is untrue. It is also an incredibly large assumption that it would continue to exist for 2000 years and that no one would attempt to conquer Alexandria.
But even more, it's quite possible that without religion, it would not have been built in the first place. That library was also a temple to an Egyptian god, though the contents of the library were not specifically religious texts. The Ptolomies (the library was built at the beginning of that dynasty) helped increase their power through the acceptance of the Egyptians' religion, and by at least appearing to respect and even observe it. Maybe if the Egyptians were not religious they would not have been conquered by Alexander. If religion did not exist, perhaps Alexander would not have created Alexandria. Heck, he might not have ever had any power to begin with. Maybe he would not even have been born.
For the record, I do agree with much of your post, but condemning someone for a poor understanding of history and then attempting to suggest that you can divine the consequences of removing an immense aspect of human history, especially one so influential as all religion, ever ... Well, that is not insightful in the least (as a few moderators seem to think) but it is incredibly ignorant and unbelievably arrogant.
On a side note, you're mixing up two different parts of the Middle Ages. The first part of it, the High Period, was actually more liberal both in religion, sexual behaviour, and generally more tolerant towards different cultures. The Augustinian movements, like other misogynistic and other radical positions weren't taken so seriously. The Decameron, which was written in Italy during that period, could be considered Pornographic by today standards and yet was freely available for public consumption. Our collective imagination of such period has been actually created during the beginning of the Low Period, which roughly starts some year after the end of Italian Renaissance.
After the economical collapse of the previous liberal Principalities in continental Europe, due to the side effects of Black Death and the inability to cope with the growing economical power of Spain coming the recently discovered American continent, the most extremist religious positions filled such power vacuum : On a side we got the Protestantism, that tried to recover and "stiffen" most of the theological and religious position of that period, and the other side we got the Council of Trent, which was most interested in recovering the political and cultural relevance of the Catholic Church. They basically rewrote parts of history and used for this the most violent and radical groups, like the Inquisition, which till the 16th century was quite limited in his powers. Most of our opinion regarding the Dark Ages originated then. (And, as you can see, we don't need to wait for a war with Eurasia to observe the phenomenons about control and language illustrated by G. Orwell in 1984. In a sense, the Low period of the Middle Ages could be considered the first post-apocalyptic society ever).
Galileo operated right after their rise in power. Most of the church couldn't care less about the factual truth behind Galileo positions, they were just interested in maintaining an absolute, even if formal, power.
TL;DR: there isn't actually any contradiction between the way the Church operated, we're speaking about really different time periods, and in a sense a totally different organization.
Oh, and when the economy collapses and the turmoil becomes apparent, the extremists take the power. Which reminds me of something relevant in today politics.
We all believe in a lot of things that can't be proven. The logical positivism / Popperish notion that only scientific knowledge is valuable is one of the greatest fallacies that everyone seems to believe on Slashdot. Entire swathes of human knowledge cannot be proven scientifically. Math, History, the Arts. If you look at what the early Christians were doing in their writings, they were using logic and evidence to convince people to convert - Gentiles, especially, had no reason to care about what this random Jewish guy was doing, yet they converted anyway. Why? Logic and evidence. What evidence? "Go talk to the people who've seen these things, and ask them." It seems very odd that the religion would be founded on a lie when they're encouraging people to find out for themselves what happened.
I don't think everything has to be prove, however if you want me to change my entire life on the word of some guy, you better damn well have some heavy proof! I have very little faith in anything. I do hours of research before I make simple purchases. I'm not going to waste countless amounts of time, money, and happiness on the off chance some nut job is right. I've seen no useful benefits from worship a god and have seen many hardships.
The reason the people of the bible told everyone to go look for themselves is because they knew they wouldn't bother. This is why urban legends take off. Just go ask my uncle's friends sister who knew a guy who had earwigs lay eggs in his brains. People are gullible, this is why we have faith healers, psychics and magicians. We want explanations for things, we want something to blame our lot in life on. It's much easier to blame god's will then to get off the couch and make something work for us. Further more the facts just don't add up. But this really isn't the place to write that giant list of reasons why any deductive reasoning would lead you to the conclusion there is no gods. Hell, just the fact that some all powerful, all knowing being would creation us, give us free will, then get pissed we exercise it doesn't hold water. He was all knowing, he knew what would happen. Hell I think a child would know what would happen.
Catholic, eh? Not surprising, honestly. =)
Or another way of looking at it is that humans have been having these sorts of experiences with the numinous for a long time, and have been trying to capture it in different ways. I'm not a theosophist, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.
Yet in many religions making the wrong choice damns you. So until there is universal agreement in the one true religion how can I pick between odin, zeus, cuthulu, and jesus? If I don't pick jesus and he is the one true god, I'm damned to hell for thinking otherwise. WIthout any evidence to base my decision on, I have to go with personal experience. That being there is no such thing as gods. If they did exist and really wanted me to do something, I suspect they would tell me. If they don't feel the need, they must really not care.
Ok, since you mention the question of life after death. Why do you think it's so, that death is it - Nothingness? While it seems impossible for 'us' to ever arise from nothingness again, the only evidence that we have is that it IS possible. Before we were born, we did not exist. And yet - now we do. It seems better to say that it is more likely to happen again than to say that it is impossible.
I don't know what death is. Which is very fucking scary when you really think about it! I could be wrong (all intelligent men accept that they could be wrong) and thus burn for eternity for simply not worshiping a being that refuses to interact with me. I have no evidence that shows me people exist after they die. I do however have much empirical evidence that there is no afterlife. For example the houdini seance where houdini has yet to come back from the grave to prove there is an afterlife.
People see patterns anywhere there is not
The Church all during the dark ages said that when empirical scientific results conflict with the interpretation of the scripture that it is the interpretation that must be changed because reality is what it is.
Related, some good advice from St. Augustine of Hippo (5th century CE) on why Christians shouldn't go around uneducated :
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."
I just which more of them took it to hart these days.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.