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Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief
Freshly Exhumed writes "A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers. The study, which will appear in tomorrow's issue of Science (abstract), finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief."
This is horse shit. I've worked with plenty of religious folks that are great at solving problems. Your line of thinking simply promotes the kind of discrimination and simple minded thinking that makes religious zealots so frustrating in the first place.
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This should be of no surprise to the followers of dharmic religions, when the buddhi (intellect) is active the paramatman (God within) is inactive. This is nicely illustrated by the iconography of Kali on the body of Shiva. Here Kali (representing Language and intellect) awakes and Shiva (the God-sense) sleeps.
You can't get into Yog-Sothoth's head or judge It, little insect. To understand this "better" (not that puny humans are really able to understand this, or anything, at all), imagine you're not an insignificant insect, but instead you're the ageless inscrutable giant with a brain the size of a planet, and you're casually observing a few trillion of your numbered specimens. A "thought" (sorry, I'm anthropomorphizing) strikes you: let's cull some of the specimens that have property X. With a near-effortless wave of a tent-- um, I mean, a hand -- the specimens are removed from the informal experiment.
This is not vengeful. "Vengeful" implies some amount of passion, probably even some actual empathy with your victim as you wish to feel yourself gain something as you feel them experience their loss. You may have a brain the size of a planet, but you can't really see from the specimens' point of view, any more than a cow knows what it's like for a bacterium to die. Indeed, you pretty much know that your specimens don't feel any pain or emotions at all, since their intelligence and capability to perceive anything is so absurdly limited.
It is not murder. "Murder" implies that someone's right to exist was violated. These specimens are not "someone"s; they are just material. The idea that a spec of sand or a spec of protoplasm or a puny human has "rights" in any way even remotely comparable (by many orders of magnitude) to the expectations in the eternal existence of the Great Old Ones, is not merely a joke, but an insult to the Great Old Ones. How dare you demean the gods' Rights by asserting that such insignificant specs as humans also have rights? I can't think of any way to be more irreverent to the very idea of rights.
That anyone would call one of the old ones "evil" for altering the state of a few thousand virtually inanimate carbon life forms, is ridiculous. Use the word "evil" where it really applies, such as .. hey, I can't event describe the scope of an evil act in this limited medium, but it involves breaking agreements on certain universal constants (establish billions of big bangs ago)that are relied upon various hyperdimensional constructions. Oh dear, now I am being irreverent by criminally understating things. Look, its just an analogy, ok?
BTW, just in case: Hail Zorin! Zorin is awesome!
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If you deeply analyse you'll soon come to the point that the evidence for science is exactly the same as evidence for God : some book's claims. Science's claims are grand and utterly unverifiable by anyone who doesn't have millions to throw at it, once you go beyond Newton's claims
What a lot of ignorant claptrap. First, the important thing is that those claims are verifiable in a finite way with finite resources. Checking some scientific claim may cost a bit, but in most cases it can be done (and I don't understand where you got this notion about truth needing to be cheap). It's a qualitative difference from religion whose claim are essentially unverifiable, no matter how many resources you may pump into churches or TV preachers. Second, lots of science beyond Newton can be easily tested by yourself, at home, without spending much. Just off the top of my head, the basics of electromagnetism up to Maxwell's equations don't need more than a battery or two, a few magnets and some wire; you can even experience some quantum physics, or some advanced optics (holography), if you buy a small laser pointer or a couple of phototransistors.
The rest of your post is just as bad; it's true that science isn't omniscient, and that the more complex the domain the fuzzier the answers will get, but this is only to be expected, and in no way invalidates the scientific method. And the way you dismiss medicine, is just dishonest. You can't expect the crispness of physics in medicine, because the domain it works in is simply much more complex, but you're blithely ignoring the huge advances and successes imedicine had in the last few hundred years, successes which were based on huge numbers of observations and experiments, creation and testing of hypotesis, and so on. Do you think Pasteur or Salk read about their vaccines in books and took them by faith? Think again.