You also conveniently ignore that much of what we understand about our Universe, we are unable to actually test. We create models for understanding things we can't actually observe, and infer much of what we know about them by the perceived effects they have on other things. We believe we know lots of things, based on reasoning and inferrance.
Regardless of how much there is that we understand and have not directly tested, we have evidence to support certain explanations. I hope you're not comparing religious belief to science just because there are some things in science that we can't be quite sure of. Religion doesn't even come close to actually knowing anything. It pretends, and it fails.
Using my previous analogy, if you buy a house, there is "no test you can do to conclusively prove" that your title will maintain ownership of that property for your grandchildren after you die; you can only exercise faith in the rule of law to have the hope that the work you did while alive will survive to benefit your heirs.
That's a terrible analogy. You can't prove that there is inherent worth in a title, because there is no inherent worth in it. "Having faith" that the law will protect its value is a completely different usage of the word 'faith' than "having faith" that a god exists. One usage means something like "hoping" and the other means "believing in spite of no evidence".
I have no business or interest in trying to get you to exercise faith in anything. I'm merely saying you are foolish to regard faith as the opposite of rational thought, and suggest that faith is never based on knowledge but is only a result of ignorance.
As I explained in the previous paragraph, you're apparently considering some alternate definition of 'faith' that doesn't apply to religious belief. This is what we're talking about, from The American Heritage Dictionary:
faith, n. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.
And that right there is the result of ignorance, and the opposite of rational thought.
My original point was that showing hatred for things you don't understand is the core reason for much of the violence and bloodshed in our world. The fact that you step around that order to reaffirm for yourself that your contented and enlightened existence is entirely due to your superiority over people who view the world differently doesn't refute that; it rather makes it more obvious.
Oh, I don't show any hatred for things I don't understand. Fortunately, I understand why people believe in religion, and I understand why religion is a terrible thing. I am a bit upset that people "view the world differently" than I do, but not because their view is different -- because their view is wrong. Before you tell me that their opinions are just as valid as mine, better read up on 'science': there are no opinions in physics. There are facts.
It's like suggesting to the KKK that maybe they are missing something, and having them, in their defense, just spew out the same garbage again about their superiority, citing circular definitions of what being the master race is all about.
It's pretty clear that you're comparing the reasoning of atheists to the reasoning of KKK members because unsupported belief systems cannot be successfully defended.
I fail to see any point in further explaining the nature of faith, as a trust based upon knowledge and experience, when you simply ignore rather than refute my definition, and reiterate what your faithless peers want it to mean so as to protect your illusion of the world.
It's funny that you say my view of the world is the one that is 'illusionary' when those of religious persuasions believe in gods and spirits and pixies and invisible pink u
How many dead for the sake of the "religions" of Nationality, Self-Serving, Capitalism, Politics.
Those are all very different things from religion. Capitalism is just a productive economic system. Nationalism is just a simple by-product of having different nations with different ideals. People being self-serving is just a natural part of human brains which helps to drive the process of evolution. All of this is fairly benign and simply part of having a working society.
But religion is a set of claims, both specific and non-specific, about the physical world. Not only does it often drive people to do bad things, but its components can be shown to be false. That's the problem.
Technically, that's correct. I can't prove that the world would be a better place if religion never existed. It's too complex a question for the answer to be obvious. (This also means that no one else can prove that the world would be worse off if religion never existed.)
Fortunately, the answer to the question "Is religious faith technically accurate?" is clear, and I see no legitimate reason to believe in something that logic and reason can show is nonsense.
when you define faith as trust in something abstract that you know to exist, even if it is not visible or tangible, then it changes your view of what religion might mean.
Is there any test that could be performed to show conclusively that a god or gods exist? If the answer is no, then you cannot possibly know that it exists. If the answer is yes, then belief in this god is not faith, because faith depends on the subject being undetectable. Either way, faith loses.
Einstein and Newton had certain faith in supreme being, so religious faith is not the sole property of the ignorant, uneducated or irrational.
I think Einstein has a better idea of what Einstein believes. Let's let him speak for himself:
"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, 1954
As far as Newton's beliefs go, you're depending on what a 17th-century mathematician was willing to publicly reveal about his religious convictions. Atheism was not very popular at the time, so people would have been reluctant to disclose it. Faith is not scientific, so any real scientist is an atheist scientist.
Since we've already shown that faith is irrational, I conjecture that, yes, religious faith is the sole property of the irrational.
You think you are better than others because you have an obscured, self-righteous, and arrogant disdain of people you disagree with, not because you truly understand anything or possess some special knowledge.
Actually no. I do 'truly understand' something that most people seem to miss:
- What science is
- Why we do science
- How to properly do science
If everyone understood these things, they'd be right there with me. Because they don't, they find it acceptable to have faith-based beliefs. Faith is not scientific, and science has been elegantly and simply designed to be able to explain anything that is explainable.
The biggest mass murderers in history were atheists.
Doubt it. It's much more likely that they supported an officially atheist state just as part of the plan for opression, but I really, really doubt that any of them arrived at the conclusion that no god exists through rational thought and scientific observation. The people you speak of were politicians and rebels, not scientists.
How exactly is atheism any different that any other religion?
Well, for starters, atheism is not a religion. Religions are faith-based, and atheism is logic-based. By definition, faith is belief in that which cannot be proven. (Such belief doesn't sound like a very good intellectual investment to me.)
...so suggesting that athiesm is somehow an elite plane above the religious is just as ignorant, self righteous, and rediculous as the Red States who thing they are favored by God for not being athiest.
This would be true if it weren't for the fact that atheism is correct whereas religion is wrong. Religion makes absurb and extraordinary claims without presenting any evidence at all, while atheism is supported by logic and science. Here in reality, I'm happy to say, atheism is indeed an elite plane above the religions that it displaces.
As I apparently should have said in my original post: those revolutionaries are killing because of their political philosophy, not their religious philosophy. Their actions were not "in the name of atheism", so to speak.
so let me see any idea that doesn't fit into your world view is childish, and adult reaction
I'm not sure what you mean by "world view", but what I choose to "believe" is irrelevant. Science, and science alone, is the method by which we will discover things. If anyone wants to make an extraordinary claim, they had better be prepared to present some extraordinary evidence to support it.
I'm pretty sure that the European Marxist terror groups of the sixties and seventies got up to some rather nasty things. I'm thinking the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Army Faction, that lot.
'Marxism' describes a political philosophy, not a religious one. As I said in a parallel thread, certain political groups may endorse atheism officially, but atheism itself is not their motivation for killings and terrorism.
Wow, thanks! I'm a fan of Weinberg and the work he's done to popularize physics, but I hadn't come across that quote before.
I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.
-- Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000
Quiet please, and listen. Notice that when today's modern terrorist strikes a target, there is always a letter or video to accompany it with statements along the line of, "Praise be to Allah for the swiftness with which we deliver this raid!" No one has ever blown up a building and said "This is what you get for holding faith-based, non-scientific belief!"
Never heard of Bolsheviks? Never heard of the Jacobins? Never heard of the turn-of-the-century anarchists?
Crack open a history book Mr. Self Righteous Athiest.
Firstly, neither the word 'atheism' nor 'religion' appears anywhere in the Wikipedia articles for the Bolsheviks or Jacobins. This is not surprising, because these were political organizations. Even if their support of an atheist state wasn't peripheral to their cause, the deaths they were responsible for were motivated by politics and power, not because of their personal passion for atheism.
Secondly, you can call me "self-righteous" all you like, but the fact remains that I can demonstrate why my science- and logic-derived beliefs are correct while the nonsense- and ignorance-fueled beliefs of religious fanatics are wrong.
Here's yet another problem that wouldn't exist without religion.
Don't reply to tell me that "oh, most religious people don't go around blowing things up." I know that and I don't care. When was the last time you heard of a group of radical atheists throwing a hand grenade into a tour bus?
If the person is a thief, they are still asked to leave then the police are called.
Newsflash, thieves are criminals. They don't need to listen to your polite requests. If they get spooked, they might even attack you. Walking unannounced into other people's homes at night is a terrible idea.
The first mistake in your assumption is that the police is always right
THe second one is that there can only be one reason to not stop
The third one is that you seem to believe peopel have no reason to fear the police other then having commited a crime. I think that a large majority of the Latinos, Arabs, African Americans and such can tell you an entirely different story about that, at least for as far as the USA goes.
(a) I never said that the police were always right -- like you pointed out, the subject could be completely innocent. If that was the case, the only real reason to not stop would be:
(b) As you suggested, the subject could be dealing with a medical (or other) emergency. I don't really buy this as a valid reason to not stop for the police, because the emergency could probably be dealt with quicker with the help of the police (by getting an escort to the hospital, etc.)
(c) The fact that some police forces are corrupt is an implementation issue, not a theoretical issue. I would agree that we need to un-corrupt police before starting work on other crime-related problems.
Your philosophy seems to be that it's better for ten thousand criminals to get away than for one innocent person to suffer injury or death. I guess I just don't agree with that. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Since when is possibly hiding soemthign enough reason to get killed?
You don't have to get killed. The police are giving you a choice when they tell you to stop. As far as I can tell, if you keep running, it's because you believe that whatever you did was bad enough to warrant punishment. The police don't have any way to know if you shoplifted $15 worth of stuff or if you're running away from a murder scene.
Police in many other countries use tactics like this, and it's apparently effective. So what's the problem?
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Regardless of how much there is that we understand and have not directly tested, we have evidence to support certain explanations. I hope you're not comparing religious belief to science just because there are some things in science that we can't be quite sure of. Religion doesn't even come close to actually knowing anything. It pretends, and it fails.
That's a terrible analogy. You can't prove that there is inherent worth in a title, because there is no inherent worth in it. "Having faith" that the law will protect its value is a completely different usage of the word 'faith' than "having faith" that a god exists. One usage means something like "hoping" and the other means "believing in spite of no evidence".
As I explained in the previous paragraph, you're apparently considering some alternate definition of 'faith' that doesn't apply to religious belief. This is what we're talking about, from The American Heritage Dictionary:
faith, n. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.
And that right there is the result of ignorance, and the opposite of rational thought.
Oh, I don't show any hatred for things I don't understand. Fortunately, I understand why people believe in religion, and I understand why religion is a terrible thing. I am a bit upset that people "view the world differently" than I do, but not because their view is different -- because their view is wrong. Before you tell me that their opinions are just as valid as mine, better read up on 'science': there are no opinions in physics. There are facts.
It's pretty clear that you're comparing the reasoning of atheists to the reasoning of KKK members because unsupported belief systems cannot be successfully defended.
It's funny that you say my view of the world is the one that is 'illusionary' when those of religious persuasions believe in gods and spirits and pixies and invisible pink u
But religion is a set of claims, both specific and non-specific, about the physical world. Not only does it often drive people to do bad things, but its components can be shown to be false. That's the problem.
Technically, that's correct. I can't prove that the world would be a better place if religion never existed. It's too complex a question for the answer to be obvious. (This also means that no one else can prove that the world would be worse off if religion never existed.)
Fortunately, the answer to the question "Is religious faith technically accurate?" is clear, and I see no legitimate reason to believe in something that logic and reason can show is nonsense.
"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, 1954
As far as Newton's beliefs go, you're depending on what a 17th-century mathematician was willing to publicly reveal about his religious convictions. Atheism was not very popular at the time, so people would have been reluctant to disclose it. Faith is not scientific, so any real scientist is an atheist scientist.
Since we've already shown that faith is irrational, I conjecture that, yes, religious faith is the sole property of the irrational. Actually no. I do 'truly understand' something that most people seem to miss:
- What science is
- Why we do science
- How to properly do science
If everyone understood these things, they'd be right there with me. Because they don't, they find it acceptable to have faith-based beliefs. Faith is not scientific, and science has been elegantly and simply designed to be able to explain anything that is explainable.
Jus'n is correct.
The biggest mass murderers in history were atheists.
Doubt it. It's much more likely that they supported an officially atheist state just as part of the plan for opression, but I really, really doubt that any of them arrived at the conclusion that no god exists through rational thought and scientific observation. The people you speak of were politicians and rebels, not scientists.
How exactly is atheism any different that any other religion?
...so suggesting that athiesm is somehow an elite plane above the religious is just as ignorant, self righteous, and rediculous as the Red States who thing they are favored by God for not being athiest.
Well, for starters, atheism is not a religion. Religions are faith-based, and atheism is logic-based. By definition, faith is belief in that which cannot be proven. (Such belief doesn't sound like a very good intellectual investment to me.)
This would be true if it weren't for the fact that atheism is correct whereas religion is wrong. Religion makes absurb and extraordinary claims without presenting any evidence at all, while atheism is supported by logic and science. Here in reality, I'm happy to say, atheism is indeed an elite plane above the religions that it displaces.
As I apparently should have said in my original post: those revolutionaries are killing because of their political philosophy, not their religious philosophy. Their actions were not "in the name of atheism", so to speak.
so let me see any idea that doesn't fit into your world view is childish, and adult reaction
I'm not sure what you mean by "world view", but what I choose to "believe" is irrelevant. Science, and science alone, is the method by which we will discover things. If anyone wants to make an extraordinary claim, they had better be prepared to present some extraordinary evidence to support it.
This concept has already been addressed in other child posts, for example here.
I'm pretty sure that the European Marxist terror groups of the sixties and seventies got up to some rather nasty things. I'm thinking the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Army Faction, that lot.
'Marxism' describes a political philosophy, not a religious one. As I said in a parallel thread, certain political groups may endorse atheism officially, but atheism itself is not their motivation for killings and terrorism.
Wow, thanks! I'm a fan of Weinberg and the work he's done to popularize physics, but I hadn't come across that quote before.
... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.
I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute
-- Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000
If anyone is curious about the parent author, just take a look at his previous posts. Whooh.
Halvy, if that is your real name: Please stop wasting people's time.
Quiet please, and listen. Notice that when today's modern terrorist strikes a target, there is always a letter or video to accompany it with statements along the line of, "Praise be to Allah for the swiftness with which we deliver this raid!" No one has ever blown up a building and said "This is what you get for holding faith-based, non-scientific belief!"
Never heard of Bolsheviks? Never heard of the Jacobins? Never heard of the turn-of-the-century anarchists?
Crack open a history book Mr. Self Righteous Athiest.
Firstly, neither the word 'atheism' nor 'religion' appears anywhere in the Wikipedia articles for the Bolsheviks or Jacobins. This is not surprising, because these were political organizations. Even if their support of an atheist state wasn't peripheral to their cause, the deaths they were responsible for were motivated by politics and power, not because of their personal passion for atheism.
Secondly, you can call me "self-righteous" all you like, but the fact remains that I can demonstrate why my science- and logic-derived beliefs are correct while the nonsense- and ignorance-fueled beliefs of religious fanatics are wrong.
Here's yet another problem that wouldn't exist without religion.
Don't reply to tell me that "oh, most religious people don't go around blowing things up." I know that and I don't care. When was the last time you heard of a group of radical atheists throwing a hand grenade into a tour bus?
Haha -- mod parent up!
If the person is a thief, they are still asked to leave then the police are called.
Newsflash, thieves are criminals. They don't need to listen to your polite requests. If they get spooked, they might even attack you. Walking unannounced into other people's homes at night is a terrible idea.
You missed the point, which is: Would anyone have been very surprised if he did get shot?
THIS MAN HAS NEVER BEEN PUNCHED IN THE FACE. If he had, he wouldn't think he could get away with anything like this.
Buy a computer! It'll do a lot more than a game console.
Since they're kinda giving it away for free, you'd think there would be a version for the operating system that doesn't suck. Apparently not, though.
Ding. Mod parent up.
The first mistake in your assumption is that the police is always right
THe second one is that there can only be one reason to not stop
The third one is that you seem to believe peopel have no reason to fear the police other then having commited a crime. I think that a large majority of the Latinos, Arabs, African Americans and such can tell you an entirely different story about that, at least for as far as the USA goes.
(a) I never said that the police were always right -- like you pointed out, the subject could be completely innocent. If that was the case, the only real reason to not stop would be:
(b) As you suggested, the subject could be dealing with a medical (or other) emergency. I don't really buy this as a valid reason to not stop for the police, because the emergency could probably be dealt with quicker with the help of the police (by getting an escort to the hospital, etc.)
(c) The fact that some police forces are corrupt is an implementation issue, not a theoretical issue. I would agree that we need to un-corrupt police before starting work on other crime-related problems.
Your philosophy seems to be that it's better for ten thousand criminals to get away than for one innocent person to suffer injury or death. I guess I just don't agree with that. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Since when is possibly hiding soemthign enough reason to get killed?
You don't have to get killed. The police are giving you a choice when they tell you to stop. As far as I can tell, if you keep running, it's because you believe that whatever you did was bad enough to warrant punishment. The police don't have any way to know if you shoplifted $15 worth of stuff or if you're running away from a murder scene.
Police in many other countries use tactics like this, and it's apparently effective. So what's the problem?