Congratulations. You've just argued in favor of never making changes, since the cost of training people to do what they already do is always nil, no matter what the topic is. That's the mentalilty that would have us all triving cars with reins instead of steering wheels - because when cars were first being introduced, reins would have been the more intuative interface that would require less training.
Re:Galileo? Probably not.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
But that's an appalling misunderstanding of the scientific method.
No. Because this: Occam's Razor has never, ever said "choose the simpler explanation, even if it's barkingly wrong".
Is an appalling misunderstanding on your part of what my post said.
I never claimed anything close to that. What I said, in exact terms, is this: All theories explain everything equally if you allow their authors to add complex clauses to them to explain away the problems.
That's a really big "if" there. I didn't include it for the heck of it. I meant it. And that's what takes away the "barkingly wrong" issue. Any theory can be "fixed up" by adding more and more complexities to it until it shores up all the problem cases. That's why Occam's Razor needs to exist - to differentiate the single simple theory which is actually consistent from the case of inserting a long list of individual exceptions used to shore up a bad theory (one which would be "barkingly wrong" if it wasn't for the long list of exceptions.)
Next time try replying to what I actually said instead of some made up strawman. I don't tolerate that kind of crap.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Ah, this must be why there's so many chapters in the Federalist Papers explaining why Greek-style democracy has always failed, and why the new American democracy must not be patterned on it. I was such a fool; and here I was thinking Hamilton was saying we shouldn't be like the Greeks.
The document explains how to improve the old system so it can work this time around. That's a far cry from saying it wasn't based on it at all. Where do you think words like "republic" and "democracy" came from?
You keep on falling into the trap of false dichotomy.
No. You keep accusing me of saying things I haven't. The following line doesn't address anything I claimed in the slightest:
Just because the government isn't founded on any particular faith doesn't mean none of the Framers were motivated and inspired by their faith when they were establishing the government.
Yes. So how does this contradict anything I said? I *said* they were religious people - who deliberately kept their religion out of the government, a point which your post agreed with, so I don't see where your accusation is coming from.
Re:Less realistic religion = piss off less people
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Sure, but what is a 'real' religion???
One that existed previously outside the genre of the game.
Religion is irational by definition.
Not by definition, but definitely by practice. As long as it admits to it's own utter inability to come to any real conclusions, and admits entirely that it exists purely as a form of mental masturbation to make people feel better, then it is still rational. There are some religions that can fit this mold - Unitarians are often like this. I don't "get it" myself, thinking that the Unitarians are admitting to the utter inconclusiveness of religion while still trying to preserve what's good about religion - which to me is like trying to keep from throwing out the baby with the bathwater in a tub that doesn't even have a baby in it in the first place.
Re:Galileo? Probably not.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
idiots who didn't tolerate dissent.
If I speak out against someone's position that is not identical to being intolerant of their dissent, no matter how spitefully I do so. If I shut them up with legal means, that is a case of being intolerant of dissent.
Telling someone he's being an idiot is not the same as saying he has no right to his opinion.
On the contrary. The particular flavor of Ptolemaic model used by Scheiner and others was the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model, wherein the Earth was the center of the cosmos, the Sun revolved around the Earth in an ellipse, and the planets revolved around the Sun in ellipses.
This agrees with what I said. Why did you preceed it with the phrase "on the contrary"?
The only way the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model is inferior is that it's more complex
When it comes down to it, that is typically all you have to go on when comparing scientific theories, and is precisely what makes one theory inferior to another. All theories explain everything equally if you allow their authors to add complex clauses to them to explain away the problems.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
I take things in the context of their times. That JRR Tolkien was a good author is true regardless of whether or not he was a devout Christian. Just like the fact that Thomas Jefferson was a good idealist of freedom is true despite that he owned slaves. Taken in the context of his time, He was better than his contemporaries even though he had some blind spots. Taken in the context of the day, In the middle ages the Church was doing *everything* - so it's not surprising that it was funding research into learning new things - but that's all as part of it's civil side. If you want to take that as evidence of the church being in favor of science, then I get to take the crusades as evidence of the church being in favor of genocide. The balanced fair view is to just recognize that back in that day and age the church had it's fingers in a LOT of purely secular things both good and bad - and its connection to science is no more religious than it's connection to the crusades.
Re:Galileo? Probably not.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
One, he was wrong, and two, he called the Pope a moron in print.
My name is Steve Mading. I think the pope is a moron. Now, notice the difference between today's day and age and those times. I won't be put in jail for saying that. The fact that Galelio *was* is, all by itself, plenty of reason to dislike the religious establishment of the time, and it was plenty of reason, all by itself, to side with Galelio on this.
Secondly, Copernicus's theory was mistaken because it assumed perfect circles. Thbe prevailing theory at the time was *also* mistaken because it did not use the sun as the center. Comparing the two, Copernicus's theory was NOT more wrong than the prevailing one, and in the long run it was closer to the truth. It got the precise shape of the orbits wrong, but the basic layout right, and the prevailing one didn't even do that.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Our government comes from Greek and Roman traditions that predate Christianity (Which we honored in all the archetecture in Washington DC on these themes). And the Treaty of Tripoli, SIGNED by all the congressmen at the time (who were around for the formation fo the constitution), explicitly states that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. Don't get me wrong, most founding fathers were *definately* Christains - no doubt about it - but they explicitly set forward to create a government that divorced that belief entirely from the rules of governance. They did not like the way it had been done in Europe beforehand. They couldn't stand the idea of having merged religion and government and knew that doing so ends up corrupting the both of them in the long run. It was a deliberate, thought-out decision after much debate. Article VI explicitly states that no religious test is allowed as a prerequisite for holding office. This was there even before the debate on the first amendment.
The idea that the US is founded on Christianity is quite false.
As to the Declaration of Independance, it was deliberately worded in a very vague way. It doesn't say "God". It says "Creator". The reason for this is that some of the founding fathers were in fact Deists and not full blown Christians. Thomas Jefferson's first draft didn't even have that line in there. It was added at the insistence of others.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Einstien was a christian
Blink. Blink. Uhhhhmmmm. What? There might be debate about him being *Jewish* versus atheistic, but certainly not *Christian*. There's a reason he moved out of Germany, by the way....
You say that I'm a dreamer. I say you're a non-believer.
Since when are these two things mutually exclusive? Wishing for things, and going off on long flights of fancy in your mind does not have to require believing those things. A separation in one's mind between fantasy and reality is a good thing, but it does not have to imply that that the fantasy side of things is ignored and never played with.
(It's just that with the topic of this article, this has come to mind - there's been a lot of accusations being flung around that the non-religius are non-dreamers and that's just not true.)
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
And having the computer randomly place your characters such that your main guy *has* to be the first to leave the map becuase he's in everyone else's way and there isn't enough room to shuffle positions - that was considered not Valorous. I had to regain that f-ing Valorous eigth over and over in that game because of random luck on the placement of figures on the battle map - that I had zero control over. In the end I discovered through trial and error that if I had a full roster of players that it would place my character differently so that it wouldn't be blocking the exit, but if I had less than the full roster it kept screwing me over
It was an interesting idea for a game, but the idea of a stupid computer AI trying to enforce a morality system made it inevitable that it would fail to understand "extenuating circumstances" like that.
Re:Religion is suppresed because writers are ignor
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
I agree that the genre needs better story and plots. But the reason religion is not used has nothing to do with this at all. It's becuase it's impossible to include religion in a non-superficial way unless the game engine itself validates one view over another. Consider Ultima IV with its eight virtues. If you didn't happen to agree with the author that all eight of those were really virtuous, then playing that game can kind of piss you off - as you are required within the frame of the game to follow in that "religion" in order to get to the finish of the storyline. In effect, the game designer was the "god" of the world, and his say-so on what was and wasn't moral was the final say-so and if you don't like it then tough. (I agreed with only 7 of the 8 virtues when I played that game. One "virtue" was humility, and as someone who doesn't see hubris as a sin, this bothered me (especially since "Lord British" the game designer was himself not being the slightest bit humble in his decision to enforce his own morality system as *absolute truth* in the game - but it was just a game I said to myself, so I played with it that way anyway.)
But now if a real-world religion is used, like Christianity, then this same scenario starts treading on real nasty ground - the game engine ends up having to *enforce* the religion, and since there's a zillion different interpreations of it, this will tick off a large number of the players. (Picture if Jack Chick (http://www.chick.com/) ended up making a game that enforced HIS version of Christainity, for example.)
This is why the topic is avoided. If you try to use it your game engine itself is going to anger a lot of the players.
Re:Religion IS escapism
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Oh boy, Pascal's Wager. Yawn. All it does is prove that you should believe in the god with the bestest heaven and the worstest hell - and that means that whatever you come up with, it can always be one-upped, and when it is you should switch beliefs over to that new god you just came up with. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Besides, I can't believe something to be true just because I *want* to believe it. That way leads to insanity. So even if Pascal's Wager was convincing to me it still wouldn't matter. I need an actual reason to believe something true, something more than just "it is beneficial to believe it".
In any case, the existence or non-existence of a spiritual realm is irrelevant to the issue of whether or not people believe it. The majority do. Given that, it seems reasonable to make it a part of any game world that attempts to capture the richness of the real world.
This is true. The difficulty is that a lot of games deal with things that don't just end up saying "There exist people who believe this", but it frequently validates that belief. A priest who claims god exists is one thing, but a priest that claims god gives him the power to heal, and the game validates this by making it work, ends up validating that viewpoint. To take a non-god example of a religion, the article (did you read it?) mentioned Ultima IV. In Ultima IV, the religion was not just presented as "this is something people in the world believe", but as "This is THE TRUTH in this world, and this religion WORKS - because the game enforced the 8 virtues and required that you uphold them in order to get to the end goal of becoming an avatar.
For an example of a game that does work like you suggested, there's the Hammerites and the Mechanists from Thief. The religion contained believers, but they may or may not be correct in their beliefs and the game didn't really do anything to answer that question. (This was made easier partly by the fact that the religion of the Hammerites doesn't really mention anything metaphysical - it JUST talked about what is good and righteous to do, and not about what spirits and gods might exist. In that regard it was almost more of a philosophy than a religion.)
Re:Religion IS escapism
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
I think the point was this: People who find religion laudable wouldn't consider it to be escapism, while poeple who do think of it as escapism are the ones who don't find it laudable - so escapist religion ends up appealing to nobody - not the believer, not the unbeliever. I don't personally agree with this, mind you, but I think that was the point that was trying to be made.
False. How did the earth form? How did the plants and animals get here? Religion's retreat into staying with only the "why" questions is a relatively modern development, one borne from the fact that it really did a terrible job at the "how" questions and had to retreat or look silly. So now the mainstream Christians no longer try to defend a literal interpetation of Genesis - because Genesis is mostly a "how" book, not a "why" book.
How did the earth form - religion DOES try to answer this "how" question. How did the plants and animals get to be here - religion DOES try to answer this "how" question. I don't know where you get this idea that religion stays away from the "how" questions. At least at first it did. It has had to slowly retreat from that over the years so that *today* it just has the "why" questions left, but that's relatively modern.
And if some one, of grander or lesser intellect than ourselves (isn't that just so arrogant?) should choose a system of belief centered upon an ethical imperative
then they are doing the exact same thing as everyone else, atheist or otherwise.
How do you know for sure that Leprechauns don't exist? Do you? Can you disprove them? Yet I suspect that you don't believe in them, most likely. Neither do I. Yet I don't have a single shred of proof that they cannot possibly exist. I also have no proof that there are no US Navy aircraft carriers painted blue with pink polkadots, yet I'm not going to give the idea any shred of benefit of the doubt.
Proof is unnecessary for disbelief, because disbelief is the reasonable default hypothesis for any proposed existence question. It's the only falsifiable position.
If we as a people just dismiss Christian and other Religion as mere folklore.
There is nothing "mere" about folklore. It tells us much about what a people believed, how they thought, and what their core values were. It's just that it fails utterly to tell us a single thing about the real world outside of social human concerns.
Questions like "is there a God" are NOT RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS. They are scientific ones. Period. They belong in exactly the same category as "is there a Sun", or "is there life on other planets". Questions like "What should we do with the world, given it's current state - how do we want to change it?" THOSE are religious questions. This is one of the big beefs I have with religions these days - they take questions of pure fact and try to attach moral signifigance to them, and that's just plain, well, *wrong*.
Yes. But foreknowledge does not imply a lack of choice.
It does if the entity with the foreknowlege is omnipotent and omniscient. The idea of a god with those two properties existing is incompatable with the idea of people having free will. For me to have free will, God has to be capable of having made the WRONG prediction about my choices. Otherwise my future is already written and fated to be what god thinks it's going to be.
Re:Semi-serious?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When I first learned bible stories (as a Bahii, not as a Christian) I thought they were *all* fables, and that INCLUDES the really important core story - of the ressurection (still do). I remember the day I finally figured out that other people took it seriously. It wasn't until 6th grade. I was terrified because I had the epiphany of realizing I was surrounded by insane people. It was really frightening. To this day I find it hilarious that religious scholars try to sift which parts are metaphor from which parts are literal - thereby gaining the ability to make their bible say whatever they want it to say. That's why someone telling me "I'm a Christian" gives me no fruitful information whatsoever on what their moral views are. People have used the same book to defend just about anything from opposite sides - all by careful selective choices as to which parts to highlight and which parts to gloss over.
People pick their morality FIRST, and then try to mesh it with their religion SECOND. Religion doesn't cause morality. It is used by most as their *justification* for it.
The Bahii religion was supposed to expose me to many different religions so I could "learn" that they were all the same at some core level and thus came from the same core god. Instead I learned that they were all the same at some core level and thus were most likely made up by ordinary people. I can't really remember ever having been a believer.
Re:Semi-serious?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Eve didn't have the knowlege of good and evil yet, according to the fable. That's what the tree was going to give her. So how is it that it was right for God to expect her to know that it was good to obey god's order and evil to disobey it? That was knowlege that, according to the story itself, was being deliberately kept away from her.
Which makes God quite sadistic when you think on it. If it is true that Adam and Eve had zero knowlege whatsoever about what makes the difference between good and evil, then that means God was being cruel when he decided they needed to be punished for disobeying his order to avoid eating from the tree of knowlege. After all, why follow god's orders? Is following god's orders something you should do because it is Good? If so, then that's knowlege that was still being kept from Adam and Eve, artificially, BY god himself, and they couldn't possibly be expected to realize there was anything wrong with disobeying god until after they had the knowlege from the tree.
This is one of the big problems I have with literal Christianity. It's moral system as portrayed by it's fables isn't even *internally* consistent.
Slashdot Mirror
Where has the open source community been the whole time all these worms have infected the world and ruined people's days?
They've been ignored. It's not like people haven't been saying anything about it. It's that they get ignored.
Congratulations. You've just argued in favor of never making changes, since the cost of training people to do what they already do is always nil, no matter what the topic is. That's the mentalilty that would have us all triving cars with reins instead of steering wheels - because when cars were first being introduced, reins would have been the more intuative interface that would require less training.
But that's an appalling misunderstanding of the scientific method.
No. Because this:
Occam's Razor has never, ever said "choose the simpler explanation, even if it's barkingly wrong".
Is an appalling misunderstanding on your part of what my post said.
I never claimed anything close to that. What I said, in exact terms, is this: All theories explain everything equally if you allow their authors to add complex clauses to them to explain away the problems.
That's a really big "if" there. I didn't include it for the heck of it. I meant it. And that's what takes away the "barkingly wrong" issue. Any theory can be "fixed up" by adding more and more complexities to it until it shores up all the problem cases. That's why Occam's Razor needs to exist - to differentiate the single simple theory which is actually consistent from the case of inserting a long list of individual exceptions used to shore up a bad theory (one which would be "barkingly wrong" if it wasn't for the long list of exceptions.)
Next time try replying to what I actually said instead of some made up strawman. I don't tolerate that kind of crap.
Ah, this must be why there's so many chapters in the Federalist Papers explaining why Greek-style democracy has always failed, and why the new American democracy must not be patterned on it. I was such a fool; and here I was thinking Hamilton was saying we shouldn't be like the Greeks.
The document explains how to improve the old system so it can work this time around. That's a far cry from saying it wasn't based on it at all. Where do you think words like "republic" and "democracy" came from?
You keep on falling into the trap of false dichotomy.
No. You keep accusing me of saying things I haven't. The following line doesn't address anything I claimed in the slightest:
Just because the government isn't founded on any particular faith doesn't mean none of the Framers were motivated and inspired by their faith when they were establishing the government.
Yes. So how does this contradict anything I said? I *said* they were religious people - who deliberately kept their religion out of the government, a point which your post agreed with, so I don't see where your accusation is coming from.
Sure, but what is a 'real' religion???
One that existed previously outside the genre of the game.
Religion is irational by definition.
Not by definition, but definitely by practice. As long as it admits to it's own utter inability to come to any real conclusions, and admits entirely that it exists purely as a form of mental masturbation to make people feel better, then it is still rational. There are some religions that can fit this mold - Unitarians are often like this. I don't "get it" myself, thinking that the Unitarians are admitting to the utter inconclusiveness of religion while still trying to preserve what's good about religion - which to me is like trying to keep from throwing out the baby with the bathwater in a tub that doesn't even have a baby in it in the first place.
idiots who didn't tolerate dissent.
If I speak out against someone's position that is not identical to being intolerant of their dissent, no matter how spitefully I do so. If I shut them up with legal means, that is a case of being intolerant of dissent.
Telling someone he's being an idiot is not the same as saying he has no right to his opinion.
On the contrary. The particular flavor of Ptolemaic model used by Scheiner and others was the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model, wherein the Earth was the center of the cosmos, the Sun revolved around the Earth in an ellipse, and the planets revolved around the Sun in ellipses.
This agrees with what I said. Why did you preceed it with the phrase "on the contrary"?
The only way the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model is inferior is that it's more complex
When it comes down to it, that is typically all you have to go on when comparing scientific theories, and is precisely what makes one theory inferior to another. All theories explain everything equally if you allow their authors to add complex clauses to them to explain away the problems.
I take things in the context of their times. That JRR Tolkien was a good author is true regardless of whether or not he was a devout Christian. Just like the fact that Thomas Jefferson was a good idealist of freedom is true despite that he owned slaves. Taken in the context of his time, He was better than his contemporaries even though he had some blind spots. Taken in the context of the day, In the middle ages the Church was doing *everything* - so it's not surprising that it was funding research into learning new things - but that's all as part of it's civil side. If you want to take that as evidence of the church being in favor of science, then I get to take the crusades as evidence of the church being in favor of genocide. The balanced fair view is to just recognize that back in that day and age the church had it's fingers in a LOT of purely secular things both good and bad - and its connection to science is no more religious than it's connection to the crusades.
One, he was wrong, and two, he called the Pope a moron in print.
My name is Steve Mading. I think the pope is a moron.
Now, notice the difference between today's day and age and those times. I won't be put in jail for saying that. The fact that Galelio *was* is, all by itself, plenty of reason to dislike the religious establishment of the time, and it was plenty of reason, all by itself, to side with Galelio on this.
Secondly, Copernicus's theory was mistaken because it assumed perfect circles. Thbe prevailing theory at the time was *also* mistaken because it did not use the sun as the center. Comparing the two, Copernicus's theory was NOT more wrong than the prevailing one, and in the long run it was closer to the truth. It got the precise shape of the orbits wrong, but the basic layout right, and the prevailing one didn't even do that.
Our government comes from Greek and Roman traditions that predate Christianity (Which we honored in all the archetecture in Washington DC on these themes). And the Treaty of Tripoli, SIGNED by all the congressmen at the time (who were around for the formation fo the constitution), explicitly states that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. Don't get me wrong, most founding fathers were *definately* Christains - no doubt about it - but they explicitly set forward to create a government that divorced that belief entirely from the rules of governance. They did not like the way it had been done in Europe beforehand. They couldn't stand the idea of having merged religion and government and knew that doing so ends up corrupting the both of them in the long run. It was a deliberate, thought-out decision after much debate. Article VI explicitly states that no religious test is allowed as a prerequisite for holding office. This was there even before the debate on the first amendment.
The idea that the US is founded on Christianity is quite false.
As to the Declaration of Independance, it was deliberately worded in a very vague way. It doesn't say "God". It says "Creator". The reason for this is that some of the founding fathers were in fact Deists and not full blown Christians. Thomas Jefferson's first draft didn't even have that line in there. It was added at the insistence of others.
Einstien was a christian
Blink.
Blink.
Uhhhhmmmm. What?
There might be debate about him being *Jewish* versus atheistic, but certainly not *Christian*.
There's a reason he moved out of Germany, by the way....
You say that I'm a dreamer.
I say you're a non-believer.
Since when are these two things mutually exclusive? Wishing for things, and going off on long flights of fancy in your mind does not have to require believing those things. A separation in one's mind between fantasy and reality is a good thing, but it does not have to imply that that the fantasy side of things is ignored and never played with.
(It's just that with the topic of this article, this has come to mind - there's been a lot of accusations being flung around that the non-religius are non-dreamers and that's just not true.)
And having the computer randomly place your characters such that your main guy *has* to be the first to leave the map becuase he's in everyone else's way and there isn't enough room to shuffle positions - that was considered not Valorous. I had to regain that f-ing Valorous eigth over and over in that game because of random luck on the placement of figures on the battle map - that I had zero control over. In the end I discovered through trial and error that if I had a full roster of players that it would place my character differently so that it wouldn't be blocking the exit, but if I had less than the full roster it kept screwing me over
It was an interesting idea for a game, but the idea of a stupid computer AI trying to enforce a morality system made it inevitable that it would fail to understand "extenuating circumstances" like that.
I agree that the genre needs better story and plots. But the reason religion is not used has nothing to do with this at all. It's becuase it's impossible to include religion in a non-superficial way unless the game engine itself validates one view over another. Consider Ultima IV with its eight virtues. If you didn't happen to agree with the author that all eight of those were really virtuous, then playing that game can kind of piss you off - as you are required within the frame of the game to follow in that "religion" in order to get to the finish of the storyline. In effect, the game designer was the "god" of the world, and his say-so on what was and wasn't moral was the final say-so and if you don't like it then tough. (I agreed with only 7 of the 8 virtues when I played that game. One "virtue" was humility, and as someone who doesn't see hubris as a sin, this bothered me (especially since "Lord British" the game designer was himself not being the slightest bit humble in his decision to enforce his own morality system as *absolute truth* in the game - but it was just a game I said to myself, so I played with it that way anyway.)
But now if a real-world religion is used, like Christianity, then this same scenario starts treading on real nasty ground - the game engine ends up having to *enforce* the religion, and since there's a zillion different interpreations of it, this will tick off a large number of the players. (Picture if Jack Chick (http://www.chick.com/) ended up making a game that enforced HIS version of Christainity, for example.)
This is why the topic is avoided. If you try to use it your game engine itself is going to anger a lot of the players.
Oh boy, Pascal's Wager. Yawn. All it does is prove that you should believe in the god with the bestest heaven and the worstest hell - and that means that whatever you come up with, it can always be one-upped, and when it is you should switch beliefs over to that new god you just came up with. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Besides, I can't believe something to be true just because I *want* to believe it. That way leads to insanity. So even if Pascal's Wager was convincing to me it still wouldn't matter. I need an actual reason to believe something true, something more than just "it is beneficial to believe it".
In any case, the existence or non-existence of a spiritual realm is irrelevant to the issue of whether or not people believe it. The majority do. Given that, it seems reasonable to make it a part of any game world that attempts to capture the richness of the real world.
This is true. The difficulty is that a lot of games deal with things that don't just end up saying "There exist people who believe this", but it frequently validates that belief. A priest who claims god exists is one thing, but a priest that claims god gives him the power to heal, and the game validates this by making it work, ends up validating that viewpoint. To take a non-god example of a religion, the article (did you read it?) mentioned Ultima IV. In Ultima IV, the religion was not just presented as "this is something people in the world believe", but as "This is THE TRUTH in this world, and this religion WORKS - because the game enforced the 8 virtues and required that you uphold them in order to get to the end goal of becoming an avatar.
For an example of a game that does work like you suggested, there's the Hammerites and the Mechanists from Thief. The religion contained believers, but they may or may not be correct in their beliefs and the game didn't really do anything to answer that question. (This was made easier partly by the fact that the religion of the Hammerites doesn't really mention anything metaphysical - it JUST talked about what is good and righteous to do, and not about what spirits and gods might exist. In that regard it was almost more of a philosophy than a religion.)
I think the point was this: People who find religion laudable wouldn't consider it to be escapism, while poeple who do think of it as escapism are the ones who don't find it laudable - so escapist religion ends up appealing to nobody - not the believer, not the unbeliever. I don't personally agree with this, mind you, but I think that was the point that was trying to be made.
Science asks 'how?' where religion asks 'why?'
False.
How did the earth form?
How did the plants and animals get here?
Religion's retreat into staying with only the "why" questions is a relatively modern development, one borne from the fact that it really did a terrible job at the "how" questions and had to retreat or look silly. So now the mainstream Christians no longer try to defend a literal interpetation of Genesis - because Genesis is mostly a "how" book, not a "why" book.
How did the earth form - religion DOES try to answer this "how" question. How did the plants and animals get to be here - religion DOES try to answer this "how" question. I don't know where you get this idea that religion stays away from the "how" questions. At least at first it did. It has had to slowly retreat from that over the years so that *today* it just has the "why" questions left, but that's relatively modern.
And if some one, of grander or lesser intellect than ourselves (isn't that just so arrogant?) should choose a system of belief centered upon an ethical imperative
then they are doing the exact same thing as everyone else, atheist or otherwise.
Ethical systems do not require belief in a god.
while a religious person stands in utter amazement at the number of questions.
Your implication that this requires religion is, of course, a lie.
When presented with an unkown, the atheist labels it as "unknown". The theist labels it as "god".
How do you know for sure that Leprechauns don't exist? Do you? Can you disprove them? Yet I suspect that you don't believe in them, most likely. Neither do I. Yet I don't have a single shred of proof that they cannot possibly exist. I also have no proof that there are no US Navy aircraft carriers painted blue with pink polkadots, yet I'm not going to give the idea any shred of benefit of the doubt.
Proof is unnecessary for disbelief, because disbelief is the reasonable default hypothesis for any proposed existence question. It's the only falsifiable position.
If we as a people just dismiss Christian and other Religion as mere folklore.
There is nothing "mere" about folklore. It tells us much about what a people believed, how they thought, and what their core values were. It's just that it fails utterly to tell us a single thing about the real world outside of social human concerns.
Questions like "is there a God" are NOT RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS. They are scientific ones. Period. They belong in exactly the same category as "is there a Sun", or "is there life on other planets". Questions like "What should we do with the world, given it's current state - how do we want to change it?" THOSE are religious questions. This is one of the big beefs I have with religions these days - they take questions of pure fact and try to attach moral signifigance to them, and that's just plain, well, *wrong*.
Yes. But foreknowledge does not imply a lack of choice.
It does if the entity with the foreknowlege is omnipotent and omniscient. The idea of a god with those two properties existing is incompatable with the idea of people having free will. For me to have free will, God has to be capable of having made the WRONG prediction about my choices. Otherwise my future is already written and fated to be what god thinks it's going to be.
When I first learned bible stories (as a Bahii, not as a Christian) I thought they were *all* fables, and that INCLUDES the really important core story - of the ressurection (still do). I remember the day I finally figured out that other people took it seriously. It wasn't until 6th grade. I was terrified because I had the epiphany of realizing I was surrounded by insane people. It was really frightening. To this day I find it hilarious that religious scholars try to sift which parts are metaphor from which parts are literal - thereby gaining the ability to make their bible say whatever they want it to say. That's why someone telling me "I'm a Christian" gives me no fruitful information whatsoever on what their moral views are. People have used the same book to defend just about anything from opposite sides - all by careful selective choices as to which parts to highlight and which parts to gloss over.
People pick their morality FIRST, and then try to mesh it with their religion SECOND. Religion doesn't cause morality. It is used by most as their *justification* for it.
The Bahii religion was supposed to expose me to many different religions so I could "learn" that they were all the same at some core level and thus came from the same core god. Instead I learned that they were all the same at some core level and thus were most likely made up by ordinary people. I can't really remember ever having been a believer.
Eve didn't have the knowlege of good and evil yet, according to the fable. That's what the tree was going to give her. So how is it that it was right for God to expect her to know that it was good to obey god's order and evil to disobey it? That was knowlege that, according to the story itself, was being deliberately kept away from her.
Which makes God quite sadistic when you think on it. If it is true that Adam and Eve had zero knowlege whatsoever about what makes the difference between good and evil, then that means God was being cruel when he decided they needed to be punished for disobeying his order to avoid eating from the tree of knowlege. After all, why follow god's orders? Is following god's orders something you should do because it is Good? If so, then that's knowlege that was still being kept from Adam and Eve, artificially, BY god himself, and they couldn't possibly be expected to realize there was anything wrong with disobeying god until after they had the knowlege from the tree.
This is one of the big problems I have with literal Christianity. It's moral system as portrayed by it's fables isn't even *internally* consistent.