Beleg Cúthalion on 5/8/2009 at 07:47

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Honestly I cannot see the church interfering with my daily life to the extent you just described. What concerns the rest... I don't know if they're really redundant. I consider them not as plain rules but as ideals one should aspire to. The state for instance doesn't care about marriages but usually people are better off (that is, feel better and have a better budget) when living in a family, even if it means to step back from one's very precious personal freedom. The rituals again are so deep into the very religion that you'd have to question them first and not the church around. But what I wanted to say every earlier was that you shouldn't abolish an apparently outdated system just because the things it ensured (mainly with ideal support and not direct influence) are meanwhile covered by other institutions. To strain once again my democracy example: Would you like people to forget about democracy once they have a system of electing a president? Or don't you think they should be kept aware of how they came so far and what the essence of their idea is etc.?It just sounds to me as if someone saying this would be so arrogant and never strain himself in order to do something for other people. I'm quite sure you do nonetheless but the way you put it in words sounded different to me (that's why I also wrote "sounds" in my first reaction).This issue is interesting if you throw in the evolutionary system like a lot of prominent atheists do nowadays. How would you justify an ethical system protecting the human being with "natural" means? Well, he/she is part of the community and thus useful, even if he/shes does something bad. Now try to apply a larger scale, even a murderer could be saved just because he maybe has some knowledge the community needs so killing him could turn out ill-advised. So now imagine you have a serial killer who knows nothing useful and is only a threat to everyone. In this case there would be nothing in this world to justify keeping him alive and you'd have to invoke something untouchable to save him. That's what IMHO religion is for, it reminds you of an ideal which cannot be reached but should always be aimed at, even if the contexts and situations on this earth change.

What e.g. the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_Foundation) Giordano Bruno Foundation does is promoting this sort of natural evolutionary humanism which accepts the full "biology" of humans, denies the free will but still tries to establish some kind of floating ethical system. But it clearly says that everything cumbersome will be dropped. Now someone tell me that this is 1.) right and 2.) not another kind of religion-to-be.Pity if you can't but apparently a lot of people throughout history were able to. What's the problem with imagining something supernatural and undetectable? IF there is something like this our images will surely be wrong and all that, but the sheer possibility to think of it isn't "nonsensical". No matter how eloquently you put it, what you're bringing on here is a simple there-is-only-our-world-and-thus-no-supernatural-stuff argument. No, not argument, opinion. It is perfectly right to believe that you can (pars pro toto) only "see what's there", but in fact you try to deny something that's outside of your means and think it's impossible just because of that. The only scientificly correct standpoint to this is that we as natural beings cannot (directly, with our usual means etc.) know if there is a supernatural power. And that's agnosticism.No, I said that the result you see is natural but the cause for the very little accidents of which our world consists can probably never be explained down to the last (and are thus a possible way of acting for a creator, but again I don't like painting things like that so clearly). They are just there and fine and all that, but you won't be able to explain why this or that stimulated gene mutates in this or that way. NOMA itself might be a different thing, but how I defined it for myself as explained earlier it works IMHO. It doesn't change our perception of things, it just assumes that accidents are/can be guided by some supernatural intelligence.Sounds like somone else suffering from strange interpretations of religion. Well, I don't care about America right now, just one thing: This "experimental lense" might be just the assumption that there is a god/supernatural thing etc., but this is one way to see the world. You will hardly find things in religion which heavily contradict the rules of our natural world AND which cannot be explained by limited perception of ancient authors or different ways of interpretation, so let's just assume every religion CAN be adapted to modern life et alii. The other expoerimental lense is to assume that there is nothing else but what I can see, ergo the (one might call it stubborn as well) atheist/natural perception. If there is a sort of active 50% chance for every "version" of the world to happen (just for theory, let's imagine there is half a god), both views are at least equally blind. One because it assumes things to happen according to a (non existant) plan, the other because it refuses to see anything behind its limited perception. The wise answer is to say I cannot know. The personal thing is to say either I do believe there is more to this world than meets the eye or I believe there is only this unless proven otherwise. And now you form a sentence denying the reconcilability of reading the Bible and intelligence?

Who finds typing erros may keep them.

Herr_Garrett on 5/8/2009 at 08:33

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The main difference I see between atheists and non-atheists (I use this word because I'm not an atheist and yet not religious) is the fact that non-atheists have one last step before the ultimate mystery: the acceptance/belief/knowledge that a g/God must/may/does exist.

Atheists merely say "this is like this, we'll never know how the world was created, end of discussion, STFU", non-atheists say "this is like that, that God fellow created the world, we'll never know how, end of discussion, STFU".

The thing you complain so much about is like complaining about the fact that you have the cue ball in billiard. Ultimately all the balls go down, only some do it with the cue ball and others without it.

Vivian on 5/8/2009 at 08:48

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Fine, fine - all you religous types, what has you convinced there is a god? (as in, a human-recognizable omniscient personality with an interest in your wellbeing). Because I have never seen or experienced anything to suggest even the slightest hint that the universe as we know it isn't a big ball of quantum, heat gradients and gravity that can be entirely explained (ourselves included) by theories of optimisation. Why do you need a god (and believe me, I do consider him/it to have been made up by people)? Is it fear of death? Of not really mattering? Why do you need to reassure yourselves that you are really 'special guys', or in fact (and this really annoys me sometimes), why do you need the threat of supernatural disapproval to be nice to people? I just do it because it's the obvious way to improve life for everyone.

I'll be honest and admit something - when people tell me they're religious, I do see it as a sign of some kind of personal weakness. Like they are too ignorant, stupid or scared to deal with the universe as it is, so they take the easier/more comforting route of believing what are essentially works of fiction.

rachel on 5/8/2009 at 09:11

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The fundamental reasoning in Descartes' philosophy is doubt. Doubt everything and build your worldview from there. The only certain thing is that you exist, because you think about yourself and doubting your own existence de facto proves it.

About God, his thought was a convoluted logical deduction that by having the idea of God, therefore God must exist. (short version, for the long one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_argument) Wiki's your friend. Kind of like Anselm's argument.

Descartes caught a lot of flack because people believed he promoted atheism as his idea of God was not the catholic one.

Vivian on 5/8/2009 at 09:22

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Beleg - justification for keeping 'serial killers' etc alive is study, far as I can see. They're certainly not going to tell you as much about what drives people to such extremes when they're dead.