Being redeemed from an obstacle a god created doesn't seem much like redemption. Also that still doesn't explain why a tree was created that specifically contains evil, and the point that this god can't be omnipotent if free will exists.
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The falsity of religion & God(s) is so self evident, m'lady
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Being redeemed from an obstacle a god created doesn't seem much like redemption. Also that still doesn't explain why a tree was created that specifically contains evil, and the point that this god can't be omnipotent if free will exists.
Shin Kojima
Banned
As much as I dislike religion, I think it's still needed to keep the people in check who otherwise think they're not capable of morality.
Sweden calling, what's up with the whole "neckbeard, fedora wearing atheist" thing? If i'm not mistaken that tag gets applied to forum-goers and video game nerds as well.
You mean people who say stuff like "if i didn't have God i'd do all kinds of crazy shit; smoke crack, steal cars and beat up my neighbour - but i don't, 'cus i've got Jesus!"?
I have a hard time believing that they'd actually do those things if they deconverted. And if they did they'd be quickly reminded of: the justice system.
EDIT: Sorry for double post, thought the thread was moving faster than it was..
...Scatter...
Banned
self evident
more like
self shredident
I would like to donate some conditioner to that dry hair
thelatestmodel
Junior, please.
I actually disagree with this, although I believe it will take hundreds, if not thousands of years, and lots of bloodshed. Life without organized religion is the way forward. We no longer need it, science has shown us the way.
My ultimate hope for humanity is that we abandon religion, think of ourselves as human first instead of black / white, Christian / Muslim or whatever, and start to actually look after ourselves and make real progress.
But it will probably remain a distant dream.
ZackieChan
Member
And a certain percentage of new ones are gonna act like they're the first one to ever realize that there isn't a God, dazzling us with their revelations. Most of us just accept it and move on.
maquiladora
Member
If you need to believe in some old guys ravings in a magical storybook written hundreds of years ago in order to be keep your morals in check then something in seriously fucked up.
bengraven
Member
Which is funny because Christians can say the same thing.
God exists because it's obvious that someone had to create all of this.
Earthpainting
Member
If we're not tipping fedoras, we're talking about tipping protocol in establishments, or discussing the merits of cutting the tip off wangskin.
I mean, yeah, life without religion is and has been "the way" for a lot of people in a lot of countries around the globe. Religion has never been an option or even enticing one for those people - like me, i've been an atheist my whole life. I didn't know what the word atheist meant or that it even existed when i was, say 12, but i never looked at the world or it's creatures and thought to myself that it had been created by some thing.
I understood at an early age that this planet had been around for a long long time and that my kind are pretty "new" to this Earth. That's one of the reasons i was so nerdy about dinosaurs, because i knew they had walked this Earth millions of years ago and that the Earth looked a lot different then. The history of this planet and the universe itself made me the science nerd i am today.
Theists talk about "the awe of god", but i just need to look at this very planet and the evolution of the different species that lives here to be filled with just that; awe. And beauty.
crazygambit
Member
That's a different question though. I think both are relevant.
I remember when I was about 5, some older kid told me Santa didn't exist. My mind immediately processed this information and came to the conclusion that he was of course telling the truth. I hadn't really thought about how Santa worked before, but after the tiniest amount of critical thinking by a 5 year old, it all fell apart. It was clear to me there could be no such thing as a man delivering presents to every kid in the world on 1 night.
I saw some other kids experience the same thing, an older kid telling them Santa wasn't real and the reactions were quite different. They would double down on their belief, even claiming they'd seen him and would not be convinced otherwise no matter what.
Religion and God works in pretty much the same way IMO. Just like the OP proposes, it can't stand any sort of critical analysis.
I was talking with a religious person about heaven and he said animals didn't go to heaven, which got me thinking: what's the cut off point? Do only homo-sapiens go to heaven, meaning I'm gonna be finding cavemen there? Or maybe even earlier stages in human evolution? Is the cut-off at a much later date, where humans were more civilized? How was this decided?
I think once you start to get into the details of how things are supposed to work it all starts to fall apart and it's pretty clear it's all a story to make our short life-spans more bearable.
As for the question of whether that's a net positive or not, I can't answer.
Also another question that we should ask ourselves is whether or not we want a world controller by an all seeing all knowing god. I don't know if any of you have seen Person of Interest (great show btw), but most of the qualities we ascribe to God, like being all knowing, all seeing, to interact in several places at the same time, are all qualities computers already have. A sufficiently powerful AI, would probably be indistinguishable from the God described in the scriptures. Do we want to live in a world controlled by such AI? Maybe we'll end up creating God after all.
Shin Kojima
Banned
Well, I never said I didn't think something is seriously fucked up..
Nah, OT will always be "Depressing News of the Day" forum.
There have been a number of religious threads in the past, but I've only noticed within the past few months that the number of religious threads have gone up more than usual.
There's only one of me, brah
The way they phrase it, I don't know if they forget about or don't give a shit about the justice system at all. I wonder if the latter is actually true for much of them, or they're just talking shit, making up some excuse to justify their beliefs and explain why everyone should be religious, and would shit their pants if they were taken in.
Yeah this shit makes no sense unless you consider the Adam and Eve story to be true, then there were only homo sapiens and A&E's descendents are the only ones that are judged. But we know that's not true at all, so...
DragonSworne
Banned
Evolution
Religion is not needed as those who lack morality can be educated (Or kept aside if they are a danger to society) to understand what is acceptable in society.
You can't explain that!
Now this is a somewhat original theory, but, yet again, what evidence has lead you to believe this? What sort of simulation is it?
Evidence?
crazygambit
Member
I don't think even (non-crazy) religious people believe that. I mean I went to a catholic school and Adam and Eve was always a just a metaphor for how the world was created. Evolution has been officially recognized by the catholic church for a very long time now (their view is that it's all God's plan and all that), so there really isn't any explanation about how heaven works.
The current Pope recently said animals did indeed go to heaven. It almost seems like they're making it up as the go along.
Déja vu
bengraven
Member
Then why we still got Capcom?
Cybrwzrd
Banned
It is interesting how ONLY when it comes to religion, the onus is only on those trying to prove the negative...
If I told you that Tootsie Rolls were the feces of tiny purple elephants and the factory is just an illusion the onus would be on me to prove it, even though all the evidence points to the fact that they are actually made in a factory in Mexico City (or Chicago or Cambridge, Mass).
I must say I prefer the religious over agnostics, because at least they have picked a side - however wrong it may be. What makes agnostics so irritating is that their view of the above absurdity would be - well you can't prove it either way and dismiss the rational people who have evidence of a factory and it's production because tootsie rolls look and smell like turds.
If I told you that Tootsie Rolls were the feces of tiny purple elephants and the factory is just an illusion the onus would be on me to prove it, even though all the evidence points to the fact that they are actually made in a factory in Mexico City (or Chicago or Cambridge, Mass).
I must say I prefer the religious over agnostics, because at least they have picked a side - however wrong it may be. What makes agnostics so irritating is that their view of the above absurdity would be - well you can't prove it either way and dismiss the rational people who have evidence of a factory and it's production because tootsie rolls look and smell like turds.
Trojita
Rapid Response Threadmaker
Original theory? Have you read fiction in the last 20 years?
Please don't ever use the phrase "logical necessity" ever again.
DragonSworne
Banned
You got me.
CornBurrito
Member
On a related note, why do people these day speak so matter-of-factly about God when extremists do things like throw homosexuals off rooftops in the name of God? You'll get people saying that God obviously doesn't condone such behaviors, but there's really no guarantee of that is there? Why can't God be a being totally at odds with modern human morality? Shouldn't we be agnostic in regards to whether or not God supports barbaric actions? I think that people selectively push for agnosticism. If you want to state 100% that God doesn't support some (to our modern sensibilities) offensive action? You're golden. If you want to state 100% that the God of the Bible doesn't exist? Woah woah woah back it up, we can't know that for sure.
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lol im dying
Logic. Why would we be in the original universe? The odds are stacked against us. It would also explain the possible dearth of intelligent civilisations. Our creator set it up that way.
Some interesting experiments in the area:
http://news.yahoo.com/universe-really-hologram-203240505.html
How do you know the odds are stacked against us if you have no evidence of there being a universe outside of this one? Especially one that created this one (or has the capabilities to)?
DeathoftheEndless
Crashing this plane... with no survivors!
Constrained logic. Only logical under the baseless assumption that there can be a single universe from which all other (simulated) universes stem.
If you accept the premise (and you can do so on a conditional, probabilistic basis) that universes can exist in multiplicity - then it would follow that we would only exist in a universe that provides the conditions to allow us to exist AND observe the universe in kind.
... You post that the day after the 70 year anniversary of Auschwitz? C'mon now.
It was too meta for this forum sorry.
I just think that a large majority of people always have a sense of wonder, and can't help but think at the beauty of it all , at the sense it does, as why we're here and what were before us. And then another large majority of people need a sense of community, of being part of an order, of having structures in society that cannot be broken.
The formers are spiritualist religious people. They don't believe in rules, they believe in the "beauty" of nature if you like.
The latters believe in order, and not in people. They want to believe they are part of something important because they can't see importance in the beauty of nature itself. Those are the majority of the "religious" people of today. Which i'd argue are really not religious at all; more like bind in cultural and societal dogmas, not in the exploration of the self and the unknown.
The problem here imho is that modern "religions" have all a basis in the spirituality that more or less all human have, but use it only a pretext to justify societal structures, and not push toward those feels we innately have. The simple idea that something can be true always for such fickle, variable things like human societies and moral values require you to refuse any change for the worse but for the better too, it deny progress itself, it's a dead branch in the evolutionary tree of ideas.
So no, i don't think religion itself is stupid because i think a lot of people used it a source of motivation. Many scientist of the antiquity like Galileo itself was drawn by the conviction that things had to be simple and elegant because a creator god did them, but in general, it's a more primitive instinct. It wasn't religion that put in prison, it was the church a very temporal power. Einstein was pretty similar, and his faith in a perfect order was so strong that he rejected Quantum Mechanics for many years, before the actual implications of the theory were clear.
The discussion on God is really similar on the discussion on numbers in a sense. You can't prove that either exist (it's an interesting discussion, the one between idealists, concretists and symbolists i believe, i dunno the exact english denomination for those three train of thoughts). Well, at least number works.
Yeah. I agree that most religions are bullshit, but until science can explain what religion tries to do it's better to keep an open mind. The big bang is a start, but raises more questions than answers. And even when we explain the creation of this universe, what about the others? What about the nature of reality outside of these multiverses? Science don't know shit, and we need to stop acting like we have it figured out.
It all still feels like a failed experiment to me anyway.
Thing is, our understanding of the nature of the universe is significantly beyond that which most even well read people on the subject understand. It's far more bizarre when you get in there, and our understanding goes far enough to rule certain possibilities out of the question. We narrow in on particular explanations. The gaps excite scientists, but I would imagine the reality of what the gaps are would be rather disappointing to someone trying to find their sequitur to justify their belief.
Maninthemirror
Banned
Some people have small trials, some people have bigger trials and some have ultimate trials, the lessons learnt from humanity as a result of those trials which is a result of man's free will to chose to be good to people or bad to people, make good decisions or bad decisions so that it becomes a lesson not to lean on the path which will get you the wrath of God per say comes into play here.
to a disbeliever the life starts at birth and ends at death, to a believer, life starts just before birth and ends at death but a much longer afterlife begins, the outcome of which depends on the struggle they endured and how they carried themselves in the life before them if they made good decisions or bad decisions nomatter the suffering.
I read somewhere that if you see the difference between life and afterlife, afterlife is like the length from one end of earth to the other while the afterlife would be more like the distance from the edge of the solar system to the sun, with the life being the suffering and trial for everyone (no one essentially lives a perfect life) and afterlife being the result of if you basically a good person or not.
the difference in thinking between a believer and disbeliever is vastly different in this matter, a disbeliever of God would mock the fact that no prayers are answered and question the existence of God because of suffering yet the fact remains he does not believe in a God so he is not questioning God, he is questioning your belief in God but what he doesn't know is that the believer in God thinks differently. he sees this life as a vessel which is infinitely small compared to what happens next but it is essential still because when this person in this infinitely small life is steadfast in the face of adversity, has patience, is good and prays for some good, in the end he knows it doesnt matter if the good will come in this life to remove some suffering or it won't, the prayers might be answered in this life for things to allay suffering but the ultimate prayer will be answered when his judgement comes and he is shown as being put in a good place in the afterlife as a result of facing the trials of his life by being steadfast and good.
The Albatross
Member
Freakzilla, is your username named after professional wrestler Scott "Big Poppa Pump" Steiner? Who went by the name "Freakzilla" to his fans.
That's why I said somewhat. Relative to this thread, not in the world in general. Mea culpa.
I think this most certainly cannot be the case. Our universe may be embedded in some higher dimension or ever increasing reductionary mechanic. But it would be naturalistic emergence of complexity. I'm more certain that we don't live in a simulation constructed by a higher intelligent power than I am about my own atheism.
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