Religion, war and violence

[MudFu]

Well at least someone else is in this conversation now...its been a long time of just two of us talking back and forward. But I think this topic will slow down now, or else everything will be repeated. Not much new can be said.

[Stoner Shadow Wolf]

maybe i should read back thoroughly, i always have something to say which no one wants to hear

edit: naw, i have said what i can say, im just ignored too easily

[Oneironaut]

Its like...ok...this is a curde way of relating it but here goes. 1+1 is 2, but you can also say 1+1 is 11. I can accept the idea that it has to outcomes but I will always choose one outcome, the 2. Its the same as the possiblity of God or not. I can see both but I will always choose one. This may not make sence but its the best I can do.

No, sorry, that doesn't make any sense. 1 + 1 can never equal 11. Omnipotence and omniscience can never exist in the same being. No matter how you look at it, 2 + 2 = 4, and there is no God.

I choose to believe that God wants us to advance ourselves. God do not want us to relie on the powers that God holds. God wants us to achive. This is my belief. Others will not agree but I'm not others.

So where's the evidence that God exists? That is to say, what is it about our world that you experienced that caused you to believe in God? In your world, he just doesn't interact with the physical universe in any way. That certainly seems to best fit the evidence, at least. But then, how can you state that God exists, if there isn't anything in our physical universe which suggests that he does? How did the knowledge of God get from his protective barrier beyond the event horizon of our universe to your brain? Unless you're just making shit up, that is.

We still and may forever not understand God (keeping in mine that their could be). It will be something that can never be fully explained. Whats the point in anything? Many things, we as humans do, have no real point, but we still do them. The reason no one can tell you what God is, is that no one knows.

Wait...you're saying that nobody knows what God is. So, how can you know it exists? What is it that you are claiming exists? I can't just say I believe in snooglefrumps but nobody knows what snooglefrumps are. That's a meaningless statement. So either tell me something about what God is, or just admit that you're really an atheist underneath it all.

You mean destiny. I do not believe we have a choosen path that we have to walk down. I also do not believe God can see what will be.

So how can God be all-powerful, if he doesn't have the power to see into the future? Hell, even humans can form vague ideas about what's going to happen in the future.

You can choose your future, you do have free will, but once again this is how I see it. Unknown for sure but it is still my ideas.

And where did you get that idea? Oh that's right, you pulled it right out of your ass. Please, if you care about the truth in the slightest, try to back your beliefs up with arguments or revise them to better fit the evidence. Just stating something does not make it so.

I can not prove it and you can not dismiss it.

What is there to dismiss? You tell me there's a God, but you don't know what God is, and you're open to the possibility that this thing that you can't even identify might not even be there. Of course it's impossible to dismiss such a vague statement.

You tell me we have something called "free will", but you refuse to define that too. If we look into the matter hard enough, we find that free will is just as meaningless a concept. From what we can observe, people's behavior is dependent upon various factors: what they've learned from previous experiences, the structure of their brains, their emotional state, their state of consciousness, and so forth, whose physical reality can be shown. So what is "free will"? People say that free will is when something makes decisions for us independent of these phenomena, "on its own" somehow. But what, then, does it base its decisions on, if not for those phenomena? Does it choose decisions at random? Nobody seems to be claiming that. The answer is that free will does not exist; our behavior is based on a range of phenomena in the brain, ultimately derived from our genes, our experiences, and our current state of mind.

Someday, maybe, we will have the answers, but as for now we live and we hope for more.

It is certain that we will know more in the future. But knowledge comes from science, not from faith. Knowledge comes from observation about the world, and forming theories that fit those observations. That is the only way to obtain knowledge. Knowledge cannot be found by throwing logic out the window and making shit up.

I am hoping for many things, love, accpence, peace, happiness for friends and family and everyone and I hope my children will live a good life.

I hope for the same things, and I know that peace on Earth can only be achieved once faith is defeated and replaced with rational, critical thought. We have to keep an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out. Be receptive to new ideas, but don't believe in them unless they can show some evidence.

[MudFu]

No, sorry, that doesn't make any sense. 1 + 1 can never equal 11.

Logical your right. But if you look at it this way take the 1 from the first number and the 1 from the second number and combin them you have 11. It is possible but it is not logical.

You keep asking me the same questions and I keep telling you the same thing. Over and over I repeated myself. It is my belief and my idea. I am not stating facts. Stop asking me something over and over plz.

[Oneironaut]

All right, if you want to base your beliefs on things which aren't fact, that's fine for you. But I prefer to believe in things which are true.

[Polymirize]

But I prefer to believe in things which are true.

I think it's your notion of having access to "truth" in some special way that is causing all the misunderstandings in this thread.

I for one, wish that christian fundamentalists would realise that there are other paths to truth, rather than just through faith.

But I'll admit the scientists do a fairly bad job of admitting that at its most basic level, all of science is resting on assumptions about our world.

So it really does seem like intepretation can be everything sometimes.

Regardless of what side of the debate you come down on, you always seem to reduce to a claim that science is infallible, or that it has given us "truth". This is just like a believer claiming "god". Exactly the same actually. It stops the ability to continue having a conversation...

Unless you can show me there's some reason you get to have "truth"

[Oneironaut]

I think it's your notion of having access to "truth" in some special way that is causing all the misunderstandings in this thread.

I don't claim to have all the "truth", but what I am sure of is that the only way to truth is observation. What other possible way of knowing things is there? "Faith" just doesn't make any sense. If it's not based on observation, it's obviously based on making shit up. There's simply no other way of coming up with it.

I for one, wish that christian fundamentalists would realise that there are other paths to truth, rather than just through faith.

I wish they would realize that faith is not a path to truth. How can it be? Making a dogma out of things which have no evidence for them can only lead us astray from the truth.

But I'll admit the scientists do a fairly bad job of admitting that at its most basic level, all of science is resting on assumptions about our world.

Sure, but these are fairly uncontestable assumptions. The assumption that the universe tends to follow straightforward rules, for example. Or the assumption that the universe exists. These sorts of things are based on experience, as is all of science. Every theory in science needs to be able to be tested, and there needs to be some way to falsify it. That is not the case in "faith", where you just have to accept things as true, no questions asked. You don't need proof or evidence, you just assume whatever you want to be true is true, or you assume whatever your priest and your holy book say is true is true.

So it really does seem like intepretation can be everything sometimes.

Would you be prepared to provide an interpretation of the universe in which science doesn't work? In which there is no gravity or no electrons or no natural selection? Science reveals things about the universe which are verifiable through experience. Faith "reveals" things about the universe which just have to be taken on hearsay.

Regardless of what side of the debate you come down on, you always seem to reduce to a claim that science is infallible, or that it has given us "truth".

Note that science is not a thing, it is not a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. Namely, it is the method of looking at the universe, finding theories which fit the available evidence, and rigorously testing them to try to find what most closely approximates the truth. When some generally accepted piece of information is shown to be not in accord with the evidence at hand, it is thrown out or revised so that our understanding fits in with what we know. It isn't perfect, but it's by far the best way of understanding the universe that we have developed.

This is just like a believer claiming "god". Exactly the same actually. It stops the ability to continue having a conversation...

Huh?

Unless you can show me there's some reason you get to have "truth"

I don't claim to know everything about the "truth" that there is to know. But my method of trying to understand the universe — science — is far more reliable than "faith". Science is based on observation. Faith is based on...what? Guesswork? Self-deception? Deliberate lies? I don't know, but if it's not based on observation, it's not based in reality.

[F L E S H]

To the people of faith who are getting all riled up:

That's the freaking point! We want you to get mad, we want to provoke you to thought, we ultimately want you shed your childlike fantasy of a big daddy upstairs who'll give you some goodies after you die, but only if you've been a good boy during your life!

Sounds a bit like Santa Claus to me, and when did you stop believing in him, when you were 10-11-12? I wonder why don't people stop believe in Christianity at that same age? well, probably because of the big-ass churches that are around the world filled with sexually-repressed old men in robes who think they're always right.

Polymirize, there's a difference between empiricism and science. It's not a question of priests vs. scientists. There are other people too. The hardcore scientific view is just as harmful as religious ascetism. That being said, the answer does not lie "somewhere in the middle." But I'm not gonna go into that here, Nietzsche wrote a whole book on the subject called The Gay Science (Gay as in happy....).

[MudFu]

To the people of faith who are getting all riled up:

That's the freaking point! We want you to get mad, we want to provoke you to thought, we ultimately want you shed your childlike fantasy of a big daddy upstairs who'll give you some goodies after you die, but only if you've been a good boy during your life!

Sounds a bit like Santa Claus to me, and when did you stop believing in him, when you were 10-11-12? I wonder why don't people stop believe in Christianity at that same age? well, probably because of the big-ass churches that are around the world filled with sexually-repressed old men in robes who think they're always right.

Polymirize, there's a difference between empiricism and science. It's not a question of priests vs. scientists. There are other people too. The hardcore scientific view is just as harmful as religious ascetism. That being said, the answer does not lie "somewhere in the middle." But I'm not gonna go into that here, Nietzsche wrote a whole book on the subject called The Gay Science (Gay as in happy....).

I think this post would have been better if you posted it after someone showed sighs of anger, like when I said that Oneironaut was crossing the line of becoming an asshole. Anyways, nice way of putting something so blunt. You guys have no understanding of what we (as in people who have faith) believe. Not all people believe in God but they still have faith in certian things. Anyways I stand by what I said before. This is a spiritual forum. You guys are not spiritual. You are protesting our spirituality. You don't really have much of a place in this forum.

[beachguy in thongs]

To the people of faith who are getting all riled up:

That's the freaking point! We want you to get mad, we want to provoke you to thought, we ultimately want you shed your childlike fantasy of a big daddy upstairs who'll give you some goodies after you die, but only if you've been a good boy during your life!

The Gay Science (Gay as in happy....).

I grew up on Gay Lane.

That's a pretty good thought, a big daddy upstairs who'll give you some goodies after you die.

We may never need to find God and that may be His goal. People say they "find" God, but if they actually found Him, they would cease to exist.

And not come back.