Thread: The Church Strikes Again

Alvis Alendran said Details of belief as taught or discussed. You don't actually need a God to have a religion. Click to expand... Correct most sects of Buddhism, for example, do not actually have a god, but you do need belief to have a religion. You need to accept that something is real regardless of all other factors. Anyone who accepts the facts without understanding them is also guilty of this, but for those of us who know what we are talking about, and know where those facts come from, there is no belief. There is knowledge. Alvis Alendran said They stand in smug superior judgement to anyone who doesn't subscribe to their belief that empirical evidence is the answer to all things. Click to expand... Why yes, I do believe I am superior to someone who worships an ideology that says ignorance is good and doubt and skepticism are bad. I believe I am superior to someone who says that the natural order of things is flawed, and that we should feel guilty about who we are. Alvis Alendran said They claim that they don't want to have to listen to any religious drivel shoved in their face against their will, but it's perfectly acceptable to force feed their own belief into others. Click to expand... As I have said, they are not beliefs. Science is not about force-feeding facts. Science is about showing you how to find them for yourself. As HP Lovecraft so famously said, If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. Alvis Alendran said Most of the religious people I know just wantto go their own way, and live with their own beliefs, and not have to be mocked or harrassed for it. Click to expand... If you want to believe that some white, ageless, bearded man is running the cosmos, and you want to live your life and let me live mine, be my guest. But when people of power like, say, a senator are restricting environmental reform because global warming is just scientific drivel and refusing to refurbish the education system because science is just an opinion, that angers me. When people create schools that brainwash children into scoffing at evolution despite the fact that it has been proven to the same degree as gravity, and then get away with it without a single criminal charge, that angers me. Alvis Alendran said If you take away the religion from their actions, what's left? An asshole. And those come from everywhere. If they weren't hiding behind religion, then they'd probably shift to hiding behind freedom of expression. Click to expand... Assholes will be assholes and idiots will be idiots, agreed. But religion gives them power. And an asshole with the power to amass followers is a lot more terrifying than an asshole with a blog. Alvis Alendran said That being said, I would love to see a moment when if someone uses their religion to justify their own hatred and tried to use it against other people, they should be excommunicated from their church, cut off from their excuse, and shown to simply be an asshole trying to foist their opinions on others. Click to expand... That only works in a system that actually doubts its figure of authority. And as I've already mentioned, doubt in religion is a terrible thing. Blind obedience, on the other hand... Alvis Alendran said Proof, impartial bias, evolution vs. creationism, etc. Click to expand... I am glad that you did not utterly refute evolution, since that would make proving you wrong too easy. Instead you went for the neo-religious view and spoke of coexistence of god and science. There are, of course, two ways of doing this. The first, and most common, is the famous watchmaker argument - that god created the world and let it go from there. While a noble endeavor, this only proves god insomuch as he is what science cannot explain yet - which, as I mentioned in my previous post, makes him an ever-receding pocket of human ignorance. Right now that pocket is about a fraction of a millisecond long after the beginning of the big bang that science has yet to completely explain, after which the history of the universe has been meticulously detailed, and it is getting smaller every day. The second, which you use, is the overseer argument - that god guides our world using science as his tool. This argument is countered by something called Occam's Razor - a logical mechanism that states that the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Allow me to explain. Hypothesis 1 Rain falls because water evaporates via heat from the sun's rays, condenses in clouds which move via wind currents, and then the rain falls when the condensation is sufficient that the water becomes liquid again. Hypothesis 2 Rain falls because the sun's rays pass into leprechauns relaxing on the water's surface, who become very angry and heat up, letting the heat pass into the water, which then evaporates. Another leprechaun in the air catches all the water vapor in the absorption radius of the cloud and puts it all into the cloud, and then wrings the cloud dry when it becomes too dense and heavy. Essentially, the simplest argument for which the question how? is answered as often as possible if not always since an assumption does not answer the question of how, because it is something taken for granted should be selected in any logical endeavor. And while an argument can exist with the leprechauns in it without compromising the fact that evaporation and condensation occurs, it is unnecessarily complex and creates the unnecessary assumption that leprechauns exist. Thus, like our leprechauns, god is cut out via Occam's Razor because he is completely unnecessary in the explanation of the workings of our universe. I need to find some synonyms for unnecessary.