You can't say that you haven't heard the word of God because I've told it to you just now
I can say it's not the only word of God I've heard.
I don't have to prove it's true, just make you aware that it is the truth.
Does not compute. With so many "truths", why is yours the right one? Ahh, silly me, you just said you don't have to prove it, so you must be the right one.
If you end up in hell, naturally, you will realise that you have made the wrong choice
Of course, that's the power of hindsight.
if you drink a finite amount of deadly poison, you die permanently.
I don't consider that an infinite punishment in the absence of an afterlife. At the point where you transition to being dead, the punishment is over as you no longer have the capacity to experience it. But, then again, my world view isn't based on the idea of judgement and fairness. The problem you face with infinite punishment for finite crime is that all crimes are punished equally* and that there's a will imposing these punishments on people. No one's saying you can't have infinite punishment for finite crime, just that it's unfair. With a being such as God thrown in there, it makes Him look kind of like a buttmunch for doing something like that. With no God or divine will or intent, well, there isn't a problem. Yeah, it sucks, but at least there's no puppet master pulling the strings in such a way to actively make the universe suck.
*If you didn't accept Jesus, you still share space with Hitler for the rest of eternity no matter how much of a philanthropist you may have been. Unless, of course, there are varying degrees of hell or you don't actually believe that it's about accepting Jesus and simply being mostly decent is all that's necessary.
tl;dr Pascal's Wager.
where ever you got that information, its very untrue
The old testament, I'd imagine. What with all the sanctioned killing and genocide.
Where do you think you came from? Random matter collecting in the universe? Where did the universe come from? Where did space, time, and matter come from? Out of nowhere? A "big bang" created the universe? So you came from a rock? Please explain to me these things...
*sigh*
Even if we couldn't explain where we came from, how does this validate your specific beliefs? The truthful answer would be "we don't know". How does one logically move from "I don't know" to "I know a god must have done it"? Seems rather contradictory to me that you manage to move from the state of complete ignorance (the "I don't know") to a state of less complete ignorance ("I know it was God"). That being said, let's dive into some of the specific points:
Where did space, time, and matter come from? Out of nowhere?
Probably yes, it's certainly possible. Although probably not "nothing" as you're thinking of it. Even in the most complete vacuum in our universe, there's always "something" there. Currently the net energy of the universe is 0 (but split into a positive part accounting for all the mass and kinetic and other forms of energy and a negative part accounting for the gravitational potential...roughly; it's a bit complicated), so it is plausible that the universe came from "nothing" in some sense. You'd have to be more specific about what you mean by "nowhere". Especially since nowhere can only be defined on some existing space and space only just started existing when the universe did.
So you came from a rock?
Not really, no, but it does demonstrate that you either haven't bothered to actually educate yourself on the matter or you're intentionally misrepresenting the science. Since you're now conflating abiogenesis, evolution, and the big bang, it's more likely the former option.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
I think that your post sounds pretty balanced, Peri.
Quote from Nazzer »
Did you miss the part where I talked about infinite punishment for a finite crime? I think you did.
I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to address every point in your post; there were many more I missed, I just responded to what I considered the main point. I didn't know that that was expected of me, but if this issue is more important to you, I'll try answering that too. Again, apologies for the misunderstanding.
So, here we go...
Heaven is where people with no sin belong, and Hell is the alternative. People accumulate sin on earth -- accumulate is the wrong word, I suppose, as sin isn't passive -- people commit sin on earth.
In my understanding, Hell didn't exist before sins existence. When Lucifer (later Satan) committed sin in heaven, he couldn't stay there, and was cast down by God into Hell.
Accepting Jesus as the son of God, and as your saviour, results in the nullification of your sins.
On Earth, the choice of your destination after life is yours. You can't say that you haven't heard the word of God because I've told it to you just now. I don't have to prove it's true, just make you aware that it is the truth. If you end up in hell, naturally, you will realise that you have made the wrong choice, but the fact that you didn't believe when you were supposed to means that you are now in Hell, locked in from the inside.
OK, last piece of logic, and also relevant to those of the "tl;dr" tendency, if you drink a finite amount of deadly poison, you die permanently. If you have a finite amount of sin attached to your soul, your soul suffers permanently. These wounds are exactly the same in terms of who inflicted them and how much.
Your theology is so convoluted it's not even funny.
Lets put it this way: God designed the system. He could have DESTROYED Satan instead of putting him in hell. He also could have designed a system in which people DON'T get punished eternally for not loving him.
Your poison analogy is awful. Dying from poison isn't a punishment, it's a consequence. No one is able to end it, and no one is ensuring that it continue. God, however, IS able to end punishment in hell, he just chooses not to. A better analogy for hell is a father whose son will be sent either into the attic to receive a blow-job if he loves his father, or into the basement to be tortured by a guy in a red suit for all eternity. This is nothing like your poison analogy, because a being other than the son is sending the son to be punished, and could intervene if he wanted to.
You still haven't justified your beliefs. God putting people in hell when they don't love him is no different from a mob boss saying "Hey, if you ain't gonna do me a favor, then I'll break your legs", except that when the mob boss breaks your legs, the punishment will eventually end, your legs will heal. You have no more choice about loving god than you do for doing the mob boss a favor. It's not "free will" if one option will result in an eternal punishment.
I know for certain for myself that it is the truth, and maybe I expressed the frustration I have at attempting to sharing it there.-
No, you don't KNOW. You BELIEVE. There is a difference between what a person believes and what a person knows. If it was the case that you KNOW, then you would be able to give me a reason for your belief other than faith, which is just the permission slip people give themselves for a belief that they don't' have any good justification for.
I consider hell a consequence, not a punishment. I don't think that God wants people to go to Hell, because he loves them, but that they choose either God's criterion for entering heaven, or Satan's criterion for entering hell. Once in hell, I believe that they are kept there by Satan.
So god is powerless over Satan? And he can't prevent nonbelievers from going to hell? If he is so powerless, then why call him god?
For the post that you have just ninja'd me with, I know gravitation occurs, but know nothing of gravitons. Neither does anybody else.
What a ridiculous non-answer. What analogy are you trying to make with gravitation and gravitons? Gravity is an observable phenomenon, and gravitons are defined as far as we know their properties. They fit in snugly with what we know about quantum field theory, and their existence is predicted by string theory.
Gravitons have explanatory power. Gods do not. Why must god be posited to account for the current state of the universe?
I don't know it's operation, but I know why I know it is there.
Stop trying to sound all philosophical. It's silly. You don't claim to know nothing about a god, you claim to know what he does and does not like, and you claim to know what he will do to people after their death. You claim to know far more about your god than scientists claim to know about gravitons. In fact, scientists don't claim to know ANYTHING about gravitons. They admit that they are entirely a hypothetical construct that has not made it to the status of theory yet. Comparing your claim to "know" that god exists to gravitons is, frankly, insulting.
One thing I wanted to address (not directed at anyone in particular) is the idea that belief is a choice. For me, I don't really consider this the case. My belief (or disbelief, as it were) is a conclusion, not a choice. To me a choice is what sandwich I get when I go to Potbelly or Jimmy John's, what clothes I put on in the morning, what game I want to play when I'm bored. My...philosophical position, for lack of a better term, isn't a choice. My position is based on evidence and that is all. I will go where the evidence does, if I'm shown to be wrong, I'll turn on a dime and change my mind, but this isn't by choice. If I held any of these religious beliefs, it'd be superficial at best. I'd be lying to myself and those around me and I'd know it.
If there's one thing I can appreciate about my parents (and this is really the only thing I can think of, but I digress) it's that my childhood was largely secular. My parents never mentioned anything about religion. They never said it was right or wrong. It just never came up. It didn't need to. My grandparents were religious so I was baptized and I went to Sunday school and performed in some of their church's functions, but I didn't really realize until later that I never actually believed any of it. It's funny because I believed in Santa Claus more than God and I think that's largely because my parents actually did things to reinforce that belief. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is I think it does well to explain why I think what I do and that's that God and His various religions are unnecessary, but we need more Santa.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
1. I'm rather sure the whole thing of 'freedom' means that some all-powerful god cannot just pluck us out of trouble. We have control over our own lives, and we take responsibility for that. If a god were to just get rid of hell then there would not be any real responsibility for our actions, and freedom would be moot.
2. Alas, gravitons are a very loose thing we made up to help us understand how gravity works. All we know is the effects of gravity and nothing else about it. Gravitons are just a theory we made so we'll have something to look for. This is how discovery works, we make a theory on how something works and look for it. Very rarely is this first thing in such a mysterious field the thing we are looking for.
3. It's insulting how offensive you are about this. Chill dude, take this a little better. Reason for existence and how something works are completely different fields that don't terribly contradict. Science is for the hows, philosophy is for the whys. To compare them is indeed a bit silly, but in no ways insulting to either field.
1. I'm rather sure the whole thing of 'freedom' means that some all-powerful god cannot just pluck us out of trouble. We have control over our own lives, and we take responsibility for that. If a god were to just get rid of hell then there would not be any real responsibility for our actions, and freedom would be moot.
This is nonsense. You are saying that if a father were to prevent his son from going to his basement where he would be tortured forever, even though he sent him there, that he would be violating his freedom to save him from his basement. If god invented the punishment of hell, he isn't violating a person's freedom by not sending them to it.
I am assuming that by "responsibility for our actions" the "action" you are speaking of is disbelief in god or refusal to accept the sacrifice of Jesus.
2. Alas, gravitons are a very loose thing we made up to help us understand how gravity works. All we know is the effects of gravity and nothing else about it. Gravitons are just a theory we made so we'll have something to look for. This is how discovery works, we make a theory on how something works and look for it. Very rarely is this first thing in such a mysterious field the thing we are looking for.
This is important: stop misusing the word theory. We don't create a THEORY and then look for it, we create a HYPOTHESIS and then try to demonstrate it. Gravitons were posited because they are predicted by a theory. What theory makes the prediction that a god exists?
3. It's insulting how offensive you are about this. Chill dude, take this a little better. Reason for existence and how something works are completely different fields that don't terribly contradict. Science is for the hows, philosophy is for the whys. To compare them is indeed a bit silly, but in no ways insulting to either field.
Saying "magic man done it" is not a "why", it is a "how.
This is nonsense. You are saying that if a father were to prevent his son from going to his basement where he would be tortured forever, even though he sent him there, that he would be violating his freedom to save him from his basement. If god invented the punishment of hell, he isn't violating a person's freedom by not sending them to it.
I am assuming that by "responsibility for our actions" the "action" you are speaking of is disbelief in god or refusal to accept the sacrifice of Jesus.
I don't think you understand the other guys philosophy, but then again I don't exactly hold the same as his so I can't say I do either. But I'm rather sure for this analogy to work the father would have to say "Don't go down into the basement." And by responsibility for our actions I mean being a *******, through killing and hate. Although again this depends on the views of the dude.
Quote from Nazzer »
This is important: stop misusing the word theory. We don't create a THEORY and then look for it, we create a HYPOTHESIS and then try to demonstrate it. Gravitons were posited because they are predicted by a theory. What theory makes the prediction that a god exists?
I do apologize for my misuse of the words here. I was looking more at how things were done than the literal definitions of the words themselves. Your last sentence does pose a bit of a problem because it assumes a god needs to be defined by science. As much as we love that stuff a being defined as all powerful need not be defined by something within the time scope of our history or the modern day.
Quote from Nazzer »
Saying "magic man done it" is not a "why", it is a "how.
Then you ran into a dude that took something in the wrong context. Those religious books seem more focused on portraying a meaning rather than giving a very precise history on how things have been.
And I'm tired of trying to defend the beliefs of another dude, seeing as I am not that other dude and don't believe what he believes. I don't want to leave your replies to my arguments up to him, but I don't want to continue this spiral down a path that won't lead anywhere simply because of the nature of the argument.
This is nonsense. You are saying that if a father were to prevent his son from going to his basement where he would be tortured forever, even though he sent him there, that he would be violating his freedom to save him from his basement. If god invented the punishment of hell, he isn't violating a person's freedom by not sending them to it.
I am assuming that by "responsibility for our actions" the "action" you are speaking of is disbelief in god or refusal to accept the sacrifice of Jesus.
I don't think you understand the other guys philosophy, but then again I don't exactly hold the same as his so I can't say I do either. But I'm rather sure for this analogy to work the father would have to say "Don't go down into the basement." And by responsibility for our actions I mean being a *******, through killing and hate. Although again this depends on the views of the dude.
In the analogy, the man will send you down there if you don't love him. Does this mean you have the freedom to choose whether you love him or not?
I do apologize for my misuse of the words here. I was looking more at how things were done than the literal definitions of the words themselves. Your last sentence does pose a bit of a problem because it assumes a god needs to be defined by science. As much as we love that stuff a being defined as all powerful need not be defined by something within the time scope of our history or the modern day.
I am not assuming that a god needs to be defined by science. I am saying that his comparison is insulting because he is comparing something that IS NOT science to something that IS science just because they are both unobservable, and in doing so asserting that I should accept his magic man just as much as I accept gravitons.
And a god does not need to be defined by science. It needs to be defined by the people proposing that a god exists. If there is no evidence that one exists, then both science AND philosophy dictate that one is unwarranted in believing that it exists.
Quote from Nazzer »
Saying "magic man done it" is not a "why", it is a "how.
[/quote]
Then you ran into a dude that took something in the wrong context. Those religious books seem more focused on portraying a meaning rather than giving a very precise history on how things have been.
[/quote]
Excuse me? The religious books aren't trying to express some deep philosophical meaning by attributing the existence of the universe to a creator deity. If they are, then that means that the bible does not actually support such a being's existence, and you can't claim that it is the word of such a deity. You don't get to say "this is just metaphor" for the entire book in one breath and then make claims about where this deity is going to send me in the afterlife in the next breath. That's would be an example of trying to eat your cake and have it to.
I don't see the point of not taking any religious text literally. You don't need to read the Bible, Bhagavad Gita to know anything about God, He's unknowable. Make up what you want about him, and if he's any good he'll let you into Funland just because you tried.
There should be as many ways for people to worship God as there are people.
Nothing can be proven objectively true, so the same could be said of all philosophy.
In epistemology, we have a certain "event horizon" of knowledge. It's a point at which something has so much evidence that to find evidence that it is false in the future is colossally unlikely.
It's true that we can't prove things objectively. However, this makes "knowledge" a useless word in practice. So, in the study of epistemology, we have added another definition of knowledge meaning "practical knowledge", or things that are safe to assume are true given the level of evidence in support of them.
The fact is that even though there are trillions of possibilities of how the universe functions, only ONE is true, and many have exactly zero evidence in support of them, or even might have evidence against them. For example, it is commonly said "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". This does not apply, however, in systems in which we would EXPECT evidence to appear in a particular place. For example, according to Intelligent Design, we should find body parts that are "irreducibly complex", that is, impossible to have evolved given their complexity. However, we have not found any such example. Sure, people have made propositions, like the Eye, Wing, the Bacterial Flagellum, and the Mammalian Immune System, but scientists successfully debunked every one of these, showing not only HOW they could have evolved, but demonstrating that there exist organisms today that display the various intermediates of each of these features. So, because Intelligent Design predicts that we should find evidence of a creator deity's hand at work in the world, but we do not find this evidence where it should present itself, that absence of evidence is in fact evidence of absence.
So what I am trying to say is that just because things can't be proven objectively doesn't mean we are justified making wild speculations, and especially not trying to legislate such speculation on others or living our lives with the assumption that such speculations are true.
In response to your opinion on the last few lines, I entirely agree that the 'speculations' should not be forced upon others as they are still in many parts of the world. Though I also believe that people should not only be educated in important theories such as evolution, but to also be shown how to understand the ideas behind religion (not to be taught to follow it), such as why people have developed these beliefs in the past. It's all part of greater understanding of the history of humanity, and as the atheist population grows I feel it's important to remember why people developed the beliefs that they have had. I know that you haven't said otherwise, but it's more in response to the origional topic than directly to your post.
Teachers should not even be attempting to teach your kids the why of religion. There's too many places for biases to be inserted. I would think that taking an objective look at why people believe in God would only weaken a students resolve to believe in any religion and I think the class would be construed to be anti-religious scientists teaching their kids not to believe in God.
Schools aren't qualified to teach these kinds of things anyways. Religion should be taught in church. Practical life skills in school.
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I fully support the teaching of comparative religion, as well as the teachinf of the bible as literature, given that it is pretty much required to gain a full understanding of English and American literature. Just the number of sayings and euphemisms that we got from the bible is reason enough. However, such a course should have stringent guidelines to make sure teachers arent teaching it as fact, be only available at the high school level, and most importantly be entirely an elective course.
From my studies of goverments, religion was used as a form of crowd control. While this makes sense i uess, i find it absurd when people treat it as if it were more, like a way of life. However, then i guess religion would need to be influential to control, so i guess it is all that they say it is, but i personally am not religious as have you ever seen islam? That country used a theological government and 20% of them are extremists, not to mention they blocked many sites on there comp over 'draw Muhammad day' which to me is just some silly little thing, absolutely harmless. Other religions are pretty bad too, some have condoned crusades over which religion is valid, considering people heretics for not following the religion, and even allowing superstitious theories to be science.
Thats all folks!
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Quote from dra6o0n »
Magic have a bigger priority than Technology when it comes to combat, but Mining and Crafting a bigger priority to Magic.
I can say it's not the only word of God I've heard.
Does not compute. With so many "truths", why is yours the right one? Ahh, silly me, you just said you don't have to prove it, so you must be the right one.
Of course, that's the power of hindsight.
I don't consider that an infinite punishment in the absence of an afterlife. At the point where you transition to being dead, the punishment is over as you no longer have the capacity to experience it. But, then again, my world view isn't based on the idea of judgement and fairness. The problem you face with infinite punishment for finite crime is that all crimes are punished equally* and that there's a will imposing these punishments on people. No one's saying you can't have infinite punishment for finite crime, just that it's unfair. With a being such as God thrown in there, it makes Him look kind of like a buttmunch for doing something like that. With no God or divine will or intent, well, there isn't a problem. Yeah, it sucks, but at least there's no puppet master pulling the strings in such a way to actively make the universe suck.
*If you didn't accept Jesus, you still share space with Hitler for the rest of eternity no matter how much of a philanthropist you may have been. Unless, of course, there are varying degrees of hell or you don't actually believe that it's about accepting Jesus and simply being mostly decent is all that's necessary.
tl;dr Pascal's Wager.
The old testament, I'd imagine. What with all the sanctioned killing and genocide.
*sigh*
Even if we couldn't explain where we came from, how does this validate your specific beliefs? The truthful answer would be "we don't know". How does one logically move from "I don't know" to "I know a god must have done it"? Seems rather contradictory to me that you manage to move from the state of complete ignorance (the "I don't know") to a state of less complete ignorance ("I know it was God"). That being said, let's dive into some of the specific points:
Probably yes, it's certainly possible. Although probably not "nothing" as you're thinking of it. Even in the most complete vacuum in our universe, there's always "something" there. Currently the net energy of the universe is 0 (but split into a positive part accounting for all the mass and kinetic and other forms of energy and a negative part accounting for the gravitational potential...roughly; it's a bit complicated), so it is plausible that the universe came from "nothing" in some sense. You'd have to be more specific about what you mean by "nowhere". Especially since nowhere can only be defined on some existing space and space only just started existing when the universe did.
Not really, no, but it does demonstrate that you either haven't bothered to actually educate yourself on the matter or you're intentionally misrepresenting the science. Since you're now conflating abiogenesis, evolution, and the big bang, it's more likely the former option.
Your theology is so convoluted it's not even funny.
Lets put it this way: God designed the system. He could have DESTROYED Satan instead of putting him in hell. He also could have designed a system in which people DON'T get punished eternally for not loving him.
Your poison analogy is awful. Dying from poison isn't a punishment, it's a consequence. No one is able to end it, and no one is ensuring that it continue. God, however, IS able to end punishment in hell, he just chooses not to. A better analogy for hell is a father whose son will be sent either into the attic to receive a blow-job if he loves his father, or into the basement to be tortured by a guy in a red suit for all eternity. This is nothing like your poison analogy, because a being other than the son is sending the son to be punished, and could intervene if he wanted to.
You still haven't justified your beliefs. God putting people in hell when they don't love him is no different from a mob boss saying "Hey, if you ain't gonna do me a favor, then I'll break your legs", except that when the mob boss breaks your legs, the punishment will eventually end, your legs will heal. You have no more choice about loving god than you do for doing the mob boss a favor. It's not "free will" if one option will result in an eternal punishment.
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No, you don't KNOW. You BELIEVE. There is a difference between what a person believes and what a person knows. If it was the case that you KNOW, then you would be able to give me a reason for your belief other than faith, which is just the permission slip people give themselves for a belief that they don't' have any good justification for.
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So god is powerless over Satan? And he can't prevent nonbelievers from going to hell? If he is so powerless, then why call him god?
What a ridiculous non-answer. What analogy are you trying to make with gravitation and gravitons? Gravity is an observable phenomenon, and gravitons are defined as far as we know their properties. They fit in snugly with what we know about quantum field theory, and their existence is predicted by string theory.
Gravitons have explanatory power. Gods do not. Why must god be posited to account for the current state of the universe?
Stop trying to sound all philosophical. It's silly. You don't claim to know nothing about a god, you claim to know what he does and does not like, and you claim to know what he will do to people after their death. You claim to know far more about your god than scientists claim to know about gravitons. In fact, scientists don't claim to know ANYTHING about gravitons. They admit that they are entirely a hypothetical construct that has not made it to the status of theory yet. Comparing your claim to "know" that god exists to gravitons is, frankly, insulting.
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One thing I wanted to address (not directed at anyone in particular) is the idea that belief is a choice. For me, I don't really consider this the case. My belief (or disbelief, as it were) is a conclusion, not a choice. To me a choice is what sandwich I get when I go to Potbelly or Jimmy John's, what clothes I put on in the morning, what game I want to play when I'm bored. My...philosophical position, for lack of a better term, isn't a choice. My position is based on evidence and that is all. I will go where the evidence does, if I'm shown to be wrong, I'll turn on a dime and change my mind, but this isn't by choice. If I held any of these religious beliefs, it'd be superficial at best. I'd be lying to myself and those around me and I'd know it.
If there's one thing I can appreciate about my parents (and this is really the only thing I can think of, but I digress) it's that my childhood was largely secular. My parents never mentioned anything about religion. They never said it was right or wrong. It just never came up. It didn't need to. My grandparents were religious so I was baptized and I went to Sunday school and performed in some of their church's functions, but I didn't really realize until later that I never actually believed any of it. It's funny because I believed in Santa Claus more than God and I think that's largely because my parents actually did things to reinforce that belief. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is I think it does well to explain why I think what I do and that's that God and His various religions are unnecessary, but we need more Santa.
1. I'm rather sure the whole thing of 'freedom' means that some all-powerful god cannot just pluck us out of trouble. We have control over our own lives, and we take responsibility for that. If a god were to just get rid of hell then there would not be any real responsibility for our actions, and freedom would be moot.
2. Alas, gravitons are a very loose thing we made up to help us understand how gravity works. All we know is the effects of gravity and nothing else about it. Gravitons are just a theory we made so we'll have something to look for. This is how discovery works, we make a theory on how something works and look for it. Very rarely is this first thing in such a mysterious field the thing we are looking for.
3. It's insulting how offensive you are about this. Chill dude, take this a little better. Reason for existence and how something works are completely different fields that don't terribly contradict. Science is for the hows, philosophy is for the whys. To compare them is indeed a bit silly, but in no ways insulting to either field.
This is nonsense. You are saying that if a father were to prevent his son from going to his basement where he would be tortured forever, even though he sent him there, that he would be violating his freedom to save him from his basement. If god invented the punishment of hell, he isn't violating a person's freedom by not sending them to it.
I am assuming that by "responsibility for our actions" the "action" you are speaking of is disbelief in god or refusal to accept the sacrifice of Jesus.
This is important: stop misusing the word theory. We don't create a THEORY and then look for it, we create a HYPOTHESIS and then try to demonstrate it. Gravitons were posited because they are predicted by a theory. What theory makes the prediction that a god exists?
Saying "magic man done it" is not a "why", it is a "how.
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Mostly because there are so many.
Edit: People who think christianity is associated with hating blacks, search imperialisim in africa
I don't think you understand the other guys philosophy, but then again I don't exactly hold the same as his so I can't say I do either. But I'm rather sure for this analogy to work the father would have to say "Don't go down into the basement." And by responsibility for our actions I mean being a *******, through killing and hate. Although again this depends on the views of the dude.
Then you ran into a dude that took something in the wrong context. Those religious books seem more focused on portraying a meaning rather than giving a very precise history on how things have been.
And I'm tired of trying to defend the beliefs of another dude, seeing as I am not that other dude and don't believe what he believes. I don't want to leave your replies to my arguments up to him, but I don't want to continue this spiral down a path that won't lead anywhere simply because of the nature of the argument.
In the analogy, the man will send you down there if you don't love him. Does this mean you have the freedom to choose whether you love him or not?
I am not assuming that a god needs to be defined by science. I am saying that his comparison is insulting because he is comparing something that IS NOT science to something that IS science just because they are both unobservable, and in doing so asserting that I should accept his magic man just as much as I accept gravitons.
And a god does not need to be defined by science. It needs to be defined by the people proposing that a god exists. If there is no evidence that one exists, then both science AND philosophy dictate that one is unwarranted in believing that it exists.
[/quote]
Then you ran into a dude that took something in the wrong context. Those religious books seem more focused on portraying a meaning rather than giving a very precise history on how things have been.
[/quote]
Excuse me? The religious books aren't trying to express some deep philosophical meaning by attributing the existence of the universe to a creator deity. If they are, then that means that the bible does not actually support such a being's existence, and you can't claim that it is the word of such a deity. You don't get to say "this is just metaphor" for the entire book in one breath and then make claims about where this deity is going to send me in the afterlife in the next breath. That's would be an example of trying to eat your cake and have it to.
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...
What makes you think any of that is true?
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So why bother with it at all?
In epistemology, we have a certain "event horizon" of knowledge. It's a point at which something has so much evidence that to find evidence that it is false in the future is colossally unlikely.
It's true that we can't prove things objectively. However, this makes "knowledge" a useless word in practice. So, in the study of epistemology, we have added another definition of knowledge meaning "practical knowledge", or things that are safe to assume are true given the level of evidence in support of them.
The fact is that even though there are trillions of possibilities of how the universe functions, only ONE is true, and many have exactly zero evidence in support of them, or even might have evidence against them. For example, it is commonly said "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". This does not apply, however, in systems in which we would EXPECT evidence to appear in a particular place. For example, according to Intelligent Design, we should find body parts that are "irreducibly complex", that is, impossible to have evolved given their complexity. However, we have not found any such example. Sure, people have made propositions, like the Eye, Wing, the Bacterial Flagellum, and the Mammalian Immune System, but scientists successfully debunked every one of these, showing not only HOW they could have evolved, but demonstrating that there exist organisms today that display the various intermediates of each of these features. So, because Intelligent Design predicts that we should find evidence of a creator deity's hand at work in the world, but we do not find this evidence where it should present itself, that absence of evidence is in fact evidence of absence.
So what I am trying to say is that just because things can't be proven objectively doesn't mean we are justified making wild speculations, and especially not trying to legislate such speculation on others or living our lives with the assumption that such speculations are true.
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Teachers should not even be attempting to teach your kids the why of religion. There's too many places for biases to be inserted. I would think that taking an objective look at why people believe in God would only weaken a students resolve to believe in any religion and I think the class would be construed to be anti-religious scientists teaching their kids not to believe in God.
Schools aren't qualified to teach these kinds of things anyways. Religion should be taught in church. Practical life skills in school.
Hallowed be thy domain.
Thy search to come,
Thy results be done..
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Lemme throw in my ring.
From my studies of goverments, religion was used as a form of crowd control. While this makes sense i uess, i find it absurd when people treat it as if it were more, like a way of life. However, then i guess religion would need to be influential to control, so i guess it is all that they say it is, but i personally am not religious as have you ever seen islam? That country used a theological government and 20% of them are extremists, not to mention they blocked many sites on there comp over 'draw Muhammad day' which to me is just some silly little thing, absolutely harmless. Other religions are pretty bad too, some have condoned crusades over which religion is valid, considering people heretics for not following the religion, and even allowing superstitious theories to be science.
Thats all folks!
facepalm of the month- dra6o0n
facepalm of the month- dra6o0n