The Big Big Thread of Religious Discussion

[Azisien]

Originally Posted by Sithdarth

We don't need aliens to give us an objective view point. All the mumbo jumbo I said is the objective view point. It just has an arbitrary human filter of names on top of it. We can get rid of that by just using universal units. Which are ironically what we'd expect to be the first means of communication between us and an alien species because they would be the same without having to explain to the aliens what a meter is.

I agree. I (attempted) to say the same thing in the very passage you quoted. But there is more to the human experience than some universal units (your link is broken by the way). We HAVE seen some of what I would call the true objective viewpoint. However, the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of all of our experiences are still humanly objective. Aliens for instance would be a great means, if not a necessity (though they very well might be for some concepts).

Originally Posted by Funka Genocide

just wanted to point out that this tangent is not only eating up ridiculous amounts of space with a pointless (at least in my opinion) argument, and that I haven't seen so much as one word referring to religion in a couple thousand.

Is it too much to ask that we get back on track?

Jesus, yes, it is! Hah, all right... (Booya, first reference in a cople thousand!)

I do find it ironic you deem our tangent pointless in a religious discussion, though. I've got little to say on the topic of religion, much of it has been said already. Even you launched some fiery atheist claims some pages back, but unfortunately it got no bites.

Well I could go for a bit of history about myself, I suppose, like someone tried to start up dozens of pages ago. I consider myself an atheist, though as a scientist I also make myself open to possibilities. If there's a God, it won't manage to make me bow on faith alone, given those statements about myself.

I was raised essentially with an empty slate. My mother is Anglican, but doesn't practice openly. My father was raised Roman Catholic but became atheist by his own decision at some point before I was born. To be honest, the topic of religion almost never ever came up during my childhood. Aside from the media, of course, from time to time, but as a kid I think I was more interested in playing soccer and basketball, riding my bike, and owning my mom at Super Mario Kart to care about Islamic fundamentalists and Evangelical Christians and whatever.

As I grew up, I eventually started to question my parents about their beliefs. The response was essentially the same in both cases: "We're not going to force anything on you, believe what you want and make your own decision." The statement actually carries itself beyond the topic of religious belief, it's the same thing they tell me if I ask what they think I should be when I grow up, only the "believe" is replaced with "do."

In grade 8, I went from a public school (and the one I attended, from my experience, was absolutely free of religious influence, aside from Christmas, which was really more the commercial aspect with Santa and such) to a Roman Catholic high school. I stayed there until I graduated. Now if there was a time to convert me, those years were probably it.

And those were the years I started asking harder questions. Around the same time one of my grandmothers who had been suffering from a debilitating terminal disease finally passed away, and given the new Catholic influence in my life (daily prayer, mandatory Religion class, a general Catholic teaching atmosphere), I started searching for a God, so to speak.

Suffice to say, nothing came. I eventually tried to go through the motions and pray in earnest, but prayers of course go unanswered. I never once felt any special experience, regardless of any of the stresses or events I went through in high school. I started at page one of the Bible and made it to the end of Deuteronomy (sp?) before I gave up, now pretty much officially atheist. I drew the conclusion that searching for a God is a fruitless affair. Given the very notion of faith, there can be no answered prayers. There can be no magical experiences. There can be no direct or indirect evidence of a God, because that goes against the notion of faith. I, however, require observable proof. Otherwise, believing in God to me is blind devotion, the kind of thing that can get you killed in a different scenario ("There's a bunch of riches at the bottom of this cliff edge, all you have to do is jump off!" "Won't I get hurt? How do I know it's there? Can I look?" "NO! Just JUMP man!")

Religious scripture, to me, is simply written by the hand of man, with no "divine" inspiration. Inspiration and human creativity, sure, but no magical force moved the hand of those writers.

I see many of the traditions of Catholicism as entirely pointless, and I reject the notion of God. There are, however, valuable ethical and philosophical innards to every religion. Since I define my self as a culmination of my genetics and my experiences in given environments, I'd be lying if I said going to a Catholic high school for 5 years didn't affect me in some way. At the very least, some of the morality rubbed off. Of course, I've refined my own conception of morality since then, and I no longer follow the Catholic/Christian rule (directly anyway, there are parallels to almost all moral views).

What others call religious power, or spirit, or experiences, I call our own human strength. Subconscious human strength. We are not masters of our own minds, we reason and exert control with only a very small portion of it, because that's the way we've evolved. What others might call the power of religious community or the success of such communities, I simply consider that the success of human altruism, and the success of humanity as a species on the planet. We are a herd animal, we function at our absolute best when we are in absolute cooperation. Religion can actually be a vehicle for such cooperation, but I do not see a God in any of that. (Though I must wonder how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people the early Jews or Christians had to eradicate or convert to become the "good guys.")

I ate science right up in high school, and now into university. It led me to other statements like "Religion is a means to achieve the answers we like to hear." Which is something I pretty much agree with as of right now. I later dove into philosophy, stating to my friends campy claims like "I want to learn both sides!" Because everyone, everyone gives me a funny look when I tell them I'm simultaneously in Biology and Philosophy.

Where do I stand now? Well, I'm an atheist, but given my scientific influence, you might call me an atheist-agnostic. Perhaps there's a better term for what I consider myself. The existence of a God is to me an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and not worth my consideration at this time. Even beyond that, it seems almost eternally unfalsifiable, worse than something like elements of M-Theory, which at least we have some vague technological projections for. I much prefer the scientific venture, which not only moves mankind forward in the modern age (in places where religion is trying its very hardest to keep us stagnant, or move us back), but it gives me answers to my liking. Answers I can accept. Science is not a static belief system, it evolves in a way almost analogous to the process of evolution itself. Thus, I don't consider my trust in the scientific engine as something analogous to faith.

And the claim out of that latter statement that bugs me the most is "well, what if science is all wrong?" A claim which doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to begin with. What, exactly, will be shown wrong? Is the proton actually going to be suddenly NOT what it is? Will our buildings suddenly all crumble because science is somehow inherently wrong, and only in our hindsight observation, we'll notice this? I've never understood where that claim comes from, and yet I hear it over, and over, and over again by theists.

Science is of course fallible, because it is performed by fallible organisms. But I think the dynamic structure of the methodology is such that we weed out the bad and move in a positive direction, almost exclusively. No, our history of the fossil record is not complete. However, it grows completer with each passing day. The notion of evolution, both micro and macro, becomes more convincing to me with each passing day. No, our understanding of physics is not complete, but it grows completer with each passing day. No, we don't know what caused the Big Bang, or what preceded the Big Bang, but then we didn't know what a Big Bang was one hundred and fifty years ago. We're already probing some of the most fundamental phenomenon in the universe, where three hundred years ago you'd probably get burned for being a witch if you went on about electrons and atoms and molecules (even though the Greeks had a notion of an indivisible particle at some point, it was the usual wild speculation of the time).

I've found comfort in my ability to be uncertain. I would rather say "I don't know. Yet" than "God did it." We don't have all the answers, but I and others will search for them. And we'll find them.

Well, I'm running out of things to say right now, so I do believe I will bring this rant to a close.