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That's the strange thing about language, in that we can write something and multiple people can take a different meanings from it (despite us knowing what we're trying to say) because of just a few words we chose to use. "Storytelling" in lieu of "human accounting" creates a totally different picture, and before you know it you're lost in a debate with someone you don't really disagree with because of how that viewpoint was presented.
Anyway, I largely think I understand what you were going for, though I don't think I was that lost to begin with aside from the "storytelling" bumble that make me misinterpret your feelings. The misinterpretation I felt by you wasn't a major one, so you have no worry of offending me (it takes a lot, really, and I respect you as a debater anyway). I was far more misinterpreted earlier in the week, when one poster seemed to think I went to the service to laugh and make a mockery of the process in front of the worshippers, an observation that you'd think would be impossible to make if one actually read my post; again, meaning was warped and an opposing viewpoint to the one I meant was made against my best efforts, somehow.
A quick response to what I saw as the most salient points you clarified: Now I see what you were getting at here, and that clears most of it up. Because you view sciences like geology or biology as ones of discovery and largely as those with the view of looking at something and giving what is a very final judgement (like looking at the Grand Canyon and decisively proving its age or at least that it is more than 6,000 years old) you were warning me about viewing the human condition and its vastness of contradiction and individuality with the same concrete certainty. This I get, and don't entirely disagree with, so I don't want to make it seem like I was equating those two sciences as one. To again bring up an issue of syntax and semantics, psychology and sociology are viewed as social sciences and that meaning is programmed into your head in school such that you repeat it despite really thinking about it and what it means. As I bumbled with your meaning of "storytelling," perhaps this was where my meaning was muddled in your head.
Science is hard enough to describe and delineate, so we can lose ourselves in just comparing these many fields to one another, but I agree that human beings and their infinite variety of experience, functioning and general existence shouldn't be equated to the very final judgements scientists want to make about how our world works using the data open to them. As you pointed out, if a comparison is made between the fields people may assume that just as two pieces of sedimentary rock can be gauged as filling the same timeframe in the earth's history judging from where they lay in the superposition of the rock, two people who have the same religious beliefs must of course come to that belief from the same pathway.
But of course we know that the latter isn't true, as numerous factors can exist predicated on the individual, their parents, background or general life circumstances. I understand why, then, you weren't a fan of calling those observations of humans a science, to avoid a comparison to general science as we know it and largely, where those observations are universal fact.
Here you just made that point even more succinctly, and again we agree. Going into the service I didn't mean to sum up human experience with religion in a concrete and final way, but I think I have a good handle on why people believe and I wanted to see if the same reasons, through observation, could be garnered from the local worshippers in my community.
The fact that I could surmise a variety of reasons for why people were compelled to believe went a long way towards proving that humans aren't a piece of rock to quantify in age and qualify the experience of with exact detail; we're all different and always changing, so a different manner of observation and accounting must be created to discuss human nature and what compels us to believe what we do. We're not rock stacked on top of each other, we're a vast and complicated species that come to our lifestyles in a variety of ways that don't always line up with common observation.
And this is largely what you point out here: To view human experience through the model of a scientist looking at rocks endangers one to think that their observations are more universal than they are and, in an ironic way, this could lead to the same universal belief and faulty sense of truth in those observations that atheists view the religious to have in what they believe.
Some of the religious told themselves that the bible was true and viewed the text through a scientific eye (Noah's arc was real, there was a flood, Jesus did resurrect, God did create everything in seven days and the earth is 6,000 years old) and that faulty sense of observation led to their own misunderstanding that confused parable with established historical accounting. In the same way we can fall into the pit of generalizing human nature with the same mental gymnastics, which is of course an end to avoid. Again, we basically agree here, of the danger in treating human experience with the appearance of scientific certainty. And from a sociology perspective that you would find more focused on society and not on the individual, it can be dangerous to take a view of a community of people and use those findings to assume things about the individuals that make up that community. The individual doesn't have to mirror the perceived collective, and the collective can't be gauged by the individual.
I also think that you are right to point out, from a societal perspective, that religion is most readily still alive and kicking because of the tradition attached to it over time than anything else, and how it has become such a part of the world and its people that to let it go would be too jarring a change. Just as we got to our family's homes on Thanksgiving and repeat the same rituals annually because that's what we've always done, so why change it now, religion has the same inseparable relationship with tradition where society is compelled to uphold it as it always has. This then creates a scenario and arena through which people feel compelled to believe it, as they see just how much society encourages and spreads religion.
Further certainty in the belief of a religious person will come if they grow up in a religious family, as they reach maturity never knowing their lives without religion having a part in it. It becomes second nature, a part of who they are, and so they are unable to stop believing in what they do no matter what because to do so would be to lose a part of themselves.
Overall, @Strog, I think we will now be able to see where we were both trying to come from after we cleared up the meaning behind the words that gummed up the works.
My whole point in relaying my experiences at the funeral last week wasn't to seriously take on the role of a sociologist or psychologist, decisively observing the experiences of a dozen people to equate them to a whole world of believers no matter the dogma they raised up (though some seemed to think I was doing this very earnestly). And in the end I think you understood what I was really doing, respectfully observing with no great ambition to understand a group that both fascinated and bemused me in non-judgmental silence, instead of arriving at the mass I think we got a lot cleared up, and it is great that we can have these kinds of discussions. You know I already respect you as a debater and thinker, but until this moment I have only been able to appreciate you for your thoughts on Bond and cinema. Now I see even more sides to your mind, and generally I think we come away agreeing far more than we disagree, semantics aside. ;)
TL;DR, read up before you trash Catholicism, or ANY religion for that matter. Or don't trash religion, period. Let's all just shake hands and move on.
Actually no. If God was to show up to me, whether it's at midday descending to London from heaven for everyone to see or materialising out of thin air in my living room right now, I'd no longer be an atheist. Except that would not expect anyone to believe me if it's the latter.
My atheism is a position I have now due to lack of evidence in the existence of a deity. It's not a dogma and it can change if evidences for God are brought to me.
Actually let's go there as you're making a few claims here. How was Galileo an arrogant jerk? And even if he was... that would not justify the threats of torture and the censorship of his work by the Catholic Church. Who censored him because his discovery was going against their dogmas and institutionalised ignorance. They changed their mind with him and Darwin when they could no longer deny it without being a laughing stock. And even if Galileo had been an arrogant jerk... He was still right!
@Division_00
You're correct in that there was a lot more going on between Galileo and the Church than his mere contributions to physics. He may even have been arrogant, I don't know. However, whatever motives the Church may have had for going against him, it's a fact that they forced him to publicly deny his purely empirical findings; it's a fact that they were troubled by his conclusions that God doesn't make the solar system tick, gravity does; it's also a fact that he might have been killed were he not such good pals with the Pope. Another fact: Pope John Paul II was the first, in the 1990s (!), to admit the Church had been wrong concerning their treatment of Galileo. However, his successor, Benedict XVI, openly stated that locking Galileo up had been a wise and perfectly sane decision, and that Galileo's discovery of gravity--and yes, it's true that Galileo discovered gravity, not Newton!--has directly led to the atom bomb... Such a statement could easily be (mis)read as the Pope telling us to stay away from science since it can lead to only terrible things. Well, there's a good chance Benedict wouldn't have been able to celebrate his 90th birthday this year had it not been for a group of scientists seeing to his health day and night.
Galileo is a good example of another problem: the Church giving itself juridical powers. To deprive a man of his freedom, to force him to make claims he doesn't support, by what authority did the Church do that? That's all in the past, you'll argue. Well, it isn't. You're from Atlanta, I see. I bet if I were to stand trial there, they'd make me swear on the bible, wouldn't they? Truth is, I could lie as much as I'd want to, because I'd use the bible as toilet paper if it weren't for all that ink, and swearing not to lie in the face of an overrated non-existent supersanta? There's something ironic about that. I bet I'd just start laughing like a madman.
Here's another beautiful example of religion going wrong:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4930978/Jaundice-kills-baby-parents-refuse-treatment-her.html
Once again, god kills. These people didn't kill; the people who indoctrinated them (pastors, parents, teachers, neighbors, ...) are directly responsible for the death of that child. That the mother sat over the dead body of her child with others praying, is a clear case of mass hysteria, the very essence of the bible belt in America. I'm sure some members who occasionally post in this thread, will call me a bigot, a religion trasher, and whatnot. Well, when you read that article, and you don't feel an urge to trash religion, you're either a fool, a drug addict or a criminal.
So, care to join the 21st century, or are you going to keep throwing that "let's all just shake hands" nonsense in our faces?
Wonderful irony re the arrogance of religion in itself ? The presumption that they have power of judgement (and their actions are justified),
this goes way way beyond personal belief and simply trashes any concept of human rights.
Religion and the judicial process should be like oil and water.
Dear old Copernicus, the grandfather of myth busting, didn't wait until he was near death to publish his helio-centric theory because he was a paranoid proofreader and was really worried he'd print his magnum opus with a bunch of grammatical errors unless he spent his entire adult life going over every line of text. He knew exactly what his life would be like once the church knew what he'd uncovered (basically that they were full of it).
I'd love to live in a world where we can all shake hands and be friendly over this religion thing, but the effects of religion on progress, enlightenment and sheer human decency make me not so eager to extend my digits in that particular embrace. Nation-wide gay marriage is barely two years old in the states, and that's a problem we should address, as the effect of religion and what the bible infects the mind with is widespread and long in its poisoning sting. In some ways we're still in the Middle Ages, and that's terrifying. I expect far better of a truly modern and developed world.
I also don't think it's any mistake that God is given the mutated form of the noun "god" for his name. He's been designed to be the one to reign over them all by his human creators and boy has it worked.
@DarthDimi another epic post. I dare say this was borderline a hitchslap.
I award you the Trophy for the Post of the Day, sir.
Despite my apparent eagerness to lay waste to all things religion, I too recognise that the simplest and by far the most peaceful solution would be to obliterate hatred and aversion rather than each other. And let's be frank, far from what we tend to write in these posts, most of us walk through life relatively unconcerned with the religious mindset of others.
That said, one must at least be able to recognise, if only in principle, that there's something quite wrong with how religion as a mass delusion is allowed to perpetuate in this day and age, when the defendable uses for it, if any, have diminished to little more than spiritual comfort or moral guidance, and even regarding those two I'm not sure religion offers the best path.
Religion may once have served a purpose, when the universe was still far too complicated for primitive minds to fathom out. False answers are sometimes better than none when little is at stake and the only alternative would be chaos, confusion and the impotence to propagate a young but promising culture without any other means. But things have changed, and we have reached a vastly different stage in our evolution now. We have learned things about the cosmos that even a mere two centuries ago would have appeared utterly absurd. We have probed the very heart of matter; removed purpose, fate and human dominance from the forces that govern all processes in the cosmos; we have created things that are at risk of growing beyond our own control; and we have discovered common and inescapable threats for mankind. Only a firm repudiation of faith in a supreme being, or anything for that matter for which there doesn't exist even the flimsiest of empirical evidence, can unite us in our efforts to preserve a bright future for us all.
Obviously I can concede that removing religion from the equation isn't the only key to solving or averting every global conflict, problem or disaster. But it is an important one, considering the effect it has on how people (and their offspring) think, behave, form an opinion or tackle an issue. Due to their religious upbringing, still far too many people focus on the wrong things, seek answers in the wrong places, ultimately do things the wrong way. They obstruct scientific research, block the road to a world without heated cultural pride and continue to condemn fellow humans because of their gender, sexuality and liberal thinking. In a world constantly flirting with global annihilation, with large-scale conflicts that leave no winners but only losers, with technology evolving faster than our minds gather wisdom, we must steer clear from remaining stuck in medieval superstition. When men with their finger on 'the button' ask for help from the bible, a priest, a fortune-teller, an astrologist,... you know we're in trouble. When parents refuse medical treatment for their children because their ultraconservative upbringing has taught them that god works in mysterious ways and that we are not supposed to intervene, you know a critical re-assessment of religions as potentially dangerous cults and sects is long overdue.
Lastly, those who claim to be believers who distance themselves from any fundamental, radical or extremist religious behaviour, ought to do better than merely shruggingly dismiss those people's actions as totally unrelated. While in essence that may the case, there's a shared responsibility involved. For when you choose, against every bit of scientific evidence (or the lack thereof) to continue your belief in anything at all pertaining to the mystical, magical or supernatural, you must be able to understand the risks involved, one of those being that people with less mental clarity than yourself, might actually take those beliefs several steps too far. Perhaps it would be wise not to teach your children that only a voluntary submission to the will of god, a priest, a hate preacher, an imam, ... will save them from hell. When one of your children conveniently "forgets" that little detail about how we should not judge others, he may take every other word his nice pastor or imam ever told him about infidels and what terrible folks they are and how only the faithful will be awarded a place in heaven and whatnot in an ugly direction. And when the bombs have gone off and dozens have been killed, it's too late to speak the now well-known headlines, "we never wanted this, he was such a nice, virtuous boy." That nice and virtuous boy could have been a doctor, an engineer, a teacher, an artist, ... had his mind remained unpolluted by a medieval faith which cannot exist in harmony with our modern world, but only in a deep, unsustainable conflict.
Many evils exist in this world. Religion isn't the only one; and not all of religion is. But some of it really is evil, and some of that is large-scale, some of it small-scale; but you'd be surprised how much pain and suffering is caused by people's stubborn devotion to a mystical figure they, themselves, have created, a long time ago, when the Earth was still a flat disk, suspended in the skies, with the sun and the stars revolving around it.
That's debatable. And they are still unsubstantiated.
Wouldn't that include your own though?
The Russian Orthodox Church is excempt.
And you are a member?
Yes, I do know the thing about jpii.
This discussion is now over.
But of course, friend. If you want the discussion to be over, we shall accept your defeat. ;-) However, I'm not sure I agree with "This would turn into something terrible." Please define terrible. I thought we were all having a civilised discussion. No name-calling or anything like that.
Anyway, glad it went so easy.
One more thing, @Division_00. Please avoid double, triple, ... posts. Use the edit button if you wish to add something. Thank you.
You made claims you never backed up, we didn't.
Changing the topic, sorta: If you've ever read Augustine's "City of God" do you remember the shape-eater?
Actually back on topic what about your claims that Galileo was a jerk and how was it ok to condemn his discovery regardless?
Also, I prefer "ma'am". ;)
One time he got into an argument about the shape of planetary orbits. Galileo thought they were circles, the other guy thought they were ellipses (they're ellipses). According to tradition, a few punches were thrown.
Also, when I said, "let's not go there", I meant that I didn't want to start a discussion about the birds and the bees.
I never said it was okay to condemn his science. He sort of needed to stop picking fights with people and calling the Pope names. That generally didn't go down too well in that time period.
Yup! :)