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I'm sure they find plenty of other things to argue about that - see for an example my recent posts in this thread on the Troubles in NI and true underlying cause - politics and not religion!
I won't bash you for your lack of belief. Please don't bash me for mine.
Think you've got the wrong religion there, mate. Unless, you're referring to this non-sectarian cartoon from George Osborne's lovely newspaper on the recent Tory-DUP confidence and supply deal:
I think this should clear some things up
Seems the writers forgot Lazarus.
Still, I enjoyed that. Thanks.
That he did. CRazy, isn't it?
That's because The Dead...
... Are Alive
Fair enough, sir. I'll have you as my friend. :-)
@patb
You are absolutely correct.
Even worse, ask a 1000 christians who or what god means to them and you'll get a 1000 completely different answers. Clearly, god cannot be defined since no two people can fully agree on what constitutes god. Ergo, there's no objective way to conclusively investigate the demonstrate or rule out the existence of god. That puts god in the awkward position where religious people can't prove his existence nor scientists disprove it. Even love has a biochemical component which we are coming surprisingly close to fully understanding, allowing us to actually measure the statistical probability that a certain relationship, in its current form, will stay strong. Funny though that may sound, research in the matter is currently taking on a fairly serious form. But god remains a dogma, uploaded in your brain by some figure of authority, be it your parents, the local priest, a charismatic blogger on the internet... I'm aware that experiments have been conducted to see if someone who was never told about god could spontaneously formulate a belief in a higher being. I'm also aware of the vast controversies surrounding those experiments. At least a little seed, many a sceptic has concluded, has to be planted in the brain of the child to make said child dream up a higher being. Also, once a child has reached a certain age and a certain level of education, there's barely any chance left of a spontaneous god epiphany. Only harsh indoctrination can do the trick from that point on.
The first gods were thought up by people who were the scientists of their days. They raised questions but lacked the tools, both practical and theoretical, to put some Newtonian physics to good use for answering those questions. Hence, their best hunch were outside forces with a mind of their own, which many a scientist, many aeons later, has shown to be utter nonsense. But religion, when we were but simple cavemen, had its benefits. With the coming of the first civilisations, it became a tool for statesmen and warmongers to keep mindless drones under control. And it's been exactly that ever since. The Vatican or any other church really doesn't care about the "good" that religion would do, but about the power it gives them, the influence, the wealth, and so on.
Individuals who believe, often draw good things from that belief. Courage, comfort, purpose. However, never wisdom, good advice and certainly no deeper understanding about the way the universe works. Many religious people--and don't give me that "but I believe AND I read science books" BS, I said 'many', I didn't say 'all'--put religion in front of every other source of knowledge, including, surprisingly enough, their own empirical experiences! Religion often stands in the way of clarity and intellectual honestly. It deludes them in that sense. There's a vast goldmine of knowledge and understanding about the universe to tap, yet many prefer to spend time in church than to sit down and work their way from geometry 1.0.1 to advanced astrophysics. When religion is still considered a worthy alternative to empirical evidence, to a decent hospitalisation, to a morality one has arrived at without invoking the bible, that's when it becomes a problem. That's when the little good it can do is overshadowed by the many evils it represents, some hidden, many fairly obvious. After all, we cannot expect the full population on Earth to cope with modern technology, environmental threats, the dangers of overpopulation etcetera, when so many are still held prisoner in the clutches of a superstructure which prefers to think for you instead of allowing you to think for yourself. As a teacher, I find the latter one of the worst crimes one can commit.
I understand the problem. I understand we cannot just wipe out religion. But there are regions on Earth where I cannot believe it can still be allowed to exist. People can go to school, to college even, receive a formal education, be trained to think for themselves, yet stubbornly refuse to. And those people are asked to vote, to make tough decisions in their professional life, to raise children of their own and prepare them for an uncertain future. And when those people ultimately pick up a book full of "tales of morality" composed thousands of years ago when the world was completely different, and seek wisdom in it, that's when a) I understand why it's taking us so long to get anywhere at all as a species, and b) why so many problems are created for seemingly no sensible reason.
Oh thank you. I have always thought you a cool person.
Because to be an atheist there's only one requisite: a disbelief in God or gods. It's not an ideology although it can be part of one. But there's as many hypothetical gods as there are theists. They cannot all be right. But they CAN all be wrong.
But before they start arguing about what God wants or preaching us about it they should first demonstrate there is a God. The burden of proof resides in the person making the positive claim.
Whether its sexual choice, contraception, suicide, abortion, marriage, divorce, pub opening times on a Sunday, what meat you should eat, what parts of genetailia should be cut from what kids, what cartoons can be drawn, what clothes woman can wear, what kids should learn in school etc etc....religion has no problem in overiding personal choice/freedoms and telling people what they should do. Religion is useless at leaving people alone. Other than religion not being true, thats the bit that really gets me. People have the right to believe in any fairy tale of their choice. But when they take a moral perspective from that fairy tale and seek to apply that moral frame work onto non-believers..thats the part that really gets under my skin.
These are not my toys.....
Separately and for the larger conversation, I understand this is the MI6 Discussion Board but I'm not understanding this everything or nothing approach to religion and atheism. For friends, family, co-workers, and new people I meet I don't evaluate them on faith to turn them on or off. From experience that's not something that predicts how I'll get along, enjoy conversation, or be able to work with them on a project. Or relate to them in friendship over time. Those things are much more subjective and specific to the individual and their behavior, and it's beyond whether they worship a God or don't.
I'm seeing religion here sought out as a kind of target. I'm just as biased, but to me it represents diversity of thought in the world. Rich tradition and history. Good with the bad, at times, but so much good comes from it.
Science and religion aren't mutually exclusive, where does that come from. Of course there are people of faith that are scientists and doctors. It's impossible to write off all the world leaders, inventors, artists, and whoever else is named based on them having religion. But go ahead and try.
I agree with this paragraph @RichardTheBruce
Regarding science and religion if people of faith were sometimes scientists it was irrespective of their faith. Sometimes also the Church was the only place where you could get an education and access material to investigate the natural world. And science now has debunked many religious claims from the origin of the universe to the existence of man. Oh and the soul has pretty much also been debunked.
Warm and optimistic thoughts, @Mendes4Lyfe, but history tells us far less sunny things. I for one hate how religion is somehow synonymous with being a good person, suggesting that without religion we are brutish and violent but with it we learn to behave and become greater beings and cohesive as a population. (Despite the fact that the result is the opposite, with people throughout history battling over which of their Gods is right, but that's beside the point) One shouldn't need a book to be a good person, or need a God in their life to know that you probably shouldn't kill people, steal, or be an all around generic prick. One thing religion does have on its side as a behavior molder is fear, where the believers are openly threatened with eternal burning by hell's napalm if they upset their (supposed) understanding and glorious God. Would you have the gall to venture to say that it's still a positive that people are acting orderly if that behavior only came about after you threatened them with torture and misery for eternity? I much prefer my fellow humans to act nice without any demented motivation from a church leader sermon.
To focus this a bit more, I for one think that our world would be far more peaceful without religion. Think of all the great scientists from centuries ago that could've lived to develop their ideas, before the Church had them exiled or killed for having the audacity to show evidence that their religion and all the "facts" they told the public were lies. Poor chaps like Copernicus could only publish their work near the end of their lives, for fear that the church would strike back at them for being right about what they were saying; spoilers, they were. The church hated it when men of learning actually did their research and strived to understand how the world worked, instead of just assuming it was created by an unseen cloud being like the religious followers. To the church knowledge was dangerous, because knowledge meant one would see their lies and break away, and without control they are nothing. You won't see that kind of villainy from a fellow of science, who is driven by the curiosity to discover that religion demands you to tame to a whisper to be a part of their exclusive club. For this reason it's the scientists of the world, with thinking minds capable of weighing fact and looking for evidence to support their findings that change the world, not those who choose to question nothing and take everything from an ancient book at face value without another thought. Do you think it's an accident that the Telsas, Newtons and Einsteins of the world are celebrated, but you don't hear anything remotely close for the man of the cloth?
And what would all the women and homosexuals of the world do without religion? The concept of women actually getting to have an equal footing with men (something that many major religions actively disapprove of as outlined in the text) would be amazing, and the oppression and danger that befalls women to this day in religious circles would cease to be such an agonizing issue. As for homosexuals, do you mean to tell me that human beings would've learned to treat the idea of two male or two female lovers as disgusting without a religious book there in front of them that told them it was bad and punishable by death? In an anti-religious world I think people would be far more accepting, and though homosexuality is a minority sexuality in the world, there wouldn't be such hatred or, in the worst cases, violent or fatal hate crimes perpetrated on members of the LGBT community for it. History is full of multi-sex societies where people screwed who they wanted to screw; it was only until religion made it an issue of death that humans were brainwashed into perceiving it as unnatural and wrong. It's amazing that until a few years ago my uncle and his boyfriend couldn't experience the same unity as a man and woman could with all the benefits, despite being a commit and lawful couple of over a decade. That's the glory and positive impact of that precious bible you are lauding, the big blockade standing in the way of so many people who just want to be f*cking happy.
And we still see the negative effects of religious thought and what the brainwashing of the book has done to people over time in 2017. Long ago people accepted the bible because there was no data out there to disprove it, and this was also at a time when the concept of a spherical earth was loony to imagine and where people barely navigated out of the same area for their entire lives, giving them a closed mind to how the rest of the world truly had developed and how it worked. And yet, even after centuries of development, we still have people thinking in the Stone Ages thanks to religion. It's religion that has continued to propagate the hatred or condescension of gays through the exclusive "male/female" idea of marriage, that has led to untold early pregnancies because of their anti-contraceptive stances, and it is religion and a devoted to a deity that is the big cause of so many violent acts we see on the news every day, from hate crimes all the way up to terrorist bombings.
I wish I could be as blindly optimistic @Mendes4Lyfe, but the world I see is one that would be fundamentally improved, or would at least be far more decent, understanding and tolerable of others, than the religion ruled reality we have now. It's easy to attack scientists or anti-religious people with demeaning the power and good of religion, but when has the game ever been on the side of the thinking man? It was the church with the power to exile and murder the scientists of the world with impunity, innocents who only wanted to advance us as a species (that same kind of advancement you claim we couldn't have without religion). Scientists have been the overwhelming victims in this mess of a conflict with the religions of the world, so forgive me for not sympathizing with the plight of a system that has regressed instead of progressed us as a species in how we understand the world, think about life and perceive and treat each other.
I think I'll remain on the side of the underdogs.
Just when you think the world can no longer surprise you: 'Lutheran Satire'! I really have seen it all now.
Very fine post Sir.
Persons of faith are involved in important science and research, always have been, likely always will. In that case why separate out and discount their faith? Reality is too complicated to act in broad strokes to separate out believers and marginalize them and their actions.
As for religious people being involved in science that is borderline hogwash: a majority of scientists are now atheists. And while we're at it when in any time in history was religion an active element to make any scientific discovery? Religion does not teach critical thinking or investigation.
I'll say my experience and outlook is very different from what you're proposing.
But you're also changing the questions. Earlier discussion was regarding whether religion prevented a war, I'll address that. And my simple point was that believers are strung through the scientific community past and present. It's not my point that religious doctrine is its own scientific method, though a case could be made for that as well. But again religion and science are not mutually exclusive.
Sir Isaac Newton, discovering/studying gravity. Involved Christian.
Galileo Galilei, astronomer. Suffered backlash from the church during the Roman Inquisition for his scientific proposals--still, known as a Good Catholic.
Pope John Paul II, 1978-1984, is credited with mediation lasting long enough to avoid war between Argentina and Chile over the Beagle Channel Conflict. Montevideo Agreement signed 1979.