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Religion isn't just about comfort as the article presumes. Article is very naive from the perspective of any serious practicing believer. It's really about Trut

• akomtu 5y ago
  One of my hobbies is to study the "ancient philosophy" if we may call it this way. One of my favorite pearls I've found so far is one saint's thoughts on the nature of reality and the power of numbers. He said something along this line: every thing has a number, chance is just the lack of knowledge and time is a sequence of numbers, one is the number of spirit and zero is the number of matter, so together they form 10 which is the number of existence and the origin of duality. Apparently, the concept of super determinism and simulation was known well before Christianity was a project.
  • proc0 5y ago
    Interesting. Which saint is that?
    • goto11 5y ago
      Apparently an ancient saint which used the decimal system.
      • akomtu 5y ago
        Perhaps 10 really means 2, which gives that "duality" a trivial explanation.
• Jensson 5y ago
  > Let's use a more modern story as an example: The Simulation Theory. We are in a simulation etc., etc. If reality is a like a video game, and we're characters being 'rendered' by the Universe client, how could anyone probe into what the nature of the simulation is? How can any process or group of people ask the right question to find out what exactly is the substrate on which the simulation is being simulated? There is effectively no difference between simulation theory and a creator god like Christians believe in. According to the Bible god created a simulation with humans and stuff. We live in it and have to fulfil the goals of the simulation or God will interfere or even shut it down. The main thing separating religions is that they claim to know why the simulation is still running. I don't see any reason why you should believe their claim as to why the simulation is still running. I see why you'd want to believe in the simulation, but why believe and spread all the specifics? Personally I think it is more comforting to not believe there is a god or simulation. Without a god there is nobody that can shut it down, so existence will continue. With a god existence is meaningless since he can just shut it down at any moment wasting all effort we have put in.
  • nyokodo 5y ago
    > According to the Bible god created a simulation with humans and stuff. We live in it and have to fulfil the goals of the simulation or God will interfere or even shut it down. Genesis begins with God creating the Universe not creating a computer and kicking off a simulation of the Universe. I’m uncertain if you’re simply misusing the word for effect or whether you don’t believe in reality and are projecting that onto Scripture, regardless the Bible refers to no simulations.
    • Jensson 5y ago
      > Genesis begins with God creating the Universe not creating a computer and kicking off a simulation of the Universe I don't see the difference between the two. In the first god used some means to create what we perceive as reality, in the other god used some means to create what we perceive as reality. In both cases God is an entity outside of what we perceive as reality, meaning his reality must be used to run our reality, meaning our reality is a simulation that he is running from his reality no matter how you look at it. If he didn't simulate our reality it means that our existence is the same as his, we follow the same physical rules and laws, and the bible makes it clear that it isn't the case, hence he must be simulating us. If you don't believe God actually exists outside of our reality then I don't see how your religion actually answers the question about the truth of the universe. Edit: And if you still believe that the Bible can be true without God running a simulation you'd have to explain how that works and how it would be different from him running a simulation. To me it seems to create more questions than answers, meaning it gets you further from the "Truth" of the universe that proc0 was talking about.
• themacguffinman 5y ago
  Maybe that's what religion is to you. Will you honestly claim that's the focus for the majority of, say, the 65% of US adults that are religious? I guess huge congregations of religious believers that live their lives around heaven/hell, scripture, and infallible divine authorities aren't serious? "any serious practicing believer" is so plainly a No True Scotsman qualifier.
  • nickff 5y ago
    The parent did not make the 'no true scotsman' informal fallacy, as they restricted their definition (in their first post). You might have a good argument that this definition is unrealistic, but it is not plainly fallacious. Not every argument which you disagree with contains a logical fallacy.
    • themacguffinman 5y ago
      I wasn't accusing them of a logical fallacy, I said they used a "No True Scotsman qualifier". Inventing a vague No True Scotsman qualifier is pretty rich if you're accusing the article of being naive and lecturing about what religion is apparently truly about.
      • nickff 5y ago
        "No True Scotsman" refers to a informal fallacy [1]; using an absurdly narrow qualifier may be unreasonable, but is a totally different matter. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
        • themacguffinman 5y ago
          I wouldn't know if "serious practitioner" is an absurdly narrow qualifier because it's vague and slippery. "What's that, your church doesn't do any of that? Well, that's because they're not serious practitioners". Granted, the GP didn't actually respond with that (AFAICT they haven't responded at all) which is why I agree that it's not quite the "No True Scotsman fallacy", but that is precisely the weasel wording that sets one up. Hence, a No True Scotsman qualifier, a qualifier that preempts any counterexample to this elaborate description of what religion is really about. Restricting a definition doesn't eliminate a No True Scotsman, that has nothing to do with it. The foundation of No True Scotsman is a vague and slippery definition. Just like no true Scotsman can disagree with my theoretical description of what Scots do, no serious practitioner can disagree with GP's description of religion. It's about falsifiability.
• worrycue 5y ago
  > true nature of reality If it’s as you said, > Something that science is by design unable to probe, just like someone inside the simulation will not be able to look at its own source code. Is there a point in creating hypotheses regarding this if none of them will be falsifiable?
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    That you have a conscious experience of reality instead of being a souless biological machine in the shape of a human is not falsifiable, and yet we base a significant portion of our decisions on the assumption that it is true.
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Exact this. Free will is by definition supernatural if you believe it exists.
      • worrycue 5y ago
        Free will can also just be a psychological illusion - even if we objectively believe it doesn’t exist we can’t shake it off even if we tried; or at least as I have tried.
        • mensetmanusman 5y ago
          That sounds like faith :)
    • johnday 5y ago
      That's a response, but it's certainly not an answer to the question that was asked. Unless your suggestion is that it's because people are acting illogically, and there is in fact no reason to ask the question in the first place?
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
• goto11 5y ago
  > They are trying to peek at the true nature of reality. That would be science. Religion is a set of rituals, values, traditions, beliefs, institutions and power structures which claim to have a supernatural justification. Since the supernatural justification cannot be examined, it cannot really be questioned or investigated. Whether the claims of a religion is "true" typically doesn't matter much to the adherents. What matter is the community, traditions and identity the religion provides. Imagine some historian proved that Moses never existed. Would Christianity, Judaism and Islam just disappear? Of course not. It would have no effect, except for a few atheists gloating on the internet. The world religions would be unaffected.
  • bobthechef 5y ago
    > That would be science. In the broad sense, the sciences include philosophy. Natural or empirical sciences are not privileged. They are a product and part of culture as much as anything and thus subject to the same caveats as anything else. Those who worship at the feet of "Science!" are those who lack the intellectual sophistication to understand what science is. It is a kind of petty intellectual provincialism when elevated beyond its natural place in the grand scheme of things. So yes, religion, and philosophy (metaphysics at its core), are very much concerned with ultimate reality. This does not mean that what the sciences tell us must be false or illusory, only that, at best, they are concerned with bits and pieces of reality, while metaphysics studies being as being and religion, at least Christianity, concerns itself with revealed truths concerning the ultimate. Faith (as probable and trustworthy) only enters the pictures when, for example, we identify the god of Abraham with the god of philosophy (Ipsum Esse Subsistens). I.e., the god of revealed theology with the god of natural theology. So while the empirical sciences are without question a good, let us not pretend they are anything more than they really are. > Religion is a set of rituals, values, traditions, beliefs, institutions and power structures which claim to have a supernatural justification. Since the supernatural justification cannot be examined, it cannot really be questioned or investigated. First of all, there is no single thing called "religion". And furthermore, every man has a religion according to the most sensible characterization as that which a man worships. All men worship something, view something as the highest good, whether they realize it or not. Second, you've sort of listed a bunch of characteristics without any deeper reflection: 1. Rituals don't exist for their own sake. They have functions. They are a language of signs that are meant to communicate some reality and put some flesh on things which could otherwise remain purely abstract. They can be sacramental in nature (sign of the cross). Truths are what are ostensibly communicated, and it is those truths ultimately that they serve. 2. Traditions serve to maintain a continuity that allows truths to become accessible across generations (and btw, there are traditions within science as well; you couldn't have science without tradition; what do you suppose a mentor is doing when he's teaching you?). Tradition is what allows you to interpret scripture. Without that knowledge, you're left with the problems plaguing Protestantism (obverse the 40,000+ sects in America alone). So again, truth is the ultimate end of tradition. 3. Institutions also serve a purpose. They are guardians of tradition and, in the case of the Catholic Church, also that through which sacraments are dispensed. Institutions are also not solely the province of religion, at least not from a Christian POV where a distinction between God (religious) and Caesar (secular) exists. But again, truth is the ultimate end. 4. "Power structures" is a wishy washy term in this context. Authority exists everywhere. Distributions of power exist in all human societies. Authority has a purpose when exercised within its proper bounds, which is the good of men in some sense, and ultimately the good of men depends on truth. Again, we are oriented toward the truth. The truth as known and the truth as lived. > Imagine some historian proved that Moses never existed. Would Christianity, Judaism and Islam just disappear? Of course not. This is untrue. Religions make truth claims. Which truth claims are essential to the viability of a religion and in what way vary. Something like Buddhism would probably survive without the Buddha of the stories because the principles are what count, but it would not survive a thorough rebuttal of those principles. On the other hand, Judaism and its heir, Christianity, for example, are historical. God acts in history. There is historical development. That doesn't mean that the writing style used in heterogeneous scripture will conform to modern historical conventions, that there aren't places where symbolic language or hyperbole are used, but it does mean, for example, that Christianity as such is nothing without Jesus. Jesus was not just some "wise man". The validity of Christianity rests entirely on him being the Incarnate Logos. Otherwise, Jesus was a lunatic, a liar, or the gospels are made up (to all of these, and more, there are responses; see Kreeft for a compilation). So yes, if you could somehow show that Jesus never existed, you would in effect destroy Christianity. There is no question about it.
• ykevinator3 5y ago
  I smell jesus
• op00to 5y ago
  Think about it from the context of a virtual machine. To the virtual machine, it doesn’t know it’s not a real computer. But, under some circumstances, it is possible for the VM to escape and affect the world outside its universe (ROWHAMMER). Why wouldn’t there be a ROWHAMMER for the universe?
  • lcall 5y ago
    If there were such a virtual machine (and I have no idea), under my conception of God, it wouldn't have any bugs or flaws. :) For example, we believe He is the source of all light, is not subject to time in the same way we are, He knows the end from the beginning, and we have the opportunity to know more in the future. I can't personally explain more than that except that the important thing for now is for us to learn what we can, act on that faithfully, take good steps forward, and opportunities will open for more steps (my phrasing).
• lupire 5y ago
  > It's really about Truth. "Truth" about the unknowable unfalsifiable. The foundation of "faith" is choosing a Truth that can't be proven. That's another word for "existential comfort" Science is about making some assumptions and then deriving probable results. Science (and am individual scientist) is tolerant of multiple competing set of assumptions, and being agnostic as to which is true. Religion or spirituality is about the "other" side, inventing or picking an unprovable "Truth" that makes the world feel OK.