4 ms·

I'm downvoting you, not because of what you're saying, but primarily for your incendiary tone. Content-wise, your musings on religion seemingly fail to take in

by epenn 14y ago

I'm downvoting you, not because of what you're saying, but primarily for your incendiary tone. Content-wise, your musings on religion seemingly fail to take into account the existence of other religions outside of Christianity (or at the very least, outside of the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, & Islam). There are many non-biblical, non-revealed religions. There are many non-theistic ones as well. I don't feel the need to list them off here. Feel free to research. Back to your tone, I kindly request that you be respectful of those who do not necessarily agree with you and do not assume you are preaching to the choir, otherwise you do nothing but hurt your own cause. If you reduce the entire concept of religion to nothing but "the ramblings of bronze age goat herders," do you honestly expect anyone who adheres to one of those religions (or to any other non-"goat herder" religion for that matter) to listen to what you have to say? For the record, I agree with a lot of what you said, especially about awe and amazement not being exclusive to religion. Likewise about how many people (not entire religions mind you, or religion itself, but individuals) claim a monopoly on morality. Again, my issue isn't so much with your content, but more so with how you're presenting it. Just some food for thought.

super_mario 14y ago
Why should lies and delusions be respected? Something is either true or not. We now have evidence that all religions are man made inventions. Most people are either unwilling or unable to look at evidence or understand it. Willful or otherwise ignorance. Respecting beliefs no matter how wild is exactly what got us into situation we are now, where politicians have to associate with some kind of brand of delusion before they can be elected, or when a senator of the most powerful country in the world is saying we don't need environmental policy because Jesus is going to return to earth within 50 years, so who cares what happens with the planet. Moderate, respect religion view that you are advocating is exactly what gives platform and legitimacy to more wild and extreme fundamentalist beliefs.
- iyerrag 14y ago
  Your points are correct for the most part, but still a little restricted by your implicit assertion that all religions are Abrahamic in nature. There is, for example, a tradition of atheism in Hinduism[1] - rejection of the "fact" that there is a guy in the sky who created everything. It deals mostly with human action - its nature and motivation. And fwiw, very few, educated, Hindus I know (anecdotal) are even aware of this. You are correct when you say advocating religious views can lead to encouraging extremists, but I think you might be also dismissing, with little study, the moral teachings and the focus on self without the need to resort to a god-figure that some religious traditions espouse. (I only know of this in Hinduism, there might be more.) I'd rather learn from that rather than dismiss it as irrelevant gibberish. This is not to say that religion is some sort of magic cure-all, but that some traditions do exist - possibly out of our individual experience - which cannot be easily dismissed but which should be merged into our views as well. I treat religion as a conduit to self-improvement, not as a way to book my place in heaven, which is why your pretty angry,dismissive view of religion seems restrictive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism Edit: added wikipedia entry
  - super_mario 14y ago
    If you want to improve yourself you should look into what evidence based reasoning has to say about what you want to discover the answer for, and in particular what modern science has to say about it. Think of it this way. Think of any question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one. Abandoning evidence based reasoning leads to error quickly. Arguing from absolute certainty, which is what faith is (it claims to posses the absolute truth, the words of the creator of the universe no less), is bound to lead to errors. Not testing your ideas does that to you. Take for example animal rights and if it is right to kill animals. Judeo-Christian faiths are clean on this: god gave humans dominion over the earth, and in particular animals for food. End of story. Why should I give rights to my food? But what is right follows from what is true. If animals are indeed sentient, if they are self-aware even, if they can suffer, are scientific questions. If scientific answers to these questions are positive, then some of us sufficiently evolved, aware humans can't ignore the fact, and we have no choice but to treat animals differently than what we do now. Some countries like Spain have gone so far as to give protection and right to life to higher primates, our closest cousin apes.
    - iyerrag 14y ago
      I see where you are going, but I fear this is getting way too meta for the thread :) I never said that I blindly followed what was being taught to me; if it sounded like that, then its just poor phrasing on my part. I do test what has been handed down to me by my elders. For the most part, because of the loss of most of the reasoning behind "religious teachings" - loss of books, extremists killing off opposing points of view, colonial trauma etc etc - it's very easy to dismiss religious traditions as random musings, because there is no textual evidence for ideas and thoughts. For eg. Hinduism is a little mixed about animal rights. I was specifically brought up as a vegetarian because of the tradition in our sub-sub-sub-branch of Hinduism that animals had rights. OTOH, there is some random garbage about women being second-class citizens which I never aim to follow, because it is patently unsound. I guess my point is, I am not going to dismiss years of thought, just because they are years old, without putting some amount of thought into figuring out if it makes sense - in that sense I think we agree with each other. Religion tackles more things than we imagine when we learn to become atheists - its sole purpose need not be cataloging a list of dos and don'ts and it might end up provoking you to ask more questions about yourself. My religious tradition has primarily been a bunch of ideas and thoughts and there is no real "book" which lays down the law. Maybe that is why I think from this perspective and why I cannot just dismiss these ideas without some introspection.
- jorangreef 14y ago
  Understand that your position is one of naturalism, not one of science. Science does not presume to discuss what may or may not lie beyond the observable world. Consider Carl Sagan: "An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed." It is as much folly to advocate militant secularism as it is to advocate blind faith. You are caught red-handed. Consider your ways. "Come now, let us reason together" - Isaiah 1:18
  - super_mario 14y ago
    Really? Think of any question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one. Also, we are working with different definitions of gods here. Sagan is talking about deistic god, which I spent some time addressing above. But when it comes to theistic gods (the ones that care about you, that break natural laws for their people, the ones that care what you eat and on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, ones that give themselves body so they may kill it to save their people, who take "our" side in the war etc), then we have plenty of scientific evidence these things are man made. Besides it's really not up to me to provide evidence against some god. People who invoke him should. It's the classical celestial teapot argument. If I claim there is a tea pot circling Mars, why should you spent time and energy proving there isn't such a thing. I should provide evidence there is one. If science has nothing to say about something what else does? Ramblings of religious people who just make stuff up and never provide any evidence for their claims? And which ones? Scientologists? Mormons? Muslims? Which one of these you will adhere to is highly correlated with where you were born and has nothing to do with the truthfulness of the particular religion. Sometimes these teach completely opposite things about god at the threat of hellfire and infinite torture. They can't all be true, but they can all be wrong. And how do the religious know what lies beyond? Of course it comes down to "revealed" knowledge. God himself spoke to some people and told them things. And others are required to trust these people for their extraordinary claims without any evidence? Let alone the extraordinary evidence required to actually verify their claims. And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence? God would presumably know that people would invent scientific method as the only sure way to discover truth. Yet he leaves such important things as if you will be damned for eternity to belief without evidence leading to three desert dogmas that teach completely opposite things about him. Yahweh himself besides being stupid is rather evil god. Look how he behaves exactly as you would expect the people of that age that invented him to behave (he orders genocide of neighboring tribes that worship other gods, enslavement of women and children etc, just read random book of old testament). By the way he was never meant to be god of all, he was meant to be a god of a single tribe (otherwise a lot of stuff god says and orders makes no sense). Evolution of competing religions and the fact we have multiple religions like this is exactly what you would expect to see if religion were man made. All metaphysical claims and especially all physical claims made by religion were proved to be wrong. And would you expect it any other way really. Religion was our first approximation of cosmology, medicine etc. But like all first approximations it proved to be completely wrong. Jesus casts out demons to heal people, he heals lepers instead of healing leprosy, no germs ever mentioned in the Bible (naturally no germ theory of disease either). But now we know better. We know how solar systems are formed, we know how planets are formed, we know how life evolves, we even know how a universe can come from nothing. We really don't need god to kick off any of these things any more. Over the millennia people believed in all kinds of gods from Zeus to Athena to Thor. You are perfectly capable of dismissing them all as laughable, so you know what it is like to not believe in any of those as nonsense. Atheists just go one god further.

by epenn 14y ago

super_mario 14y ago

Why should lies and delusions be respected? Something is either true or not. We now have evidence that all religions are man made inventions. Most people are either unwilling or unable to look at evidence or understand it. Willful or otherwise ignorance. Respecting beliefs no matter how wild is exactly what got us into situation we are now, where politicians have to associate with some kind of brand of delusion before they can be elected, or when a senator of the most powerful country in the world is saying we don't need environmental policy because Jesus is going to return to earth within 50 years, so who cares what happens with the planet. Moderate, respect religion view that you are advocating is exactly what gives platform and legitimacy to more wild and extreme fundamentalist beliefs.

iyerrag 14y ago
Your points are correct for the most part, but still a little restricted by your implicit assertion that all religions are Abrahamic in nature. There is, for example, a tradition of atheism in Hinduism[1] - rejection of the "fact" that there is a guy in the sky who created everything. It deals mostly with human action - its nature and motivation. And fwiw, very few, educated, Hindus I know (anecdotal) are even aware of this. You are correct when you say advocating religious views can lead to encouraging extremists, but I think you might be also dismissing, with little study, the moral teachings and the focus on self without the need to resort to a god-figure that some religious traditions espouse. (I only know of this in Hinduism, there might be more.) I'd rather learn from that rather than dismiss it as irrelevant gibberish. This is not to say that religion is some sort of magic cure-all, but that some traditions do exist - possibly out of our individual experience - which cannot be easily dismissed but which should be merged into our views as well. I treat religion as a conduit to self-improvement, not as a way to book my place in heaven, which is why your pretty angry,dismissive view of religion seems restrictive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism Edit: added wikipedia entry
- super_mario 14y ago
  If you want to improve yourself you should look into what evidence based reasoning has to say about what you want to discover the answer for, and in particular what modern science has to say about it. Think of it this way. Think of any question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one. Abandoning evidence based reasoning leads to error quickly. Arguing from absolute certainty, which is what faith is (it claims to posses the absolute truth, the words of the creator of the universe no less), is bound to lead to errors. Not testing your ideas does that to you. Take for example animal rights and if it is right to kill animals. Judeo-Christian faiths are clean on this: god gave humans dominion over the earth, and in particular animals for food. End of story. Why should I give rights to my food? But what is right follows from what is true. If animals are indeed sentient, if they are self-aware even, if they can suffer, are scientific questions. If scientific answers to these questions are positive, then some of us sufficiently evolved, aware humans can't ignore the fact, and we have no choice but to treat animals differently than what we do now. Some countries like Spain have gone so far as to give protection and right to life to higher primates, our closest cousin apes.
  - iyerrag 14y ago
    I see where you are going, but I fear this is getting way too meta for the thread :) I never said that I blindly followed what was being taught to me; if it sounded like that, then its just poor phrasing on my part. I do test what has been handed down to me by my elders. For the most part, because of the loss of most of the reasoning behind "religious teachings" - loss of books, extremists killing off opposing points of view, colonial trauma etc etc - it's very easy to dismiss religious traditions as random musings, because there is no textual evidence for ideas and thoughts. For eg. Hinduism is a little mixed about animal rights. I was specifically brought up as a vegetarian because of the tradition in our sub-sub-sub-branch of Hinduism that animals had rights. OTOH, there is some random garbage about women being second-class citizens which I never aim to follow, because it is patently unsound. I guess my point is, I am not going to dismiss years of thought, just because they are years old, without putting some amount of thought into figuring out if it makes sense - in that sense I think we agree with each other. Religion tackles more things than we imagine when we learn to become atheists - its sole purpose need not be cataloging a list of dos and don'ts and it might end up provoking you to ask more questions about yourself. My religious tradition has primarily been a bunch of ideas and thoughts and there is no real "book" which lays down the law. Maybe that is why I think from this perspective and why I cannot just dismiss these ideas without some introspection.
jorangreef 14y ago
Understand that your position is one of naturalism, not one of science. Science does not presume to discuss what may or may not lie beyond the observable world. Consider Carl Sagan: "An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed." It is as much folly to advocate militant secularism as it is to advocate blind faith. You are caught red-handed. Consider your ways. "Come now, let us reason together" - Isaiah 1:18
- super_mario 14y ago
  Really? Think of any question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one. Also, we are working with different definitions of gods here. Sagan is talking about deistic god, which I spent some time addressing above. But when it comes to theistic gods (the ones that care about you, that break natural laws for their people, the ones that care what you eat and on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, ones that give themselves body so they may kill it to save their people, who take "our" side in the war etc), then we have plenty of scientific evidence these things are man made. Besides it's really not up to me to provide evidence against some god. People who invoke him should. It's the classical celestial teapot argument. If I claim there is a tea pot circling Mars, why should you spent time and energy proving there isn't such a thing. I should provide evidence there is one. If science has nothing to say about something what else does? Ramblings of religious people who just make stuff up and never provide any evidence for their claims? And which ones? Scientologists? Mormons? Muslims? Which one of these you will adhere to is highly correlated with where you were born and has nothing to do with the truthfulness of the particular religion. Sometimes these teach completely opposite things about god at the threat of hellfire and infinite torture. They can't all be true, but they can all be wrong. And how do the religious know what lies beyond? Of course it comes down to "revealed" knowledge. God himself spoke to some people and told them things. And others are required to trust these people for their extraordinary claims without any evidence? Let alone the extraordinary evidence required to actually verify their claims. And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence? God would presumably know that people would invent scientific method as the only sure way to discover truth. Yet he leaves such important things as if you will be damned for eternity to belief without evidence leading to three desert dogmas that teach completely opposite things about him. Yahweh himself besides being stupid is rather evil god. Look how he behaves exactly as you would expect the people of that age that invented him to behave (he orders genocide of neighboring tribes that worship other gods, enslavement of women and children etc, just read random book of old testament). By the way he was never meant to be god of all, he was meant to be a god of a single tribe (otherwise a lot of stuff god says and orders makes no sense). Evolution of competing religions and the fact we have multiple religions like this is exactly what you would expect to see if religion were man made. All metaphysical claims and especially all physical claims made by religion were proved to be wrong. And would you expect it any other way really. Religion was our first approximation of cosmology, medicine etc. But like all first approximations it proved to be completely wrong. Jesus casts out demons to heal people, he heals lepers instead of healing leprosy, no germs ever mentioned in the Bible (naturally no germ theory of disease either). But now we know better. We know how solar systems are formed, we know how planets are formed, we know how life evolves, we even know how a universe can come from nothing. We really don't need god to kick off any of these things any more. Over the millennia people believed in all kinds of gods from Zeus to Athena to Thor. You are perfectly capable of dismissing them all as laughable, so you know what it is like to not believe in any of those as nonsense. Atheists just go one god further.