pslewis

WTF????????????????///

tony de wonderful

And here we are all being atheists / believers in a scientific worldview being brought up in a society where that just happens to be the received orthodoxy.

What a coincidence!

Bubba po

It's just a drive-by. I haven't got time for a more considered argument.

john banks

I can think of two religions whose holy books repeatedly describe what most would consider unjustified violence against unbelievers, even though a sensible proportion of its followers do not take it literally.

I'm nervous about even mentioning one of them for fear of violence or some policeman that takes an interest because you aren't allowed to criticise some religions.

Christianity could be considered the status quo though, and can still thankfully be openly criticised, just as people should have the right to believe and practice the religion they want, even though it has been described as fairy tales for adults.

tony de wonderful

All three Abrahamic religions do.

pslewis

I was devastated to find out my wife was having an affair earlier this year, but by turning to religion I was soon able to come to terms with the whole thing.

I converted to Islam,
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............. we're stoning the slag in the morning!!

adam405sti

iTrader: (14)

As to the question does God exist? If this is the question on hand. Lets put it this way....
Can you have something from nothing? No it's no rational or logical.
Is everything limited? If so it must have come from somewhere.
Will everything with a shape, size, mass weight, features whatever you would like to call it, end at some point due to its restrictions.
Does everything with a beginning have an end? Yes...must have

This is a rational argument and does not require rocket science...

So the earth and universe have features therefore are limited and will end one day, who put it there? Only one explanation, a creator who must be unlimited which we cannot put features to i.e like man as we are limited therefore limited in understanding and comprehending but through the use of the mind can sense and comprehend the creator's existence.

I won't reply to any bigotry comments

tony de wonderful

Your mistake is to presume the universe must be rational and logical.

adam405sti

iTrader: (14)

There you go again... I stated the argument is a rational argument I didn't presume the universe is a rational or logical argument. Man has sense which he uses and a mind to comprehend and understand. Each persons ability and extent in carrying out this task is different. Furthermore that's where science comes in doesn't it.

rossyboy

iTrader: (8)

2 mins 17 in...

JohnSmith

I think in this case the faith is that someone beat cancer against all odds

No religion I believe had any part in the healing

madscoob

iTrader: (3)

all religeon in anyway shape or form is based on adult fairy tales

tony de wonderful

Rational argument and logical form are irrelevant for deciding ultimate truth unless the universe conforms to these rules.

There's actually a paradox there if you can figure it out?

Lee247

I am a Christian and I believe in God. I wear my cross as it pleases me to do so and it brings me comfort. I have lost a lot of close family, my Father, who was the most wonderful man in the world. I need to believe he is in a better place.
Comfort belief, yes, pleases me, yes, likely hood of me coming back once I have karked it, to tell you afterlife is wonderful, nope

Leslie

How about if when you do die you find that there is one after all? Can't be proved one way or the other of course. It is naturally far less inconvenient if you persuade yourself not to believe in a God.

Someone made the point that the world would be a better place if we all believed in an all powerful being and were encouraged to lead a good and fair thinking life. It used to be like that!

Looking back over recent years, it is true that the world is descending into moral depravity and selfish behaviour since it has become so much more secular. I personally think that is regrettable. Religious training as one grew up certainly encouraged people to live a better life and to have more consideration for others. Is that such a bad thing? No wasted effort there!

You can shout all you like about proof and modern thinking etc. in an effort to assuage your own consciences. it does not really come down to that. It is one of life's mysteries and it is interesting to consider how it all started in the first place. That is where the real thinking should be. Say what you like, but Faith is not such a bad thing however much the non believers shout it down, not surprising really since that is something that they find pretty irksome.

Most people who decry such beliefs are trying to bolster up their own concerns anyway because they are not 100% sure.

Les

hodgy0_2

i am afraid living a decent "moral" life is not good enough to get you to the kingdom of heaven

and if you truly believe it is, I suggest you do some more studying

john banks

It was the other way around for me. I wanted to believe in a God as that was the status quo (having just married into a very Christian family and where, unfortunately, nearly all my friends were Christian), and the promises attached to such a belief are attractive if true. However, I was trying to make myself believe something I could no longer believe was true and at that point it was worth doing something about.

I have to say most people I come across are still like that, religious or not. Whilst our society is now more multiracial than it was which brings tensions, and the press go on about how terrible it all is, I was reading some studies which showed that violent crime for example has declined greatly as the fear of crime has increased.

There are many beautifully behaved young people brought up in secular homes. It is more the attitudes of the parents than religious faith.

I don't think it is a matter of conscience, but a matter of evidence. When you piloted (I hope that is a real word) aircraft, there would (hopefully) have been a chain of evidence regarding the construction and maintenance of that aircraft, including the engineering principles behind the whole system. Even if some of those engineering principles were not fully explained from first principles, they would have empirical repeatability in testing. You may demand that the aircraft you pilot is based on all this, and rely on the work of others to ensure it. This is a life or death decision.

When I practice medicine, I try to do similar. The evidence is incomplete, but can be weighed. There are well known traps for going with feelings and impressions due to bias that result in lack of progress in effective diagnosis and treatment.

How does someone that thinks that way about the aircraft they fly or the medicine they practice think in another way (faith) about their eternal destiny? I couldn't tolerate the cognitive dissonance involved. Looking back I think it started to fall apart for me when I studied epidemiology and critique of scientific publications. I did subject my faith to the same scrutiny and it fell apart. I belief I was using faith as a construct to avoid looking at the evidence systematically. I was trying to believe something I knew wasn't true. I had believed what a bunch of nice people said when I was developing and hadn't even questioned it with schoolboy science.

Whenever I've discussed this with believers before they seem very sure of their beliefs until this point in the conversation is reached, and then they admit it comes down to something they feel and they have no objective reason to convince me to believe the same.

I would like someone to attempt to break this argument. Usually it comes down to faith opting out of being subject to reason, so you are back to feelings again.

tony de wonderful

Evidence (or raw experience) itself doesn't prove anything John. All theories are underdetermined, besides the naive Empiricist position that there is such a thing as 'raw evidence' is long discredited. All evidence is theory-laden, in fact theory determines evidence to a large extent.

For example going from Newtonian physics to Einstenian the concepts of space and time actually mean different things. It is called incommensurability.

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Cheers Rossyboy, glad someone understood !

Leslie

You missed the point completely.

Try reading it again with emphasis on the effects which were described.

Les

john banks

That naive empiricist position underpins much of the medicine, computing, science, engineering, food production etc you probably use daily, as does the application of Newtonian physics unless you are pslewis in whatever nuclear department he works in.

Medics would generally take a 95% confidence interval as their minimum standard for measuring an effect in a well designed trial. They will look for corroboration between independent trials. The use of live subjects when harm is possible means that this standard is somewhat lower than billions of samples you could collect in a laboratory. However, I would assert that either are vastly superior to evidence used to try to establish religious dogma.

Philopsophical proofs for the existence of god fail to capture my interest for some reason. The practicality of the more realistic claims of common religions are more relevant to me.

Comparing the naive empiricism by which I would like to conduct my life with the method by which I or others choose their religious beliefs is of interest to me.

Jamz3k

NSR is awesome!

Men taking it up the back passage - OK, even encouraged.

Having faith - Savage, archaic, frowned upon.

Leslie

I understand what you are saying but there is more to it all than having to rely on concrete proofs to believe in a certain way of thinking.

It is true that in my job I had to take a great deal on trust over the preparation of the machine but by the same token, we were all trained to have a pretty deep knowledge of the systems in the machine and how they all worked. Knowing that made it fairly easy to work out whether the machine was behaving as it should do and that it was working in a safe and effective manner. If one detected a problem it was pretty obvious that it existed and also which was the best way to deal with it to make it safe to either land the thing or in the worst case to use the emergency exit to save your own life. "Piloting" is quite correct as you said.

I am relieved to say that although one did get presented with the occasional problem, it was usually possible by using one's knowledge of the systems to take the correct actions to sort it all out successfully.

In a similar way, it is easy enough to make one's own assessment of the matters being discussed here and to decide for oneself whether one is prepared to accept that there just might be some truth in it or not. We all have to make up our own minds and that is something that is better accepted rather than to attempt to belittle someone for having different views to one's own. it really is quite unnecessary to run someone down for their beliefs and does nothing to strengthen ones own arguments.

Les

Tony Harrington

iTrader: (8)

[QUOTE=john banks;10678861]Not sure if serious, but if you die and there is no god, you've wasted your life labouring under a delusion that is supposed to underpin everything you think.

Why do you suppose someone would waste their life if there was no God?

Many people that have experienced a sustainable changed life would disagree because they are now an asset to society as opposed to a complete liability, by their own admission.

tony de wonderful

It's only superior because we are dogmatists about the value of science and 'rationality'. Science say this, says that, it's not scientific so must be invalid? It's 'irrational' = it's heresy?

Ok I'm not completely that much of a relativist but there are many cosmologies and they all work, we're naive to think our cosmology now is 'true' in some universal sense because the history of all cosmologies is they all get superseded.

I'm sure the Christian of late antiquity was as confident in his worldview as we are of ours.

I talked before about how 'facts' or 'observations' are theory-laden, we can't actually split theory and observation according to some epistemologists. Anti-realists, Instrumentalists, take the view that 'theoretical entities' (too small to see) like atoms are just concepts that work, to ask if they are 'real' is an irrelevant question, science can't deal with this. I believe the default Positivist position is to be agnostic about theoretical entities. Blew my mind when I got that, we learn at school about atoms like they are things you could pick up if your hands were small enough, but really nobody knows if they are actually real.

Bubba po

If God intervened in this case, why did he let all the other ones die? Including all the little children?

Hmmmmm?

jef

iTrader: (13)

my thoughts

positive mental attitude can have a posoitive effect.
wether it comes from religion or family support or a tv channel matters not aslong as it has the effect of positivley affecting thought processes.
stress hormones ect have the possible effect of putting not only the mental state but the physiological condition of the body under higher than normal levels of damage.

genetic pre-dispositions are at present the ultimate controller(with enviromental exposure a close second), but having a positive outlook in general i truly beleive can be of benefit to some. but for others its an unnatainable goal
whether religion is the source of it, is not really relevant imo. any positive influence on the specific persons character offers the possibility of maybe not physical help, but even just mental.
faith healing and "miracles" im yet to be convinced of, if thats what the o.p is implying?

Mike GT

iTrader: (1)

It's only a matter of time before science puts to bed once and for all that religion & god (s) is a load of bull****, and is nothing more than " old wive's tales " passed down generations of humans for thousands of years....for some bizare reason

At that point religion will die, and people will accept once and for all that you have one life and you have to live it in you're own way, and not be swayed into believing there is an all seeing, all doing almighty " thing " thats apparently oversees your existance.

Where is the proof of a so called "god"

Jamz3k

Why then did Albert Einstein (along with many many other renowned scientists past and present) believe in God?

tony de wonderful

Do you believe in reason and rationality?