Like I said… that’s been my expereince with the majority.
But in this country, the minority of late has become so very influential, powerful, and down right dangerous.
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Actually at the time it was the FIRST and for long the ONLY government founded on that principle. Not even the Athenian Greeks were willing to separate the gods from government.
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This is the internet
That was weird lol. The justification is : “The thread has devolved into arguing and back and forth toxicity about real world religion”. Like. Yes, discussing the nature and morality of the Light, which is basically Warcraft’s take on (western) Christianity but with cool hammers and Cosmic Chime Boys instead of angels, can and will eventually lead to discussing Christianity. LMAO anyway
Think we may be misunderstanding each other here ? I wasn’t saying that what the atheists I mentioned said can be generalized to atheism as a whole, nor am I saying that those atheists were being insistent or disrespectful. I’m saying that their conception of atheism exists and so that atheism cannot be universally summed up as “not believing in a deity”.
Also, I’m not christian, and I don’t identify with any religion. (And I’m not American, if that’s of any help)
I don’t know where to start here, as my views and yours seem to be polar opposites on this matter. What you see as superstitious explanations of natural phenomena that ought to be repudiated by “reason”, I see as the many expressions of human beings trying to make sense of their environment through poetry and symbolism. If science and those expressions were mutually exclusive (and I don’t think they are), I’d rather have science gone, because I don’t want to live in a solved world deprived of all magic.
That might be true, but that presupposes that exerting change on the universe is inherently desirable, and I don’t think it is. What’s pretty cool with “spinning prayer bells” is that, unlike “a simple flick of a light”, it will never bring about global warming.
I’d gladly sleep in a cave and live basically the exact same life my ancestors used to live thousands of years ago if that kept me away from the apocalyptic future we’re heading towards according to the scientists themselves.
Yea, that’s the thing with science. Science works… until it doesn’t, or worse, until it realizes it never did. Basically science is pretty much defined by permanent recalculation and ultimately being always wrong and yet still thinking “yea this time we def got it right”. Don’t get me wrong. Science has amazing results, its achievements are immense and undeniable. But at the end of the day, science and religions share the same goal : the creation of knowledge about stuff. Religions have their own sets of questions, answers and proofs.
The way I see things, “faith in science” is absolutely about trading one deity for another. See how technicists deal with the issue of the environmental crisis ? “We believe in Science, Science will find solutions. One day, we’ll be able to predict every single natural disaster. One day, renewable energies will be cost-effective and satisfy the planet’s ever increasing needs. One day, we’ll be able to extract humongous amounts of uranium out of sea water thanks to some super advanced technology. One day, we’ll find a planet full of the fresh water resources we’re beginning to be short on.”
That, is religious talk. That’s faith. I respect faith, and so I respect that. But I’m not buying it.
I do think both have their place, that’s what my initial post was about. It is Drahliana who was being very assertive about the fact that only one of them is correct.
Science nearly ended the world when someone decided building nuclear bombs was a good idea (talking about the Cold War and how close we came to nuclear annihilation)
Science works, but it’s also been abused to create some pretty horrific diseases and such.
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But you don’t understand, nukes are good because they prevent war between the countries that have them !!! Okay, until they don’t and we all die. Oh, and of course that system means a country with nukes gets a free pass on invading a country without nukes because obviously no one in the international community will dare taking military action.
But yes. Nukes amazing, trust me on this one
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Science means Knowledge. All Religions have a Science to them.
Ironically it’s due to Religious People not following the Science at the core of their Religions that causes them to fall into corruption.
Ignorance is the opposite of Science.
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No they don’t. Religion is about the presentation of answers that you are not supposed to question.
Science however proposes that every answer, every model is valid until it’s superseded by the next model. Science is about as much for searching for the right questions as much as it is about finding the answers.
I’m with you on this one Yven. Science and Religion are not mutually exclusive. The origin of religion was asking scientific philosophical questions and wondering if there is a grand design.
Our search for the ‘unmoved mover’ continues. We name the Higgs bozon the “God Particle” after all.
Really ? Let’s think about a few questions religions try to answer : “what is the meaning of life ? What should be valued ? What is the nature of death ?”
Aren’t those good questions ? What does science have to say about them ?
Science and religions resemble each other in that they both ask questions and try to answer them. That was my point. That the questions they ask and the answers they give differ is ultimately irrelevant.
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Xenobots were created without regard for a Grey Goo situation
All good questions and the comfort people find in the answers is what’s ultimately important to many people
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The question of ‘what is a religion’ is discussed heavily in academic circles, because there is little agreement on the particulars. Most of what is consistent is that the definition, like most taxonomies that don’t have the luxury of being monophyletic, is almost certainly a multi-factor test based on a preponderance of the points on the list being true.
Common factors include:
- Belief in a transcendental, liminal truth
- Practice reflecting the belief
- Institutions which uphold these two formally
- Community which nurtures practitioners
This particular body of traits is taken from one academic in particular (Bruce Lincoln) albeit one I found pretty persuasive.
What I would say is consistent, however, is that atheism is generally not accepted to be a religion. You describe a particular subset of antitheists who are definitely quite annoying, it is true – but the “New Atheists” (as they largely self-brand) are generally referred to as a movement. Movements can be irrational and passionate and have a community.
I think it makes a lot of sense within certain contexts to analogize New Atheism to a religion, especially within the specific political context of the United States and Western Europe, where there is generally a strong tendency towards the collapse of institution and community in religion at large (met by a counter tendency to reinforce it among converts). However, I don’t think it’s useful in the majority of perspectives about religion outside of that context, either anthropological or theological, and even from a political perspective, it is a critique of limited value as they are a group of limited (not insignificant, but limited) political power.
The very concept of ‘religion’ within the English language reflects a particular outgrowth of deinstitutionalization of explicit belief and a secularization of the values of a particular group of faiths. It falters (is not useless! but falters) when moved outside of that context. A lot of words struggle moved outside of their original context, but I think we feel it more with this one because it is discussing such important ideas to so many people.
So, if you’re going to have a serious discussion about what a religion is, you really have to work backwards – you have to openly identify the major groups you want your term to categorize and then come up with a definition that works for as many of those as possible so that you can hopefully apply it to phenomena you encounter later. And if you don’t do that, you have a vague but useful lay word that can describe 100 different contexts and communicate none of them clearly when dealing with people who have vastly different experiences from you.
tl;dr: no one has a [censored] clue what a religion is, it’s describing a bunch of [censored] things that did not consider themselves very like each other for a long time, you have to define what you mean by it every time you use it if you’re going to try to have a very precise discussion, otherwise you’re shooting a laser cannon around to light a match. you might get it, you’ll get a bunch of other stuff too.
In other news the Animal Rights Activists(I refuse to call them Environmentalists considering how they disrespect the Environment for the sake of Animal Survival) are protesting California’s attempts to resolve a Drought via Desalination of Sea Water.
I mean Science™ is not free of it’s dogmas and sectarianism
I remind you Oppenheimer actively suppressed research that contradicted contemporary understanding of atoms at the time
“If we cannot disprove Bohm we must collectively agree to ignore him”, iirc, as a salient infamous historical example
Modern Academia is subject to Publish or Perish and the Institutions That Be regularly suppress research or even takes that go against the current hegemony
And fundamentally speaking, Science cannot answer questions such as metaphysics, the meaning of life, what is Good, etc, for that we need philosophy and it’s generation of ontologies and epistemologies and etc, which is in turn the foundation of all religions if understood properly
Moreover most religions have wide and varied opinions on many things
Catholicism has a variety of philosophical schools, Muslims have 7 primary schools with upwards of 20 subschools, and there’s the old saying that if you ask two rabbis one question you’ll get four answers, etc
Most religions require and encourage interrogation, even of Dogmas
Eg the Dogma that Christ’s Body was made purely of Mary’s Body, and nothing was made De Novo by God, such that there is now medical theology investigating if Mary was perhaps Intersex such that a Y Chromosome was present, whereupon that has implications of what it means to be a Perfect Woman vs Being Intersex
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There are ways of thinking about the world beyond religion and science.
We can tackle those questions without invoking the supernatural. That’s called philosophy.
As far as the first question. Life is it’s own meaning. It really doesn’t need one it just is. As far as death… it’s state of change … the wave going back to the ocean. As to what should be valued… that’s an individual question.
Philosophy deals a lot in the supernatural. You can’t have philosophy without metaphysics, and those discussions often involved questions about the soul.
But you are right, the question “Do I have a soul?” Is a personal one. The soul scientifically weighs 21 grams, according to MacDougall. We can measure that scientifically, so does that prove we have a soul?
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On a different note, I watched the new GoT show. House of the Dragon is looking good so far. In my opinion anyway
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I finally finished Sandman and wow. That was absolutely spectacular. I’m familar with the comics through cultural osmosis but never read more than an issue or two. So I was largely unfamilar with the stories.
And coming in with no real expectations I was completely blown away. It was absolutely fantastic. Without spoiling the diner episode was one of the best things I’ve seen.
The wheels squeak a bit in the 2nd half. I felt they probably could’ve spent more time on the human characters. The show briefly becomes a wacky sitcom about an apartment of oddballs and that for the most part didn’t work for me but it wasn’t a deal breaker by any means.
But overall it was the best thing I’ve seen in ages. Just oozes creativity and the amount of genres it jumps through is awe inspiring. I dont know how you go from chilling rated R psychological horror to light hearted fantasy that wouldnt be out of place in a PG Disney movie without causing tonal whiplash - but somehow it managed to do it effortlessly.
It, fittingly enough, perfectly captures that dream like quality where everything is really weird but you just don’t question it. Absolutely adored it.
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Not really while there are philosophers who go the metaphysical route that’s not where most philosophical work is about. The vast majority of the big timers such as Kant, Descarte, is about human real world issues such as perception, ethics, and morality. You don’t need to invoke the supernatural to deal with them. Modern works such as Tim Scanlon’s “What We Owe To Each Other” Peter Singer’s work on altruism, and Derek Parfit “Reasons and Persons” and “On What Matters” contractualism, consequentialism, you don’t need to invoke gods, souls, or demons to tackle the big ticket issues.
I would highly reccomend the freely available Tanner Lecture series from UC Berkely available at the link below.
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