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Forums - General - Let's Talk About Religion

That Guy on 14 March 2009
im_sneaky said:
I'm fine with being people being stupid, and I'm fine with people, stupid or not, trying to make other people stupid. So I don't have a problem with religious people trying to convert. To become religious, there must be a weak link in the first place.

 

I find that somewhat backhanded and offensive. Basically you're saying religious people = stupid. Its like you're saying, "I'm fine with people being stupid, so I don't have a problem with Republicans. There must be a weak link somewhere in the first place."

 

Sure there are religions out there with peculiarities, but let's not put everyone who is religious under the "stupid" umbrella.



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akuma587 on 14 March 2009
emilie autumn said:
Kasz216 said:
emilie autumn said:
religions and gods are all creations of men, they are the necesety for men to explain unexplainable things, as friedrich nietzsche said "god is dead" he is indeed of no use in modern times since we can explain everything with science so why do cling to him?

We REALLY REALLY can't.

Hell most scientists think it's likely possible we can't even perceive everything.  Let alone explain it.

we humans can't, but a superior creature(aliens) maybe be able to or developement of such a machine that will lead you to detection of such things you can't percieve, our brain hasn't being exploited to its maximum capacity yet so we still ahven't seing all from human beings

Now who sounds like the religious nutjob.

 



We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.  The only thing that really worried me was the ether.  There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke

It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...."  Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson

Khuutra on 14 March 2009
Kasz216 said:
highwaystar101 said:
I think that it is foolish to believe in a personal god because you have zero chance of getting it right. However, I wont dismiss the possibility of a creator per se, if someone could show me evidence for a creator I would be open to reading it, but it needs to be scientific and logical. Not just 'mr X said that he was son of god Y and it says this in book Z, which a fair few millenia old, follow it blindly sinner', which happens far too much and I'm sure most of you notice I go from nice to hostile when that happens.

Premise 1: We are soon on the verge of developing computers that will be able to recreate human minds

Premise 2: As such, we could develop computers that could recreate an entire world or even solar system.

 

Logical conclusion: If this technology became available, we would use it to create these "false" worlds for research, also likely for entertainment.  These false worlds when technologically advanced enough would create there own false worlds.

Logical Conclusion 2: Therefore it's logical to assume that the odds of being a "real" world vs a "fake" world are very small even in a universe that wouldn't have a god.

Logical Conclusion 3:  It's statistically probable we are living in a false world.  AKA a world created by someone else.  It is statistically probably a creator exists.

I don't think that this really follows. Not that we won't be able to create a computer roughly like a human mind (maybe we will one day in the far-flung future, running on trillions of parallel cores all at once), but being able to simulate an entire solar system is literally ridiculous.

Considering how much information there is in any object on the molecular level, and in how these objects interact with one another, in order to create a simulation of the entire universe, you would not only need a complete and working Unified Field Theory, you would need a computer about the size of the universe.



Khuutra on 14 March 2009
WessleWoggle said:
That Guy said:
im_sneaky said:
I'm fine with being people being stupid, and I'm fine with people, stupid or not, trying to make other people stupid. So I don't have a problem with religious people trying to convert. To become religious, there must be a weak link in the first place.

I find that somewhat backhanded and offensive. Basically you're saying religious people = stupid. Its like you're saying, "I'm fine with people being stupid, so I don't have a problem with Republicans. There must be a weak link somewhere in the first place."

 

Sure there are religions out there with peculiarities, but let's not put everyone who is religious under the "stupid" umbrella.

I disagree, we should put all religious people under the stupid umbrella because they're all stupid for endorsing the man made plague known as religion.

In my opinion sneaky should have said ignorant, not stupid. You can hold faith based beliefs while remaining smart, but you can't hold them without being ignorant in some form or another.

Guys you are getting close to what I talked about in the OP.



Louie on 14 March 2009
WessleWoggle said:
That Guy said:
im_sneaky said:
I'm fine with being people being stupid, and I'm fine with people, stupid or not, trying to make other people stupid. So I don't have a problem with religious people trying to convert. To become religious, there must be a weak link in the first place.

 

I find that somewhat backhanded and offensive. Basically you're saying religious people = stupid. Its like you're saying, "I'm fine with people being stupid, so I don't have a problem with Republicans. There must be a weak link somewhere in the first place."

 

Sure there are religions out there with peculiarities, but let's not put everyone who is religious under the "stupid" umbrella.

I disagree, we should put all religious people under the stupid umbrella because they're all stupid for endorsing the man made plague known as religion.

In my opinion sneaky should have said ignorant, not stupid. You can hold faith based beliefs while remaining smart, but you can't hold them without being ignorant in some form or another.

 

 

There are people practising religion only for themselves and without too deep believes, though. I wouldn't consider these people to be stupid.

Please keep it civil. I know this is a topic that can result in heated discussions but I don't want to hand out bans.



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That Guy on 14 March 2009

Its funny how the pendulum has swung the other way. Back 400 years ago, if you did not have a religion, then you were considered an uncivilized heathen. That was a very intolerant viewpoint at the time.

Now, especially in this forum, if you ARE religious, now you are the uncivilized heathen. So now its the atheists who assert this intolerant viewpoint.

I believe both viewpoints are equally wrong and there's no reason to cast a whole group of people to be "stupid."



Khuutra on 14 March 2009

You don't have to be ignorant to hold a faith-based belief. There are many religions which incorporate human knowledge about the mechanics of the universe into their own belief system. Hell, that's actually something the Dalai Lama is famous for saying - if a scientific discovery goes against one of his beliefs, he just has to change his belief.

In that sense, many rleigions require no more "ignorance" than that of the scientific community.

I will agree that logic doesn't have a lot of sway in the supernatural part of many religions, but philosophically I think nearly all religions are grounded in at least some way.



That Guy on 14 March 2009
WessleWoggle said:
Khuutra said:
WessleWoggle said:
That Guy said:
im_sneaky said:
I'm fine with being people being stupid, and I'm fine with people, stupid or not, trying to make other people stupid. So I don't have a problem with religious people trying to convert. To become religious, there must be a weak link in the first place.

I find that somewhat backhanded and offensive. Basically you're saying religious people = stupid. Its like you're saying, "I'm fine with people being stupid, so I don't have a problem with Republicans. There must be a weak link somewhere in the first place."

 

Sure there are religions out there with peculiarities, but let's not put everyone who is religious under the "stupid" umbrella.

I disagree, we should put all religious people under the stupid umbrella because they're all stupid for endorsing the man made plague known as religion.

In my opinion sneaky should have said ignorant, not stupid. You can hold faith based beliefs while remaining smart, but you can't hold them without being ignorant in some form or another.

Guys you are getting close to what I talked about in the OP.

I forgot, I'm sorry.

But I'm not trying to be offensive. It's a fact you have to be ignorant to hold a faith based belief, because faith is when you believe in something without any reason, and people with faith based beliefs are ignoring the fact that their belief has nothing to do with logic.

EDIT: I didn't see the above post by Louie before posting this. Also this post was meant to clarify, not offend.

 

 

no, what you just defined is credulity. Faith is always based on evidence. And it does not always have to do with religion either.

 

People put faith in the President to get us out of this recession. Why? Because he planned out something that sounded reasonable and based on his past record of service, we decide to put our trust, faith (and in turn, our votes) in order to enable him to carry out his plan.

However, if the President promised to cut taxes and then during his term he instead raised taxes, then we would quickly lose faith in him and would not trust him to do anything else right either.

Faith is not blind; it is very active, it grows or dies, and its always based on a record of past actions. Current actions that confirm the record of past actions of course would cause one's faith to grow. Actions that run contrary to the record of past actions obviously would case one's faith to die.

 



Louie on 14 March 2009

Well what I personally always found to be really offensive was the way religious people called me ignorant and thought I was just being an atheist because I was too stupid to understand christianity. One of my teacher said "if you would think about it you'd become a christian, too" and my religion teacher always gave me bad marks because I dissagreed with a lot of things he said (yeah really. He even admitted it at some point). But in reality I was really religious first and then after a while I slowly felt that I don't believe in those things, etc.



That Guy on 14 March 2009
Louie said:
Well what I personally always found to be really offensive was the way religious people called me ignorant and thought I was just being an atheist because I was too stupid to understand christianity. One of my teacher said "if you would think about it you'd become a christian, too" and my religion teacher always gave me bad marks because I dissagreed with a lot of things he said (yeah really. He even admitted it at some point). But in reality I was really religious first and then after a while I slowly felt that I don't believe in those things, etc.

 

If I were a mod, I'd hand out a warning to your religious teacher. That is a very backhanded comment he made about you.

I'm not here to try to defend every comment that religious people have made, since there are something like thousands of religions out there, and even under the "Christian" umbrella, there are probably 500+ different denominations that don't necessarily agree with each other. And someone somewhere is bound to say something stupid.