Religion of one, religion of many.

Love is a word we've invented to describe an emotion - or rather a set of emotions - that are subjective for each of us but still sufficiently alike that we can have meaningful conversations about it even if we have no access to each others' experience.

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@Bobby G: Having a truth value dependent on point of view.

Whether or not love exists does not change depending on who you are. Whether or not Twilight sucks does change depending on who you are. That's the difference.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

I believe that whether or not you're experiencing love changes depending on who you are, though.

Do you think that whether or not God exists changes depending on who you are?

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Yes, and whether or not you're experiencing drunkenness also changes depending upon who you are. But alcohol objectively exists anyway.

No.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

Let's take Alice, Bob and Charlie.

Alice is holding, with her arms stretched directly in front of her, a ball that is red and green; one half is red, the other green. She's holding it so that she only sees the red half; if you ask her, she's holding a red ball.

Bob is standing some way away from Alice and directly to the front. He only sees the green half of the ball. To him, Alice is holding a green ball.

Then there's Charlie, who stands further away from the two, facing the ball from the side, so he sees a ball that's half green and half red. He also sees that from Alice's perspective, the ball is red; and from Bob's perspective, it's green.

So if you ask Charlie if the green ball exists, he'd have to concede that it exists for Bob in the form of an experience that Bob has, but that experience is not shared by Alice or Charlie. The same applies for the red ball.

If Charlie were to suggest to the other two that the ball is in fact both red and green, and that they're only seeing one side of it, they could resolve the issue by empirical test (turning the ball or moving around) or by discussing the matter and settling it (so Alice could accept that since Bob and Charlie both say there's at least a green half to the ball, it's probably true).

In other words, our experience of existence is relative. The objective reality is the whole setting; that the ball is in fact half red, half green, and that the three people are positioned so that their perspectives, except for Charlie's, are limited.

There was somewhere I was going with this, but I lost the thought somewhere... Well, I'll post this anyway; maybe it'll come back to me.

edited 30th Jul '11 7:27:47 AM by BestOf

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Well, the core problem about the "God question" here, is one of definition creep. If you ask someone if they believe in "God", they often mean different things by that term. They may mean they believe in a vague "higher power" behind all things. They may believe in an actual entity that controls our existence. They may believe in a "God emotion" (usually love).

All these things not only are entirely different concepts, but they have different levels of a requirement for direct evidence.

As for myself, while I'm an atheist, I do think that the "God emotion" is a real thing. I just don't think that what they're talking about rises to the level of theism. As such, I think that in reality they are atheists, even if the idea would probably horrify them. (FWIW the first definition above I consider to be a deistic belief, and the second to be a truly theistic belief). But I do think the emotional impact IS real. I just don't think it's unique to religion.

As a matter of coincidence, in about..5 hours or so? I'm going to be basically OD'ing on that "God emotion" otherwise known as catharsis. Woot for massive concerts.

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve

No. I am not fond of moral relativism, so I do not think that definition of justice is "whatever people make up".

However, there is a difference between any/many/one correct definition and the thing existing in the first place. They are not necessary linked.

So, personally, I think there is one proper concept of justice. However, justice itself does not exist outside of concept of sapient beings. It exists only as far as people make it happen.

edited 30th Jul '11 8:16:23 AM by Beholderess

If we disagree, that much, at least, we have in common

I once had a hallucination (not drug-induced) that filled me with an overwhelming sence of joy and completeness. It gave me hope and certainty that everything was gonna turn out all right.

I knew immediately that it was a hallucination, as there was no natural explanation to my experience. I still did enjoy it and the emotion I got from it, but after enjoying the ride, I thought about it and went on with my life.

Similarly, you sometimes get a very strong sensation that the world (and the universe) is OK. Everything's in its proper place, nature is beautiful, the sunset is beautiful and there's no need - or indeed room - for improvement.

These things are subjective experiences (that I believe are part of what people mean when they say they've had a "religious experience") that are explainable by psychology and biology. This doesn't make them any less significant. In fact, knowing how the wonders of nature work makes them even more wonderful: "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams.

I believe that there are experiences that could cause belief in the supernatural, especially for people who don't have access to information that would explain their experience any other way. This is the origin of religion - or at least part of it.

The fact that religion exists and that the experience of God exists doesn't make God real, any more than Alice's red ball exists.

Maybe Alice's red ball is a Universe that was designed by Yahweh, whereas Bob sees a Universe without order, only chaos. Charlie sees that there is no design, but just the illusion of design that humans have because we have evolved to detect patterns and purpose when there is none.

Alice is awed by the designer and His work, while Bob is awed by the complex, multi-layered structures that the Universe contains despite its fundamentally chaotic nature. Both can imagine, but not experience, each other's perspective.

Charlie can see where Alice and Bob are coming from, but he can see both sides at once and knows that they are looking at an illusion.

When Bob asserts that the Universe is chaotic, he's ignoring the laws of physics and the awe-inspiring structures (such as life) that they spontaneously create by building up from simpler structures via simple natural processes. So Charlie knows what Bob means by chaos - the laws of nature are kind of random - but also sees that there is order, in the form of the laws of nature, in the Universe.

When Alice says that things look designed for us because they were designed for us by a designer, Charlie knows what she's talking about, but also knows that the illusion of design doesn't reflect reality. There is no design in the universe, but there is order.

Animals are not perfect; for example, there's a nerve that most (if not all) land animals have that leads from their brain to their larynx, but not directly; instead, it goes to the chest and around the aortic arch before turning back up and finally reaching its target.

Similar "design flaws" are abundant in nature, and not limited to organisms. If one assumes that the Universe is "designed" for life, then the designer did a very poor job, as planets capable of supporting life are relatively rare (though there still are millions, if not billions, of them.)

Charlie can see where Alice gets her idea that the Universe is designed, but knows that it's because of our natural instinct to look for patterns and see them, despite there being none. (Here's an example of this phenomenon.)

Instead, Charlie sees that random mutations in living creatures, which are then "selected" for survival and breeding by a non-random process of natural selection, have, starting from an as-yet unknown origin, led to life as we know it. The reason it looks "designed" is that natural selection favours excellence, and any organism or feature of an organism that gets results will, to us and our over-sensitive pattern detection, look like it was designed.

edited 30th Jul '11 8:15:35 AM by BestOf

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@Bobby:

Indeed, there's also a neurological process by which humans experience the divine. Yet the Divinity, like Love, is abstract.

“Love is the eternal law whereby the universe was created and is ruled.” — St. Bernard

I'd like to ask you to clarify what you mean by that.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

As mentioned previously, that we have an experience of something does not make the subject of that experience real. As in, hallucinations. It's real for the person who experiences it, and for everyone else it's real to the extent that it influences the behaviour of the person experiencing the hallucination, but other than that, it's not real.

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