The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

That's what I suspect too, but it's impossible to ever know for sure.

We're still working on those trans-dimensional portals. Give it time.

If I was omniscient, that'd be interesting to know. Of course, it depends on whether you believe in chaos theory and all that — there are literally infinite posibilities of what a world without Christianity would be like.

So I suppose it would average down to "about the same", though that would be true for everything.

As far as Earthly matters, Jesus made it clear those following his example most likely will be uncomfortable in this life. It is a theme since proverbs that our time hear is a short privilege that should be mostly enjoyable if we strive to live to the standard God set for us. In that mind I suppose against the harshness of the world the Christian mindset would be to trust God will not send anything our way we cannot handle and in hard times the fortunate should take care of the rest.

Jesus was to give the people a new example to follow after they broke the pact given to them in Leviticus, to liberate the Jews (unfortunately it was from hypocrites of Jeremiah, Pharisees, not the beasts of Daniel, Rome) and to remove the need to atone for sins against God by showing the people a perfect sacrifice. (Note this is sins against God, he still expected you to admit your faults to you neighbors and work for their forgiveness)

Yeah, not a lot on natural disasters or the like besides "the world is hard but you are designed to handle it. I the lord have spoken!" Sometimes God will specifically cause a storm, other times the weather cycle seems to run its course without him having any active role in it.

I think the best argument about a peace valuing God is life itself. Take its most basic form, a double helix of sugar and a protein shell. It will proceed to do nothing but reproduce and destroy more complex life forms until nothing is left. It will then go dormant until more resources are available or enough time passes that it deteriorates completely. We call that a virus and a Christian could argue that God has built us in a way that we evolve to defend ourselves against them without even noticing this is still essentially conflict at the most basic level of human physiology.

And maybe God did not design this time we call life to be more than we could handle. Maybe he will never again personally send a punishment to wipe us out. But will he allow us to do it ourselves? We as a species have changed weather patterns and created deserts without even realizing it. Would it be in God's character to just scoff and let us ruin ourselves, provided we were doing it out of honest error and not out of the evils he deplores. He would probably be really angry about those denying human involvement in climate change simply because he does not like liars but suppose it is just an inevitable part of our existence and we mess up big time trying to do the best for ourselves? Will God say "Game Over? You guys did good enough for paradise, the rest of you can try again in Sheol, except for those who took the mark of the beast, you must wash it off first, with fire, then try again in Sheol?"

edited 1st May '13 2:51:20 AM by Cider

==> Theology thread: Rise from your grave.

So it was suggested this thread get necro'd in order to preserve the LGBT threads on-topicness.

Continuing from the discussion there, I really don't see any inherent problems with a less-than-honest deity. Frankly it would explain a lot.

You Fail Biology Forever. Viruses are not solely bent on destroying host organisms. Junk DNA are viral DNA that successfully implemented itself without any harm.

edited 28th Jun '13 5:50:19 AM by CaptainKatsura

Same. It's not like God wrote the Bible, anyways. Not all of it has to be true.

Doublepost to bring stuff over from LGBT and Religion so it can be on topic.

I'm going to have to clear up what I meant by "don't call religion absurd." What I was trying to say that you can say God is fake or stupid or whatever else you think of it, but you can't call people stupid or dumb for following it. No ideology should be kept sacred and unchallengable, likewise no ideology should just be thrown aside because of it's followers or whatever. There are evil Christians, and there were Nazi soilders who weren't sociopathic murderers. Christianity was a cult (as in new religion) during Roman times, so something being "fringe" or "small" is irrelevent anyways. South Park is not meant to be taken seriously. If you think God does not exist? Cool. That doesn't mean you can say I'm stupid or evil for thinking he does. I don't call you an idiot for not following God, afterall. Besides, the person I asked was fine with me asking. If I had asked you, and you said no, I'd have to deal with it.

You can and should form your own opinions on religion. You can and should be critical of it and, if you think it's wrong, point that out. Which is different from saying "You believe in God? You are a helpless person with no future" or something like that. Westboro is wrong because they read the Bible wrong, for one thing, and they somehow thinking protesting dead soilder's funerals will make people like them. (Same soilders who die to give them the right to BE idiots, we should point out.) Are there ideologies where each and every person following it is some sort of monster? Not that I know of, and it'd have to be a small one. People call themselves Christian who know nothing about the Bible or anything, and people called themselves Nazis who knew nothing about the ideology behind that.

However, that does not mean you can call me stupid or anything for believing in a religion you don't believe in (not saying you did.) You can't call me silly because my "Silliness" rating is totally irrelevent of my religious beliefs. Contrary to what many people think, many people's lives are NOT dominated by their faith. Again, I'm not sure how relevent this argument is. I asked, he said he would stop, and thats it. I don't see why you have a problem with that.

Yes, anybody who thinks the Bible should be taught as absolute fact with no science at all is wrong. Disproving the Bible does not disprove God, however, as God did not write the Bible. It IS wrong to restrict gay marriage, of course, but because some people believe that does not mean all religious people do. I certainly don't think that, and there are many LGBT people with religions.

If you want to use the factual wrongness of some parts of the Bible to not believe, go head. I see nothing wrong with that.

No, I never said it made it more valid, I said people don't like to have their beliefs be called abusurd. Difference. In modern America, most people are Christian, yet most people don't go to church or anything of the sort. People tend to have a life outside of religion, especially today. Which, honestly, may be for the better."I'm not insulting them, I'm insulting the belief system that they adhere to" Which is the entire basis of this argument... And what I'm trying to say here.

Being religious because because is not a good idea. You have to actually know the arguments for and against it, or if there is a better faith for you. There are people who have it the main part of their life/are only Christian because they've always been, but unless they go out and kill people for those reasons there is nothing wrong with that.

Again, I was joking there. I don't know the reasoning or reasons behind the differences between fact and Bible. I pretty much don't even care about the Bible. It's a means to the end of understanding the beliefs of Christianity, but most of the book is about other stuff. If a better book came out that better reached that end, the Bible stops being as important. I follow the God, not the book. Book says hate Gays? God says love thy neighbor.

I'm not saying don't question religion, I'm saying don't call us stupid for no other reason than we have one.

edited 28th Jun '13 9:54:00 PM by Ringsea

Hey Ring. As a fellow Christian I agree with you on a lot. But I side with Knightsof in this case. I understand your point, that we can and should strive to be respectful and courteous of the beliefs of others. But if you'd seen me on these threads long enough, you know I'm fully against anything that even somewhat looks like thought-policing. And even as a Christian, I am wary of how easily "don't mock us" can morph into "Shun the unbeliever!"

Realize bro, as a Christian, I'm too aware of the uglier parts of our history when people got lynched, burned, enslaved, and imprisoned for having the temerity to disagree. I am also aware of this aversion to criticism and mockery led to suspect, and flat out bullshit, doctrine seeping into the general discourse. God hates gays?? WHAT? God sent his only fucking son to DIE to save gays! Being gay will lead to the destruction of our country? You mean quicker than the forced extermination of the Native Americans and seizure of their land; faster than treating blacks like so much cattle; faster than forced sterilization of "undesirables"; faster than our wars of suspect justification???

So you see, we NEED people like the tropers who mock Christianity and attack it, even if they do it in ways that can be classified as offense. We're Christians. God is not afraid of those who question him, nor should we be. And occassionally, they are right.

And besides, in such an unfettered debate we have opportunities to point out where their supposed righteous position is actually lacking. Such as them often conflating genetic predisposition to genetic determination; insisting evolution has been proven true when they really mean the model has held up surprisingly well, if in meeting it's very narrow standards of accuracy and so far our knowledge is too rudimentary to really start disproving it's vast assumptions (To my knowledge, no one has actually taken a piece of radioactive material and actually let it sit for, say, a half million years to truly know radiometric dating is fully accurate on the scales we're talking about)

In short, we can't introduce anything that will hinder one side or the other from locking horns. Locking horns is how we push and pull each other toward our common goal; the truth.

edited 28th Jun '13 9:59:16 AM by TheStarshipMaxima

Ringsea, you can make use of [[ quoteblock ]] <words> [[/ quoteblock ]] (Sans spaces before & after quoteblock) to quote someone.

It makes it easier to distinguish your posts from the ones of the person you quote.

Ok, will do. I never knew how to do that, so thanks :P

I think it is more about the ability to have models that enable testable ( and preferably somehow useful ) predictions, than being righteous. There are ethical questions to some of the methods and results of the scientific process, but most scientists tend to leave the righteousness, at least in their capacity as scientists, to the moral philosophers and theologians.

Well, and you have to admit that the whole creation-model sucks at making testable predictions.

edited 28th Jun '13 7:36:29 PM by blauregen

Okay, this is going to be a long one. Links may be needed. And Ringsea, please go back and fix some of your busted tags for the sake of legibility.

Actually, they have, retroactively in a sense. You take a hunk of uranite or something similar and measure the ratio of uranium to the various substances that uranium decays into to see if matches the theoretical measurements you get for half a million years. And remember, the exact same formula governing not only uranium isotopes with half lives in the billions of years but the highly unstable isotopes with half lives measured in seconds.

There's a statistical trick that those specialising in this sort of thing use as well. Take a hypothetical unstable isotope X with a half life of a million years. With two atoms you would expect that one of them would have undergone a decay event. With four molecules you'd expect to see two to decay in the same time period, but (statistically speaking) within half a million years you'd expect to see at least one decay event. Scale that up to a million atoms and you'd expect to be seeing a decay event every two years. And a million atoms is ''tiny'. 730 million atoms, which still isn't much, you'd be expecting to see a decay event every day. This statistical scaling allows surprisingly accurate analysis of decay rates for things with longer half-lives.

I see that more from creationists mischarcterising evolution than most others. (Though I will admit that the current state of evolutionary psychology has some serious quality control issues).

Maxima, it's time to deal with the fact that scientific discourse has something of a rather specialised dialect that doesn't always match up to normal, everyday speech and your argument falls apart when you account for the differing definitions.

Now, enough appetisers, onto the main course!

I can and will if the situation calls for it. I not only will, but intellectual honesty demands that I do so. Giving something the imprimatur of religious authority gives it a lot of moral force for some people and more often than most people would like to believe, it leads followers down the garden path. And because of the force of moral persuasion religiously some times it takes the equivalent of a Dope Slap and a loud shout in their ear to get past that.

Except that's what religion does. That entire idea is at the very heart of the concepts of dogma and doctrine.

Except I've never seen any atheist seriously claim that. What many of us claim is not that only idiots follow religion, it's that religion turns it's followers into idiots and thus should be rejected (to put it in the most blunt terms possible without throwing in a Cluster F-Bomb). Put more politely and more technically, we argue that religion short circuits most people's critical thinking when it comes to such issues.

Actually I can if I feel it is appropriate. Most of the time I don't because most people are in a sea of unexamined assumptions due to the ubiquity of religion in society (worse in some places than others). But if you embrace stupid or evil beliefs in the name or religion, I will call you out on it. If you join a church that pushes Young Earth Creationism, then yes I will call you stupid. If you join something like the Westboro Baptist Church of your own volition, I will at least think about calling you evil (A hateful, twisted bigot most certainly). (Also, not necessarily to your face. Board rules and all that. But in a more open forum, quite probably.)

Look, I will boil my point down to a simple summary. Dark and terrible things have been done in the name ideologies, both religious and secular. These have been grand and horrifying in scope and petty, banal and ubiquitous, but no less damaging for it in the long term. These need to be confronted, ideally early on before they grow out of control. And quite frankly, if civility needs to be sacrificed for that purpose, then I will do so without qualms.

This is not to say civil discourse does not have it's place, but a plurality of approaches is probably the most effective form of confrontation.

Wanna bet? Psalm 14:1 "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

And quite frankly, I refuse to be held to a higher standard of accountability than your own holy books. That you choose to do say may be admirable, but it kind of proves my point about the absurdity of religious beliefs.

I can and have. They are not flattering.

And what I'm saying is that my opinions and criticisms go beyond simply wrong and into 'absurd and actively dangerous to society'.

I'll let Maxima regale you with how we regularly eviscerated over playing the No True Christian gambit. But I'll just say that from the outside looking in, given how wildly contradictory some segments of the Bible are, no one way of reading it is inherently more correct than another. More moral maybe, but that would concede that there's a standard of morality external to the bible which many denominations reject.

Maybe not, but there are some ideologies (or variants of a wider ideology) that have the capacity to turn people into monsters and there needs to be some sort of external brake on them and that need supersedes civility on occasions.

No, it's not. You may not care if an external observer finds your beliefs silly. But if it prevents someone from following you down what I think is a misguided path, I'm still going to point and laugh.

Because this is an open forum. Just because you may direct a statement at one person in particular doesn't stop other's from viewing and commenting on that statement. I found the ideas behind your request sufficiently objectionable that I felt the urge to comment a dissenting opinion.

That's not what you said. You said "pointless to go out and call people's beliefs absurd, especially since nobody can prove it one way or the other". You may not hold those particular beliefs but they are religious beliefs held by people. They have been refuted therefore it is possible to prove religious beliefs wrong, and whether or not your beliefs have been subject to that is irrelevant to your original argument.

Disproving the Bible does disprove a specific concept of God. It also undermines the foundational underpinnings of Judaism, Christianity and more indirectly Islam. Ditching the holy books gets you Theism and Deism which are different things entirely.

As for God not writing the Bible... there are those who would disagree. (Okay, quoted directly, rather than written by, but either way they consider them God's words).

That's not what I'm arguing. I'm arguing that the capability of religious belief to inspire bigotry and discrimination (among other things) is an indictment against the concept of religious belief in general.

That the situation of equating beliefs with self-identity is not universal does not excuse religion's culpability for its misdeeds in situations where such a situation does hold.

But some of those arguments are that those beliefs are that they are silly, absurd... or maybe worse. So we need to be able to say that.

Actually, yes there is. For one thing it passively grants legitimacy to the idea of religious belief that in turn legitimises more fanatical expressions of belief. And as I said before, not all the harms religious belief does are quite as up front and obvious, yet far more dangerous in the long term because they're buried in the unexamined religious assumptions people make.

As for the YEC arguement, I only pointed it out because it's a bad argument and whether your using it seriously or not, it's flaws are so legion that they deserve to be pointed out when it brought up. You were joking? Okay, so I pointed out why it's a bad joke.

But that's not what you were saying before. You were arguing the validity of religious belief in general, not your particular religious beliefs. You can't say religious belief in general is a good thing and shouldn't be mocked and then just ignore the ones that are most definitely not good or distinctly risible.

Except by putting boundaries around what is and is not acceptable to say about religion, you are saying you can't criticise religion. Specifically you're saying that there are questions we can't ask and criticisms we can't make. And I just spent quite a few words and a couple of hours pointing out that there are times when those are the questions need to be asked and those are the criticisms that need to be made.

And I'm sorry, but from where I sit asking those questions and making those criticisms is more important than not upsetting people. (Pragmatic concerns such as not getting banned so I can continue making my arguments are another matter entirely).

I'll respond to individual points when I have access to a computer as opposed to a Kindle. Honestly, I don't think either of us are really getting the other's points. Several of the points are either individual examples or objective stuff.

To an extent. The likes of Westboro are rather prone to fucking up even the least ambiguous things though, so there's a point when I'm willing to go beyond "I don't think that's right" and instead say "this reading of it is completely boneheadedly invalid". I mean there's reading between the lines, and there's basic reading comprehension.

An example: Stephen Fincher trying to use a Bible passage ("You always have the poor with you") to justify cutting food stamps, when literally the very next sentence is Jesus telling you to care for them — at another point telling a Pharisee to literally go to hell for refusing to care for said poor.

edited 28th Jun '13 10:17:53 PM by Pykrete

Don't expect a fast reply. Am at +10 GMT and it makes conversations a bit disjointed since most English speakers are considerably further west than me.

which uis kind of a major problem these days. A lot of denominations actively twist the bible to say what they want it to say.

At risk of looking like a quiter I'm going to have to do exactly not what I said I'd do (Continue the debate). Clearly, this argument is going nowhere, because we just see things too different.

... That and there were too many big words/joking.

edited 30th Jun '13 10:19:13 AM by Ringsea

Or make up stuff that does not exist in their scriptures. So called "tradition", so unquestionably followed by bigots of Catholic and Orthodox flavor. More complicated in the case of the latter, because they have multiple patriarchs who judge what is considered tradition rather than glorious leader a.k.a. pope.

edited 30th Jun '13 9:59:47 AM by CaptainKatsura

I don't think so. Science writing is actually some of the most exact and clear writing in their world of communication. I'm not talking about the actual technical stuff; but I mean science is actually quite clear about assigning a level of certainty to it's findings. To go back to gay research, nearly everyone is explicit in stating "We have little idea if this is correct or even if it's relevant to the question of choice if it is correct."

Perhaps it is you who needs to accept that people of all viewpoints tend to layer their own agenda onto the actual statements and over time, with others who believe what they believe, the opinions and suppositions become facts themselves. I had to learn to accept that I myself am not immune to this.

And here is an example of your assumptions about religion being conflated with actual fact, and coming up wrong. Don't take this an insult, many followers of faith do indeed treat any challenge to their views as wrong.

But if you actually read the Bible you'll see that questions are welcomed. Does the Bible call for faith, and obedience in the face of doubt? Yes. But the Bible actually quotes God as saying "Come. Let us reason together." Again, God doesn't fear doubt or questions. He didn't create creatures of intellect and sapience to not question.

An even greater example is Jesus himself. He walked on Earth and encountered people who were stunned, to put it mildly, by his views and his powers. Jesus never raged, never got angry, never said how dare you?

An the position many of us Christians posit in response is that one could say the same thing about atheis or political activism, or even science. Anything strong opinion can be perverted into a dogma and short-circuit the critical thinking skills of its followers. So putting it all on religion is little more than sheer bigotry.

Further, there are many Christians who don't become drooling fuckwits upon taking up the faith. Like us, for example.

Ah yes, age-old ploy cherry-picking a verse to bolster an argument. The Bible is referring to those who wrought evil and destruction, secure in the belief there is no God who sees all and, in his good time, punishes all; not someone who sets out to find answers.

Wrong. This is a conceit held by many but it's still false. I always use the US constitution as an example. The Constitution guarantees free speech, however you can arrested for inciting racial violence. Wildly contradictory? No. It is a concept that demands you look at it completely.

I'm afraid many people are so blinded by their antipathy against Christianity and are so desperate to blame Chritianity for all the world's ills, that they refuse to actually ask how seemingly contradictory statements might go together.

It was brought to my attention that someone posted a quote of mine about how, seemingly, burning several tons of oxygen would be seriously destructive, but that it actually part of the process of how a Saturn V rocket works to put someone in space. And yes Knightsof I saw your comment on that site. I don't know if you were the one who tried to twist my statement, nor do I really care.

The point was that without a clear and complete understanding of Newton's laws of motion, of aerodynamics, of chemical reactions, and other fields, a rocket's inner workings seem wildly contradictory. But with even a rudimentary knowledge of the mechanism and the science it uses, it makes total sense.

The Bible is similar. And in fact anyone can read it and start to get an understanding of what the Bible does or doesn't say. And as Ring pointed out, some of the WBC's antics are a clear contradiction of the Bible, and any novice reading it would see that.

Atheism itself doesn't really go any any farther than "Hey, you know all those magic beings that people claim exist but have never been seen in any scientifically credible fashion? I'm beginning to suspect they might not be real."

What people then do with that conclusion is a separate matter.

Thats more agnostic. Atheism is "There is no God/gods/magic/flying spaghetti monster/space aliens haunting us because they got nuked on volcanoes, ect.

edited 30th Jun '13 10:46:25 AM by joesolo

Agnostic would be "I think they might not be real, but I'm not sure".

I was being somewhat sarcastic.

Although my personal viewpoint is that strong agnosticism "it is impossible to know whether or not gods exist" doesn't hold up in an absolute sense, because if the gods have any measurable effect on reality, they are theoretically detectable. If the don't then there's no difference between that and not existing at all.

edited 30th Jun '13 10:58:00 AM by Elfive

I'm going to have to disagree with Max about The Bible. If not morals than from a narrative standpoint The Bible does contradict itself. It's also probably has the most complex continuity of any book or book series this side of the X-men so I will cop to not understanding it all. But I will give the example of Judas's death. Can you tell me for sure which of the two ways the book says he died in is what actually happened?

He hanged himself in one, and just sort of fell over and died in the other, right?

Maybe the second one just omitted the noose because the writer was a bit squeamish.