Breaking news; the tea party is retarded

Though people have posted similar, I will say science is in no way dogmatic. Canonical science always changes with new discoveries; scientists are constantly questioning and disproving theories postulated by other scientists to make way for new knowledge. Does this happen in religion? No, it doesn't. Would you ever get a religious figurehead saying "Now I can believe Jesus turned water into wine and fed the five thousand, but walking on water - I call bullshit on that"? No, you wouldn't; religion is static and unchangeable and Heaven forbid anyone actually questions something the Bible or the Quran or any religious text says is true. All religion is to me is a collection of allegories on how people should live their lives; people shouldn't believe that previous "religious events" actually happened.

Xyle's point here really bothers me, and I think TDC more or less hits the nail on the head. Morality ≠ religious adherence. Morality is a social trait, and in no way is it dependant on religion; though obviously people who are religious can be moral. I consider myself a moral, reasonably conscientious person and yet I'm a complete atheist. Something I've always found ridiculous is this leaves me completely barred from Heaven purely by the fact I have not and will never submit to God, regardless of the fact I'm more morally upstanding than some Christians - but that's getting a way from my point a bit. What you describe here is a social experiment, not a religious one. People without faith can be equally as moral as those who adhere to religion, if not more so.

If you weren't trying to imply selflessness is a religious trait, then sorry I guess I must have just been fooled by the fact you used derivatives of the word over 5 times in those two brief paragraphs.

 

Yeah, apart from the prayers and the buildings of worship and the traditions and the made up stories and the arbitrary beliefs and the unquestioning idolization of certain figures and the moral rigidity. In other words - apart from all the things that define a religion. In other words - no it isn't.

Ah, I see your problem. You're confusing atheism with science. They are not the same at all. It just so happens that religions can't stand up to scientific scrutiny, so the most outspoken atheists are often adept scientists too, but there's no requirement that atheists obsess over science. Just as there is no requirement that religious people distrust science. Though it usually helps, due to the whole "can't stand up to scientific scrutiny" thing.

Have you ever done any scientific research? The whole philosophy is basically "I wonder why X happens. Let's gather evidence and try to find out!" If scientists appear to be proclaiming something as the "truth" then it's because after centuries of analysis it's the best explanation for observed phenomena that anyone has come up with. I mean - if you really don't believe that the elements were formed as a result of fusion reactions in the hearts of ancient stars then you're welcome to propose an alternative theory. Otherwise, gloating about how it sounds similar to a creation myth is just disingenuous. You might as well say the same about gravity. "Oh, look at these narrow-minded fools who claim that the reason everything sticks to the earth's surface is due to it's mass distorting space-time. That's an exclusive truth claim, and I therefore reject it!" Yeah, well done, you're so much wiser than us dogmatic gravityists.

 

You miss the point, English.

I'm not arguing with the physics. Not at all. It's the cultural value-judgments masquerading as pure truth which I find so objectionable.

Anyway, I'm just saying, anthropologically, religion is purely a social phenomenon and so called "science" sure seems to fulfill many of the same functions.

 

So... the science is all correct, but we shouldn't act as though it is? That don't make no sense.

 

I'm glad you made this point, Smuel. In this view, science has become just another opiate for the masses. What frustrates me about this is that it implies that people need to believe in something greater than themselves. For many, religion satisfies this need and for many others, science does. This frightens me because far too many people demonstrate this insecure need. An insecure population is a dangerous population.

I deny this point because I can reject a theory as insufficient without offering an alternative explanation. Not that I've done much research on the theory, but the Big Bang serves me little better than Creationism. To me, the Big Bang Theory is just another way of saying "we still don't know." I say, "that's fine. We don't need to know. We don't need something greater than ourselves to enjoy our existence."
That's what frustrates me about the scientific elite: they say that Creationism is stupid because the Big Bang Theory succeeds where Creationism fails, when neither is proven.
Similarly, the American public in general frustrates me when it mocks Scientology more than Christianity claiming that we are the fractured psyche of an alien intelligence is more ludicrous than being the children of God.
The Big Bang Theory, Creationism, and Xenu are all ridiculous.

You're beginning to sound like the anti-Xyle.
I would be fine if Xyle were to say that religion is good.
I would be fine with someone else responding that science is good.
I lose my mind when Xyle says that religion satisfies all of the same criteria as science and more! No--it doesn't--shut up about this. Religion may be your drug, but it is not the Wonder Drug. Science falls short were religion delivers and vice versa. They are separate and you're going to have one hell of a time convincing me otherwise.

 

I concede the point. Got a religious experience that you want to know how to repeat?

What if they could?

Religion is good; Science is good. Religion doesn't satisfy all the same criteria as science because science is how we progress knowledge. Religion merely holds to that knowledge which has been found.

Knowledge is knowledge, and knowledge comes from experience. The mysteries that are not ours to know are the mysteries that we cannot experience or are forced to forget. If both science and religion, in the form of knowledge, are knowledge, how can they then be incompatible?

 

I guess it depends how you define the scope of the Big Bang Theory. If it includes the expansion of the universe and the condensing of matter into stars and so on, then it explains an awful lot of observed evidence in a more satisfactory way than Creationism, using theories that are well understood and backed up by experimentation. But if you're just referring to the starting point then yeah, we still don't know. Which means...

... that this is not really fair. If you're defining the Big Bang Theory as incorporating all that later stuff then it does mostly succeed where Creationism fails, whereas if you define it only as the starting point then nobody claims that it explains things better than Creationism. Either way, I think you're glossing over the detail to make a point which is not defensible.

The difference is that most scientists will freely admit that the Big Bang Theory is ridiculous, and say that they back it simply because it explains the observed evidence better than any other theory. Whereas proponents of those other theories are deadly serious about them, and certainly wouldn't consider giving them up just because a better explanation came along. They also maintain that this stubbornness is a virtue, whereas in fact it is rather arrogant and foolish.

I don't know, but they can't - that's not the world we live in. So it's best to treat religions as the failed hypotheses that they are.

 

Right... and I have a circuit board that disproves modern science's understanding of electricity because it doesn't do anything. Of course, it has no power source, but that's not my fault.

You can't say religions are failed hypotheses just because people have no power source for what they believe. You need to find the power source behind their beliefs before you can test them.

Of course, I have a power source (metaphorically speaking) for my experiments, but it doesn't do anyone else any good if they are unwilling to believe my testimony or are unable to learn how to tap into it themselves. And if you choose to not trust me at all, how can you repeat my experiments? Even crackpots are trusted by the scientific community enough to give their experiments a try.

 

Feeding the 5,000, the plague of blood, water into wine, coming back from the dead - any of those really. Honestly I'm intrigued to hear how you think these are replicable. Also, why shouldn't they be considered myths as we would now consider the religion of ancient Rome which people put stock in around the same time as some of the occurences of the Bible?

 

You'd be correct if religion required anything but belief. Some of those things you say that define a religion are coincidentally things that modern people do for the hell of it.

Celebrities; When they're good, they're gods. Authority figures, role models, idols - each with unquestionably loyal fans. Have you heard of "Beleibers?" Now, despite my "star" example, celebrities aren't simply musicians or actors.

As for prayers? People are known to say, "Dear God!" for no reason at all. Even atheists.
Even things that aren't normally considered prayers (due to the lack of "Oh Lord, Dear God, Great Krishna, etc.), as in "I hope I get this promotion," Are formulated in the style of prayer. Who are you telling this to? Your inner monologue making the statement has made a prayer, and "God help you" if you're talking to yourself. Oh, but if you read my next paragraph, you might see why thinking a prayer still works...

Buildings of worship? Those aren't even necessary to religious activity and are traditions, which everybody has to some degree. If you're religious, you believe your deity/deities can read your thoughts and so simply thinking a prayer is good enough. This ends up making public worship superficial and an affront to your religion due to committing to prayer when you know other people can see you, for the sake of appearance. But, how often can a person of faith admit they're praying incorrectly?

Moral rigidity? Did you ever notice that everyone around you has morals? Now, not everyone has faith, but even a psychopath has things they won't do - though a psychopath simply won't do these things out of self preservation. You ever wonder why convicted pedophiles get killed in prison?

You're really going to have to explain how I ever said atheism and science are the same thing. If you really want to break it down, based on my opening statement, "Dogmatic atheism is faith in science" doesn't equal "Atheism is science." See how those missing words change the meaning? I was talking about dogmatic atheism, hence mentioning it in my first sentence. Thing is, despite religions not holding water against certain things due to their lack of scientific evidence, all the scientific evidence they see simply proves their faith. (accidentally spelled "fail" when I typed faith at first...Freudian slip?) I wasn't addressing the entirety of atheism, because not all atheists think the same things and certainly don't work in the same fields. Now, as to why my statement would hold true for dogmatic atheism? You wouldn't take an atheist seriously if their only disagreement with religion was how shitty the world is, or that specifically their life sucks. Of course the world sucks, which is why dogmatic atheist seek scientific proof of what they experience. However, given my limited personal experience (I know far from all dogmatic atheists), it seems these people rely so heavily on science that even things that don't logically make sense must have an explanation, even if the explanation doesn't do its job;

How do you explain an electron traveling back in time? The book by Richard Feynman that I read said "We don't know why it happens, it's just in the math and happens regularly - but we can't measure its occurrence." That's not an explanation. That's an ad-hoc "WOOO magical science" anecdote, by one of the greatest theoretical physicists of our time.

If evolution selects for higher intelligence, why do intelligent people choose not to have kids? How does consciousness work? And above all, what's the purpose of the shit we do in our lives?

What do you do if the answers to those questions turn out to be so depressing, you can't stand a universe in which they're true?

I get that the last portion of your statement is meant to be ironic, because I've seen people claim gravity isn't real because pebbles don't orbit mountains - which must definitely mean we're all stuck to the earth by divine pulling.

What you said but didn't quite adhere to was "the best explanation at the time," and that makes it the truth? It's never so simple, and what you're saying truth is, happens to be a bunch of theories that, while accepted, can be proven false at a later date given adequate evidence to the contrary. That isn't truth. Truth, unlike most concepts, is not subjective and doesn't change based on evidence. We might never discover the truth regarding certain things, but that doesn't mean what we have discovered is always the truth. It's simply the best we've got.

A person dies of what is initially thought to be a gunshot, while being bound and gagged, given the evidence and how much the detectives know at the scene and from past experience with similar events. The coroner determines the shot was made after the person died and they actually had cardiac arrest while they were bound and gagged due to stress...what's the truth? It's obviously not what was thought earlier. The crime has yet to be solved, but the cause of death was not a gunshot.

 

In this regard, religion seems like a subset of science--a snapshot of the aggregated knowledge. The knowledge continues to progress, but the religion stays the same.

The context is what makes them incompatible. Reciting your multiplication tables in history class probably won't earn you a passing grade, even though both are knowledge.
The bolded passage is simply something I thought sounded poetic.

Which point is that? My ignorance of the greater aspects of the theory may confuse my message, so for purposes of explaining the origin of the universe here is my understanding:
Big Bang Theory: The universe was created by something.
Creationism: The universe was created by someone.
I'm glad you two can agree on something, but neither one of you are telling me something I can use or verify. Where you two disagree doesn't make a difference at the end of my day.

 

A man once told me he knew someone who changed his views on religion as a result of a conversation in a forum thread.

I swiftly kicked that man in the nuts for I do not appreciate being lied to.

 

It's not like there's anything else to do here lately.

 

I heard there is a competition on posting while giving head going on.

 

You should jump on that, mouth first.

 

Plague of blood -- jeesh, even the ancient Egyptians were able to do that (Exodus 7:22).


(Don't have time to comment on the rest. Will post answer later.)

 

You don't have to pretend the science isn't correct, English. You should just stop pretending that it justifies the rest of your world-view.

Look, a myth is not simply an accurate description of reality, obviously the unfiltered statistics would be the best way of describing science. The myth is the story that is told to children, idiots and ultimately our hindbrains.

All myth is defined by three questions, Where did we come from? Who are we? What do we do next? These are not scientific questions but we've made scientific answers for them nonetheless, because we're human and that's how knowledge sits in our minds. It's not pure maths and facts, it's full of value judgements as well.

 

Every time this debate takes over I feel the house gets stupider.

 

Yes, because as an atheist, I do have many copies of the Bible and other religious texts just littered around my house. Why don't you tell me explicitly how it's done, also with the other examples too.

 

Usually there's other stuff going on in The House that I don't get sucked in.