Myth: The first twelve hours

These are just words, of course, and any crazy can mean anything by them.

My own, working definition is that faith is a belief that you bet your life on.

You can only tell the difference when it's tested.

 

I quite like ytzk's definition. Let's say that you just bought a house, and then property suddenly start going down. Historically, they've always recovered, and you might believe that they'll recover this time too, but you can't be certain of it. So if you grit your teeth and continue your mortgage payments while your negative equity grows, believing that you'll be better off in the long run, that could be an example of faith. It meets both mine and ytzk's definition - there are both reasons to doubt (everyone else is frantically selling their houses) and it is potentially calamitous to you personally if your belief is wrong.

However, actually I'd prefer not to use the word "faith" at all, since it has too many religious connotations. Making a distinction between beliefs that are reasonable and beliefs that are not reasonable sounds like a good idea, but then of course everyone will disagree over what constitutes reasonable, since almost by definition everyone thinks their own set of beliefs are the most reasonable ones that it's possible to have. The people selling their houses certainly think that it's the most reasonable thing to do under the circumstances.

So, in other words, we haven't really got anywhere at all. But it still annoys me when people say things like "faith is required in the modern acceptance of science", because... well, it's not the same as faith in an afterlife, or whatever. The difference being that, sure, maybe you don't ever get to run your own experiments in the Large Hadron Collider to validate current theories, but you could if you really wanted to. Whereas with various religious proclamations, such as "eating pork is a sin", well, it is literally impossible to determine whether that is actually true or not. So insisting on believing it anyway is qualitatively different from believing that Higgs Bosons are really weird, or that house prices will recover.

 

Oh no, that's a matter of faith too. Evil demon bro, he could be deceiving you into thinking there is an external world.

 

People have seen many times the suffering that can come from swine and shellfish.

Most of all those sins are about microbiology and hygeine.

The buddhist definition of sin is, at least, measurable: that it causes suffering.

Explaining the science to an ignorant ancient, or a very simple child, might sound a lot like religion and in any case, those people would just have to show faith and wash their damn hands.

 

Yes, ytzk's working definition ups the ante nicely.

Suffice it to say that I acknowledge that there is a great deal of science that I accept blindly and this is not unlike religious people and faith. That isn't to say that some beliefs aren't better informed than others.

This reminds me of a separate interaction with another co-worker who insisted that we respect his opinion. He is under the misguided delusion that because an opinion will never evaluate to true or false that all opinions are equal. To which, kill-joy that I am, gladly reply, "Wrong dipshit. I acknowledge you have an opinion but am under no obligation to respect it because of how little value it actually has."

 

That's why Jewish women are forbidden from dating me - because I am both selfish, and a swine.

 

Uggh. Buy low; sell high.

Disagree.
Religion: Gluttony is a sin. Medical science: Overeating is an unhealthy lifestyle. These two statements mean the same thing. Both sin and unhealthy lifestyles result in premature death. ("The wages of sin are death" Romans 6:23)

 

All the times I've heard this, I've never made that connection.

 

Disagree. There are things that are considered a sin which actually prolong life. e.g. regular masturbation helps stave off prostate cancer, while using condoms helps prevent death from nasty diseases. There are also sins which have no bearing at all on life expectancy - e.g. that women should dress modestly, or that beef is okay but pork isn't. Of course, at least one other religion says that pork is okay but beef isn't.

Hypothesis disproved.

 

Uggh.

Disagree.

Firstly, Xyle, you misrepresented Scripture. Clearly, Paul was referring to eternal life and death, or else refusing to worship Caesar would be a sin because science says being eaten by lions lowers your life expectancy.

Secondly, Smuel, I think that hiding the girls probably saved their lives over the centuries, as much as avoiding pork in an age before fridges.

As to Hinduism, it tends to favour vegetarianism altogether for ethical reasons, but focuses heavily on living cleanly alongside the cattle because they were ubiquitous. There's a lot of stuff in there about not shitting too close to your home and drinking cow urine for homeopathy, which brings me to my final point.

Religious law makes sense mostly as ethics for the ignorant, and hygiene is a very abstract form of ethics, so it came down to "just do it because God says so." It does follow, though, that if you can understand the reasons for the rules, then you can break them without sinning because, eg, you use condoms, sterilise your swineflesh or live in a society which doesn't rape girls whenever their hair is showing or one that supplies drinking water cleaner than cow piss.

 

I'm not convinced that stoning young women to death if they're seen with their hair down is really an effective method of saving their lives, but maybe that's just my blinkered 21st century viewpoint.

I'm fine with the origins of sinning being a shorthand for "don't do this because it's bad for you" in an age when the causes of illness and disease were unknown. But, as you say, we now do understand those things, and yet people still insist that their own pet dislikes are sins. "God's gonna be real mad at you!" shouldn't hold any currency in a modern society. The problem is not that people used to think that way - it's that some of them still do.

 

Just to play Jehovah's advocate, many of the most horrific religious laws do have an evolutionary logic to them.

The oppressive treatment of women as property, the persecution of gay men, the explicity promotion of genocide and so on, are morally repugnant, yet could be seen to be entirely healthy for a species as a whole, from a biological perspective, even if half the kids are killed for it.

For example, incest should be reasonable, if you use birth control, yet it would make the institution of the family fucked up. From a very long term, evolutionary perspective, you could argue the same for homosexuality and promiscuity in general.

Given that Sodom and Gomorrah are dust and the oppressive theocrats are still thriving, well, maybe there's more logic in the nonsense than is immediately apparent. Of course, just because an uncompromising genocide cult is a survival trait, it doesn't make it true or good, just effective. You could say the same for being a sociopath: You'll probably win, but you're still a cunt.

Time will tell, I suppose, if we can manage to balance survival and science. Science and technology have made life awesome for a century or two, but also raised more than a few prospects for our swift annihilation. I really, really hope that we don't need oppressive theocracies to survive and, if we do, I'm not sure I'd want to.

 

I basically agree with all of that, except that I don't think things are as bleak as you make out. Are oppressive theocrats really thriving right now? In global terms they're pretty niche.

 

In terms of biology, I'd say they're doing alright. We have just recently revived the Hellenic gay democracy model, but most of the intervening centuries have been Holy Roman imperialism. Bloody Catholics filling the bloody world with bloody kids they can't afford to bloody feed. Not to mention those cunning Arabs, with their four wives who are guaranteed disease free or your money back.

It isn't something Dawkins would care to dwell upon, but he is a dead end in evolutionary terms by comparison.

The conventional wisdom is that soon everyone will be a capitalist atheist with 2.0 children but in the meantime, the rest of the species will be breeding like it's going out of fashion. It really is chapter one of The Origin Of Species: if all you got is voluntary contraception, then what you got is Homo sapiens philoprogenitas. I'm just gonna leave you to write the pun for that one, old chum.

We agree, I think, that humanism, if not science or atheism per se, does demand a little faith in the face of the evidence, and it is worth the gamble.

P.S., I just realised that the Queen is the head of the Church of England, Putin is very cozy with the Orthodox church, the Good Old Party are fucking ideological lunatics and China is in practice an ideolocracy. Seems like pussy liberal armchair intellectuals are the niche in real terms. Oh, yeah, and africa is full of Armies of God and corrupt witchdoctors. Did I miss anyone? Oh I guess south america counts as the Pope's team.

 

This seems like the type of thread I would usually get involved in. But it was started by Xyle, so I just didn't even read it. Now it's too long to read the whole thing.

I think most of you are pretty familiar with my views on this stuff anyway, so I'll save us all some bickering with this abridged version of what it would be like if I did get involved: I'm right, you're wrong, Jesus is cool, STFU xyle, smuel's mom, fuck you all, peace I'm out.

 

Perhaps we define "oppressive theocrats" differently. I wouldn't characterize most Catholic countries that way, despite their rather silly views on contraception. Technically the US may be a religious country, but it behaves like a secular one in all important respects - nobody gets imprisoned for blasphemy or stoned for adultery. Politicians may have to pay lip service to religion, but the majority of young people don't care about it any more. The same is true for most of Europe. Somewhere like India is a more borderline case - it still has a lot of religiously motivated active traditions, but even there divorce and other sins are on the increase and humanism seems to be encroaching.

If these trends hold, then I don't think demographics can save religion. We've already reached peak child. It's true that secular populations are likely to decline faster than religious ones, but that only matters if the rate of conversion to secularism slows down too, and realistically I don't see that happening any time soon.

In short - one day all of human society will be open and accommodating, just like Japes' mom.

 

That would be nice. I hope you're right but I disagree. There's a lot of easy solutions to our problems, and yet we don't pursue them because we are not that rational nor disciplined.

In ten thousand years, every word of science and history will be forgotten, but every instinct of aggression and tribalism will still be going strong. Assuming we're not extinct and/or robots by then. Religion doesn't need saving. Religion grows out of monkey brains naturally. Just like war and making babies.

Meanwhile, every single jetsetting orgy going atheist is a ticking time bomb for virus evolution, just like thy mother.

 

That's a bold claim. And in my view there's no obvious evidence for it. Sure, you can point out that every previous civilization in history has collapsed, which implies that this one will too, but on the other hand we still have mathematics and literature from ancient Greece, so information seems more resilient than civilization. What's more, the reasons for previous collapses don't seem to apply to us any more. Your major fear seems to be that a super virus will wipe us out, but travel is now on the decline - people order items online instead of going to shops, and they're delivered by drones or driverless cars. The future that we're trending towards involves fewer transmission vectors for diseases than there are today, so we're basically living in the middle of a very narrow window where such a thing could take hold, if it's even possible.

Before anyone accuses me of having faith or something, I'm basing all this stuff on a "balance of probabilities" type reasoning. I wouldn't say I'm sure one way or the other, I just don't share ytzk's sense of impending doom when I look at the evidence.

 

I always bet on doom so if it ever happens, then I'll be able to see a bright side.

As to my claim, ancient Greece is roughly contemporary with the Buddha, who lived in the culture which actually invented maths, and he said something back then which applies, though you can take it with a pinch of salt.

Knowledge survives 5000 years, in the same way people live about a century... It's often less and almost never more.

It's a neat idea because it's true now in terms of known history, that it disappears into myth about 5000 years ago, and an educated, scientific man from 2500 years ago said it was true then too.

I believe we can implement a phase change in civilisation and maybe even a galactic golden age for a hundred billion years, but I doubt we will. I expect it will be the same old politics, war, decadence, decay and, of course, kabillions of constantly evolving pathogens everywhere. I feel like your balance of probabilities is naive, using data from a tiny slice of history and an even tinier slice of the ecosystem, but I hope you're right.

 

When people without authority declare something is sin/unhealthy, it doesn't become sin/unhealthy. When people with authority rebel against the basis for that authority, same thing. I challenge you to provide the basis for your so-called "sins" without relying on those two points.

Every now and a lie comes along that helps people obey truth. The lie is not truth, but, because people are ignorant, they speak it as if is. Prohibiting actions that forestall pregnancy aids the people in obeying the scriptural and evolutionary mandates to reproduce. I personally would not call such prohibited actions sin; however, belief can make it so.

Medical science uses the word "stress" to wonderful effect. It is stressful to work all time. It is stressful to hold on to negative emotions. It can even stressful to act contrary to one's beliefs, but on the same token, that would mean that it is also stressful to live according to another's beliefs.

I hate to sound like an ass, but I personnally won't expect to live if I was eaten. Personally, I would use the definition of life expectancy that was based on the idea of actually expecting to have life (that is, to not have it stolen from me) and base that expectation on the consequences of my own decisions and actions.

The idea of stoning (or any capital punishment) wasn't (isn't) to save the individual but the society. Some people consider punishments to be nothing more than the cost of doing an action that they want to do. Unless the cost is high enough, they will do whatever they please. For society to live by a common set of rules, sometimes you need a very high cost for breaking those rules. (Not that I would advocate for capital punishment (because of Luke 9:56), but when it happens I tend to understand it.)