Unfortuantly there are still a number of bunches of bigots.
Christian Voice are in favour of legislating against women's rights, against freedom of expression (Jerry Springer the Opera - they didn't even bloody see it!)sinos) AND they are homophobic.
Operation Christian Vote is an extreme politcal party with similar repulsive views, bankrolled - rather ironically - off the musical success of a particular song writer whose work reputedly became gay club anthems.
One OCV poster which - fortunatly - was banned, it was misleading in that it claimed that abortion is murder - which it isn't, read the legislation.
yes, and religion was hardly invented in modern times, except for scientology, and i don't even consider that to be anything even closely resembling religion.
and "seems unfitting and illogical to make up fairytales"? ever heard of the romans (ancient)? greeks (also ancient)? egyptians? azteks? native americans?
what do we in modern times refer to their religious beliefs? mythology. what do we say about their "mythology". that it is made up to help explain the unknowns of the world.
you know what they referred to their beliefs as? religion. so i ask. how is it "unfitting and illogical" to think that modern religions are a tool that was made up by earlier civilizations? there is historical evidence to support such a theory.
You misunderstood my question: WHY would those civilizations feel the need to do that? I'm being told how illogical "religion" is, and yet if it's the invention of highly evolved beings for consolation.... Something clearly doesn't add up.
Perhaps there is a natural pull towards faith / belief in supernatural things - which would be irrational if there wasn't some premise for it.
my view is that religion asose as a social tool to help unite people and to drive them to some common purpose. What happened here is nothing to do with religios beliefs, but some sick misguided individuals twisting religion to suit their misplaced causes. So many bad things are blamed on religion though it is really their abuse of religion that they use as justification. I'm not religious at all, i see it as a social crutch that a lot of people find great value in, just that I'm not one of them.
What happens time and time again is that politics gets hold of religion and uses it in a wrong way to suit their own purpose. That's not religions fault; its mans abuse of it.
I've finished worshipping the Sun.
Augustine of Hippo believed in such premise.
An agnostic would believe that the ability to recognise God is simply a possible outcome of an unresolved question that generates a theory, possibly false, possibly true.
Originally the term Animism is used to describe primitive religions where the notion of an immaterial soul was absent (so objects were worshipped as gods), but now defines generically every religion, more or less. This change of meaning is extremely interesing: the original meaning (lacking the possibility to recognise immaterial beings) explains perfectly the possible rationale for the theorisation of God and traces it back to the material world.
Edit: I like to think about mankind as a "measuring species", because we have to measure things to live. We need to reduce everything, including God, to something we can comprehend. A priest once told me every religion is a tentative measurement of God, a reduction. "The start of all things, call it what you like: it's Big Bang for someone. I just call it God". He was one of the few priests I've ever respected and loved in my life, because he was tolerant and he didn't believe the rules he obeyed to should apply to others. It was the free choice of a free man.
I'm an agnostic.. agnostics don't believe or disbelieve. They simply acknowledge that they don't know. Weak agnostics don't care, strong agnostics would like an answer, or a means by which to find one. Something tangible, not rhetoric or theorised mumbo-jumbo.
Atheists, on the other hand, are most definitely a religious bunch. I've had a few fights with Brett Keane on YouTube about this. He hates me (so I must be doing something right!)
Atheism is the firm belief in the absence of god. That's definitely a faith system, particularly compared with agnostics. Their basic argument is that you can't prove a negative (i.e. that god doesn't exist), which is supposed to in some way substantiate their position. They firmly believe something that they themselves acknowledge can't be proven. Sounds just like the Christians, to me!
I'm drawing the conclusion that the opposite of religious people are the agnostics.. opposing both the religious and atheist stances. Just as the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. In theism, love is (established believers in god - Christians, Jews, Hindus, Islamics etc); hate is atheism (the refusal to recognise love), and indifference is agnosticism (the absence of any feeling, whether positive or negative, loving or hating).
Until you learn to speak to an animal in their native language, you can not present that as fact. You do not know that. I do not know they do not have religion, that is a speculative assumption on my part (which is why I did not present that as fact).
For all you know, animals may have a higher sense of morality than humans do. After all, they don't seem to kill each other for no reason.
Just because a sense of right and wrong is not based on a religion does not mean it is flawed; If it is based on a good for all life on the planet, can you really say it is wrong because it is not based on religious doctrine? That is the kind of ignorance that really pisses me off. Honestly, I can not fathom how someone can think such a thing.
Society has laws. When you enter into a society, you give up rights and freedoms in exchange for securities. You do not have the right to kill anyone, and in turn, no one has the right to kill you, for instance. That is, of course, unless you forfeit someone else's right to life. In exchange, you recieve a punishment (life in jail, death, whatever).
So, say this law that says you can not kill is not based on a religious doctrine. It is simply based on the thought that it is essential for a properly functioning society, and ultimately, success of the species. How is that bad?
Like many, I do not need a deity or a tomb to tell me how to act. I can make my own decisions. I know how things make me feel and a good idea of how things make others feel. That is all I need to know.
Keep your book.
Now.. I'm going to leave this conversation because I am already getting heated here. Like I said, for some reason this stuff really gets on my nerves.
You need to read the whole book to understand the sentence
I, as I usually do, take things at face value, think that among other wacky things in that book is just plainly preposterous. It might have been business-as-usual couple millennias ago, but today....
Or they just downplay that part and change/tweak the teachings as required, like they recently changed the teaching what happens to stillborn babies (therefore unbabtized). Because the followers in Africa and Asia didn't like the idea of their stillborn babies going into limbo (sort of intermediate of hell and heaven I think) so they changed it.
MAGGOT, before I even continue to discuss your thoughts I want to denote that I am not trying to offend you (or anyone else). I'm just talking, and I'll probably stop pretty soon if people are getting upset.
I did already talk about that though. ( the latter portion )
So... you're using moral terms to define morality... That doesn't work, for reasons I already stated in my novel above You might as well use the word... "snorkachingoo", because it has just as much meaning as "good", "right" (except for the direction, and the natural privelage), "wrong" and "bad" if it's not based on something objective.
Sorry
Why?
Please define a "properly functioning society", and also the term "bad".
I wouldn't give it to you anyway
Again, please don't take exception to my opinion. We're supposed to be having fun here If it bugs you enough to leave, then that's ok, I understand.
Ball Bearing Turbo, while I perfectly recognise your attitude isn't imposing or negative in my opinion, you're still willingly failing to understand that a law can perfectly work as an agreement between men, if it's enforced by laws or moral beliefs, and history is full of changing moral and religious beliefs. Laws, either written or felt, can perfectly work without a supernatural enforcement. Or, if you like, can perfectly fail with or without it.
However, my question is still: what are those laws (created in the human mind) based on, if not 100% arbitrary. It HAS to be based on something (you said based on morals!), and my question is what; and why. You already know my opinion.
Go back and read my previous post about contractualism. It's your right to believe laws descend from above, but there's no evidence about it. On the contrary, there's a lot of evidence about laws being contracts between men, even when they are religiously asserted. The main difference between you and me is that I don't go looking for the absolute truth: I've seen too many of them, and they always clashed with each other.
Neither religion nor morality should be regarded as transcendent and necessary, simply because something has to fill the vacuum that is at the heart of a conscious existence. My previous point (about the normative nature of morality) is precisely that there is no natural law.
We have this thing called life and have to improvise our way through it. There's no shame in that; and I prefer a life of attempting to deal with what is there, rather than what I feel ought to be there.
ball bearing turbo, i think this is a great debate (a bit of a tangent from the original topic, but whatever )
and i don't think that you need to step out just because a few people are getting heated. by the very nature of the subject, this is going to be heated on both sides. just go on presenting your side. and as long as all involved are purposely trying to offend other, i see no reason why this can't be a civil (and rather warm) topic of discussion
So, you recognise that there is a vacuum then - that's a start, and it very much relates to my question about morality!
I tend to tie natural law into natural order, which kind of blurrs the line between the physical and spiritual to some degree. If there is no natural law, then there is no reason whatsoever for us to attempt harmony. Why do we relate to each other this way? Farcical chaos theory that surmises that we just "happen to be here out of chance" is pretty silly. To use a cliche, it takes a lot more faith to believe in science than it does creationism. Microevolution? Sure, obviously. Macroevolution? Pretty silly.
Finite beings trying to grasp the infinite... It could never be done, if the infinite did not come to us in terms we understand. We are made for relationship, that is 100% clear: it's well documented what happens to people in isolation. So, natural order has to do with both our relationship to each other, and our environment - and natural law serves to follow
Sorry for condensing what I'm trying to say, I'll try and be more clear later on. Some of these things are articulated with great difficulty.
You seem to think that any kind of rules or morals must have been created/designed: a rule must be based on a sacred book or some other supreme authority, otherwise we could all make up our own rules and it would all end in chaos and bloodshed.
Take an evolutionist view instead. If you find a rule that exists in many societies, and has existed for a long time, then it must be useful in some way. Because if the rule was harmful, then any society that held it would have perished long ago. The rule "do not kill your fellow tribesmen" has existed widely, and throughout history. It has stood the trials of time, so it must be beneficial for the survival of the tribe.
(There is another rule that seems to be popular: "it's okay to kill the folks from other tribes, now and then." :shrug
So, looking at things this way, you could say that rules don't HAVE to be based on anything. They only must prove themselves useful.
I think they do. Chimpanzees go on war raids from time to time: a group of males enters the territory of another group, ambushes a lone chimp from that group, kills him/her, and retreats to safety. (OK, in a deeper sense there must be a reason for it. For instance: they do it to expand their territory, so they can get more food, and have better chances of survival. But then the wars of humans also have a reason.)
Why? Its not silly - its awe inspiring. But when one is awestruck, one is also dumbstruck. This is the vacuum that I speak of: the point where language and ideas cease to have any meaning. I for one, am not in any hurry to fill that void with words that will only, can only echo back my own experience of the world.
Humans make tools and create things, so its easy for us to think that something or someone must have created us. We create a mythology that explains our existence and we create it with concepts that reflect ourselves. Essentially, there's nothing wrong with that if you accept that the paradigm you've created is limited in value. However, once you establish it as absolute, what do you do when you are confronted by something, as you inevitably will be, that doesn't fit?
i can see how macroevolution can seem strange when looked at on the surface, but if you look into it a bit deeper, it makes much more sense.
if start with a single celled protozoa and end up with a black bear, its easy to dismiss on just the face value. but it was a very, very long process. its not like the protozoa washed up on a beach, went into a cocoon (speaking of cocoons, how weird is it for a catepillar to wrap itself up and emerge as a butterfly) and emerged as a bear. it was a process of a multitude of microevolutions taking millinea to complete.
and really, why is it so unbelievable? the reproductive system of humans (and many other types of animals as well) is basically a greatly accellerated example of macroevolution. the egg and sperm fuse into a single celled organism. then over time it divides into a multiple celled organism. and then that organism divides more and starts to organize its cells into an organism that has the typical human traits. and then it organizes further and those cells become specialized cells which eventually become organs or blood cells or nerve cells. and the end result is a person. but if you look at the start and the finish, it seems completely contradictory that they are one and the same. but it is just a series of microevolutions put together.
faith isn't required with science, otherwise it wouldn't be science. science is directly observable and repeatable. which is what seperates it from religion. with religion you just have to believe as there is nothing concrete to back it up.
"Hate is atheism"? Not quite sure how I should take that. Bloody agnostic fence-sitter
I really wish people would quit labeling atheism as some kind of competing belief system or religion - it's oxymoronic to start with. It's not a centralised and highly controlled philosophy like a religion and it doesn't have an agenda or objectives or scriptures. It's just a word, a way of describing someone who simply isn't religious. Describing atheism with the same terms you would a religion is at best uninformed and at worst completely dishonest. I don't care if people agree with it or not but I want people to realise what atheism is as well as what it isn't. It's the absence of faith and the absence of unverifiable beliefs. It's not a lifestyle, there are no athesit evangelists or prayer groups or holy books or buildings and there's nothing to tell an atheist what he can or can't do - except his own common sense & experience, which is the entire point.
@ glyphon: well said indeed. Since '89 when I started high school, each class in any of the natural sciences (even in physics & astronomy) that I've taken plus every article & documentary I've seen merely reinforces the evolutionary viewpoint. Since Darwin published Origin in the 1850s there's been a century and a half of research and results confirming and adding his original thesis on the development of species on Earth. Creation "Scientists" and Intelligent Design advocates only have a relatively unmodified text from two millenia ago to go on, plus the rather naive argument which basically states: "if it looks like it was designed, it must have been."
The thing is, it's certainly not the first time this has happened. In Australia in the mid-80s there was a large Christian movement attempting to have Creation "Science" taught in schools alongside evolution and it was mildly successful in one state (Aussies wouldn't be surprised that it was in Queensland), but was swiftly shot down and stayed in the margins for two decades. Now it's back (bigtime in the US, we've barely seen in down here) with a new name (Intelligent Design) and an even more vague argument - they've ditched the obviously religious angle (learned from the Australian creationists' mistakes perhaps?) and merely maintain that "something" or "someone" must have had some kind of intelligent input into how life evolved. Well, to a scientist, "must have" simply isn't good enough. If you can't test it, observe it, repeat it, it's not science.
If it bugs you enough to leave, then that's ok, I understand.