Ban the Religion Thread

I don't understand what "legislate Triumph" could mean?

If you'd been reading this thread carefully you would know that generally I don't participate in religious topics, and that I know, and everyone else knows (except you apparently) that I haven't the authority to legislate anything. I created a poll, and of course, I will accept whatever results it leads to. Further, I understand that if 1,000 members voted to ban the religious forum and no one at all opposed them, the moderators would be under no obligation to do anything at all. So how about you just vote, and give your reasons for your choice, and we all just play nice?

 

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Deists, for example, don't really try to define God in the first place. To them God is a mystery. They reject the idea of divine revelation and intervention, and often feel that religious conceptions of God and the associated doctrines are just as absurd as most atheists think they are. And as they are typically naturalists, they're free to embrace things like evolution (even abiogenesis) and often do.

The point is that I really don't think you should have any sort of beef with people like that at all. I don't think anyone should. They're not trying force creationist bullshit into the school curriculum, they're not rallying against homosexuality or condemning people to eternal damnation. They're not trying to undermine the scientific method or scientific progress. They're generally not even telling you how you should be living your life (other than in the sense that anyone else with a reasonable sense of ethics and morality might choose to do so on occasion).

Like I said, you can call a belief in God scientifically unfalsifiable, and extraneous, but why bother going anything further if the typically oppressive and judgemental religious bullshit isn't present? Why the need to hammer even the moderate and harmless views about existence into the ground?

 

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Everything you said is agreeable. But what percentage are these deists?

It seems that those who have the desire to undermine science taught in schools, etc., has a strong influence and lobby...

 

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Why assume some belief held loudly by a small minority of theists is representative terror], we shouldn't do this to Catholics [re: pedophilia], and, we shouldn't do it to atheists [re: rebellious]. Who is to say any of these religions are even correct in their belief!? That does not preclude the brilliant concepts which shape countless lives for the better from being admissible as evidence! In fact, doesn't this by itself at least pique consideration? How are our morals better!?

We have:
- People closer to death than life wandering our streets.
- Disrespectful children.
- Crumbling marriages.
- Rampant addictions from Meth to Saturated Fats.
- Violence which will not cease.
- Infanticide on a level never see in human history (with potential exception to Mao era China).
- Thieves running our politics.
- Greedy individuals managing our wealth.

This is secular paradise? Which part did secularism have a part in...and which did it not? It's easy to say secular society brought us medicine, 'rational' thought, and helped us escape from shackles of zealotry. But hasn't it plagued us with poison, caused disillusionment, and bound us in increasingly smaller cages?

Why are the two even exclusive?

Have not religious and righteous men benefited us in science, physics, and mathematics? In our churches and our synagogues, when have we with regularity flailed the dis-obedient?! Secular hatred of religion is not based in historical fact, it's based on convenient fiction. The average secularist perhaps never followed the the history of Helgian practice, or the evolution of is successors. They have no idea how silly the religious world still believes these people are... because they're just too damned proud.

 

There aren't enough Deists if you ask me. If every theist in the world became a Deist, or something similar, we'd definitely be getting somewhere. Somewhere special. It's about the only theistic belief system that can plug-in alongside a more secular philosophy without causing too many problems. I think it would be great.

Of course good old America tried to start off that way, but the fundamentalist creationist crackpots fucked it all up.

 

I'm talking about the text, not the people. Are you going to say your holy book itself isn't representative of your faith? The Bible advocates murder, rape, bigotry, and racism. It makes claims for the origin of the universe, the earth, and life. These are very much overlapping magesteria.

Who is to say they're wrong? And what does their rightness have to do with what religion does? You said religion asks why, I have demonstrated how religion does far more than that. Whether this is representative of all religion or just a loud minority is irrelevant.

And what concepts are those? The one that brands women as second-class citizens, or the one that demands blind subservience? The one that tells us to turn the other cheek while our enemies kill us?

Secular morality demands equality for all people, regardless of their race, creed, or sexual orientation. Secular morality removes the patriarchal yolk from women, gives them a say in when they mate and who with. Who in this world today prevents girls from attending school? Who in this world today would rather have their children ignorant than risk them losing faith by learning biology? Which societies advocate honor killings?

And we always have. Every society has its disenfranchised. The difference is that in our secular society, those people are victims of circumstance rather than divine injunction.

Always have. Do you remember God's solution? "He that curses father or mother, let him die the death." Even Jesus, meek and mild, came to a town and demanded to know why his subjects had stopped putting their disrespectful children to death.

We always have. The difference is that with the Church's influence diminished, people are free to get out of bad marriages. You'd prefer the alternative of a life of misery, perhaps abuse?

What does this have to do with morality?

Violence is a part of the human condition. There has never been peace, and there never will be.

Or when God took his midnight stroll through Egypt, killing every firstborn. Even the firstborn cattle!

I suppose by "infantacide," I suppose you're referring to abortion?

They're not all thieves, but certainly thieves are better than divinely-appointed hereditary rulers. At least we get to pick which thieves are stealing from us, and kick them out when they get too bold.

That's an awfully vague statement.

Straw man. I never said this was paradise. Such a thing doesn't exist. What I'm saying is that our morality today is far better, and far more relevant, than the Bronze Age nonsense found in the Abrahamic texts.

You're going to have to be more specific. Do you mean literal poison? Because that has been around forever. What disillusionment has secular society created? (And what the hell does that have to do with morality?) What do you mean by being bound in smaller cages, and to what are you referring?

 

there is alot more to this life than just science.
and apparently you want to hold on to your preconceptions/misconceptions about theists..
well, there is not much i can do if you don't want to learn..(cept wait for you to say just the right thing so i can argue it..)

i addressed what my intentions were.

what fun is that?
one place were me and the scientific principle line up is 'Question everything'
and again you fail at your own advice..(you don't accept the premise of God, yet you speak against him)

i haven't said your beliefs are nonsense..I ranted about you pushing those beliefs on others.
you are allowed to believe what you believe...i just wanna scrutinize why you believe what you believe..

<my edit for accuracy>
yet you don't consider speaking out against them a waste of time..

selective hearing?
i said i did not want to convince you that God exists..i have arguments as to why i believe proof is detrimental.

that's fine if you want to keep your mind closed and not explore the truth as far as a theists mind set goes..you can keep your own understanding of theists, you have expressed your opinion and of your own unwillingness to learn of better understandings.

you are more of a seeker of knowledge, you have no desire to seek wisdom.
the two are not always mutually exclusive.

 

Prove it.

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When you read a scientific explanation for teeth rot (and scientitfic explanations for the decay of organs, bones, tissues, infections, fractures, etc.),

is your mind put to rest?

 

It's good enough for me, yes.

And again, Wynn, if it is not for you- that's for you.

Others do not need religion just because you do.

 

Who said anything about others needing to be the way one is?

This thread is in General Philosophy, so it is fully reasonable to expect a more philosophical approach to the issue at hand - as opposed to taking things personally and stopping at personal boundaries.

 

God is supposed to have revealed himself on multiple occasions (to Moses at Sinai, to Mohammed at Mecca, etc). Jesus is supposed to have walked the Earth and risen from the dead. Saints (both Christian and Muslim) and their relics are reportedly associated with miracles. Christians, Jews and Muslims commonly report subjective religious experiences of all sorts. There's a whole collection of abstract theistic arguments in philosophy. There are even the more recent so-called 'anthropic' arguments in physics.

In other words, Christians, Jews and Muslims typically believe that there's a great deal of justification for their beliefs. You (and I along with you) will question how credible and persuasive that material really is. But it's foolish to simply refuse to listen to anything that a theist says. That's like a small child shutting his/her eyes and shouting: 'Nah, Nah, Nah! I don't see you! I don't see you!'

Real legitimate questions about religious epistemology exist. A great deal of academic debate is taking place in the philosophy of religion as we speak. These kind of questions need to be asked, arguments on both sides need to be examined, and discussion has to actually take place.

It's flat-out anti-intellectual for the more aggressive (I'd say 'fundamentalist') sort of atheists to legislate their own wonderful triumph by simply demanding that everyone who disagrees with them be silenced.

God isn't the easter bunny. They are two very different concepts. By equating them, you're already announcing your own conclusions to arguments that you haven't participated in and don't seem to want anyone else to participate in either.

There's no end of things to say. The problem is, you're demanding that anyone who disagrees with your own personal beliefs be forbidden from saying anything.

 

God is supposed to be a transcendental being, outside the causal, space-time, law-governed realm of nature. So what relevance could a physical science that investigates the natural universe's causes and physical laws possibly have to the question of whether or not some sort of transcendental being exists?

Most religions do imagine their divine beings and principles as being transcendent.

I agree with you that a fairly strong argument can be made that a totally transcendent being, should such a thing exist, might be incomprehensible to and unknowable by human beings. And one can probably push that argument towards the conclusion that transcendent beings are therefore irrelevant in human life. Many religious individuals in many traditions would argue with that conclusion.

That seems to assume that religion="Abrahamism"=Biblical literalism. And that's not right. Religion in general is a much broader category than "Abrahamic" theism, which in turn is a much broader category than Christian Biblical fundamentalism.

I do agree with you that the findings of science are very relevant and very corrosive to literalistic interpretations of the first few chapters of Genesis. Those literalistic interpretations have been pretty conclusively falsified in my opinion.

The problem with a few of the louder atheists, and the reason why I refer to them as 'atheist fundamentalists', is their insistence that Christianity is the only religious tradition that matters, and their belief that Biblical literalism and inerrancy are the only legitimate ways to be a Christian. In other words, some of the louder atheists share fundamental assumptions with their opponents about what religion is and about what religion should be.

You've never lived until a discussion board full of militant atheists (it first happend to me on alt.atheism in the 1990's) lecture you on what "true Christianity" is -- Biblical literalism, inerrancy and all the rest -- precisely as the fundies preach.

And now we are witnessing demands that chosen views on religion be officially legislated and enforced (on Sciforums at least), and calls that dissent from the established church be banned. Many hard-line religious fundies would once again heartily agree with the principle, even while they disagree vehemently with the content.

 

There's a dual spectivism concerning "what's going on" required: Even the scientist must retain and continue participating in the momentum of most of her culture's original folk interpretations (everyday life), otherwise she'd become a social-less machine not even bothering with intuitive slash invented meanings for human existence. The hardcore anti-abstraction crusader himself will eventually be discovered appealing to concepts like justice or love and feelings like awe that are no more observable or public, as localized, concrete objects than "scientific method" and a general law of physics (minus being tangible descriptions on paper, etc).

But a naturalist, empiricist, or scientific perspective (whatever the devil a militant theist is isolating as some culprit that's smashing "life's meaningfulness") must also be maintained and pursued in parallel to traditional conventions, if the addiction to and perpetuation of the current civilization is to continue (not to mention it having come about in the first place). The situation is not unlike the dichotomy of playing a strict, formal role that one's job/career may often require, and then returning home in the evening and becoming the more malleable and less constricted person that one's family, friends, etc., are familiar with. More than one approach to reflecting upon or understanding the immediate manifestations of perception is required for conceiving "what's going on", in order to be human.

 

Yes.

Meaning / interpretation of a non-response hereby supplemented with an affirmative response.

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That's a Modern view, yes.
One created when no one could find any hint of a God actually existing.

In the old days, God interacted with humanity- A lot. Nowadays- Nothing.
The goal posts keep shifting.
Any statement that begins with "God is..." is unverifiable right off the bat.
And yes, any statement beginning with "Puff the Magic Dragon is..." will qualify.
Just because millions of people were taught and trained to believe in a God doesn't mean there must be some validity to the belief.

Even so, by placing God outside of the Universe, apologists may have also explained his lack of participation in Earthly events, ranging from Evolution of the Species, Solar System Formation and the like- leading all the way back to that fraction of a second before BBT Cosmology (Which is the only place where someone can still feasibly fit God in.)

It's a bit like a girl having a total jerk boyfriend- when she has to apologize for him and explain him that much- maybe it's just time to dump him.

Again, my stance is that if you must take it that far, maybe it's time to let go of the belief instead of making it as far removed from investigation as possible.

That is an immediate religion. There are many, true. But the numbers of the Abrahamic faiths greatly overwhelm the numbers of other religions, globally.
It is the primary and one of the most dangerous.

This is overstatement. It's a science forum, not the Legislative Branch of the Government.
The O.P. asked whether the topic is relevant in an Open Poll.

 

And I suppose this is to be trusted since you're both an historical and biblical scholar.

 

What have I said that wasn't accurate? Or was this just subterfuge because you don't have answer and have moved on to attacking me personally?

 

Does it really? Did you actually read it in Hebrew and comprehend it?

Well... you said they were wrong... for one.

Ech...you clearly haven't read much of anything. Isn't the whole book of Esther dedicated to explaining exactly this issue?

It might 'demand' it. Unfortunately, demands aren't actions. So its demands are never met... because unlike religious philosophies.. it has no obligations! Who says a religious person can't learn biology? You? Perhaps it's YOU who is restrictive. As I said... how many historical great physicists were religious and righteous men?

Please re-read history from chapter 1 to now.

Okay, and? Why would first born's be necessarily infants?

:bawl:

 

Peace. Could everyone just tone it down now? Many of you have gone a bit off-topic. I would rather that this thread didn't get cesspooled.

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I am afraid no ne else could vote in the poll then. Please, can all additional posters simply vote in the poll, and then state the reason for their choice, and leave it at that? Thank you.

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(From the Original Poster)