Religion Thread

[CommanderKobialka]

Actually it exhibits both wave and particle like properties, but then again, all particles have wave like properties, it's just we previously though of them as being separate, but now it seems like they are both parts of the same thing if that makes any sense.

All particles have wave properties, light has the most prominent because ethe actual particle has an infinitely small mass (otherwise it would not be able to travel at the speed it does)

Light has mass. Otherwise solar sails would be impossible.

[Avenger_7]

Solar sales are propelled by gases ejected from the sun more than anything else...

[҉]

who told you the earth is round ? Did you see it with your own eyes ? No

1. Go to beach
2. Look at horizon
3. Rethink your entire system of beliefs
4. ????
5. Profit

[Keon]

Whheeeee I missed a lot of good yelling at people!

Look, I can't disprove God as a thing, but I can disprove any one god/religion by the simple fact that no religious group has 99.95 support, making the null hypothesis true.

Therefor, either there is no god, there is all gods, or there is one/many gods and they take many forms to many people so that everybody is correct, much like Wave-Particle Duality. Any of these is fine, but I don't understand why somebody will say their religion is more correct than another dudes.

[Keon]

The god of the christians, the jews and the moslems is the same god, only the ways they belive in him/her are different

They follow things differently, they have their own holy book, etc. I would even consider the catholic church a different religion from the anglican

Also just because it isn't supported by a large part of the population doesn't it is wrong.

Yeah, but the same goes for accepting cannibalism. All of society says it's wrong, it doens't make you right either.

(and you did not understand the null hypothesis BTW)

Null Hypothesis, the result is true with no correlation. Aka, people worship something and it is not that thing. I may be misunderstanding it.

[fr0stbyte124]

And as predicted, the religion discussion devolved into lots of colorful language.

[Iv121]

Also, Iv, you're on the losing end of this argument.
You are trying to prove a point which cannot be proven but can be easily disproven. Although I won't say I can argue against the idea of a god, I will rip the heart out of your religious teachings without mercy.

For example, the story of creation is a logical paradox. Let's start by listing what we're initially told.
1) god is all powerful and all knowing.
2) god is benevolent.
3) god created Adam from mud.
Ok. Now let's get into the story. First inconsistency: god needed Adam's rib to create Eve. What? If he created Adam from mud, why does he need his rib? The second major inconsistency in the story is also the killer paradox: if god is all knowing and all powerful, he must have known what would happen with the forbidden fruit. This leads to one of two possibilities:
1)god is not all knowing and therefore not all powerful
2)god is put the tree there knowing what would happen, and is therefore malevolent for plotting the exile of man from Eden.
In either case, he is undeserving of worship. This doesn't disprove the book as a whole, just the part that was added to serve as a mechanism to better control the population.

The point is that no one of you knows how to approach the paradoxes in the bible (I have to do it every single bible lesson so no sweat ). First of all there are two approaches to solve them - Either you take the research approach stating that the bible was written by different people in different times with different points of view. At this case you try to explain the text by analyzing it as a literature work, combining it with the fact that the bible is a collection of stories. For example when I read your post I understood you made a bit of a mess from the creation story - tell me which story did you follow ?

There are two stories of creation, one following another with significant differences. The way to solve this issue using the research approach is to say that the one who collected the stories of the bible had two stories on his hands, the second being the earlier one and the first being the later one, as a result that person simply included both stories. The later one differs from the earlier one by the order in which it was made, again by the point of view about god, who is he and who we are. The earlier story shows differences in the way you treat women too, in this story men are definitely worth more than women who are portrayed as property (That is the part where god made Adam a woman out of him by taking his "rib" (Again bad translation but I wont get into that )). Both stories approach differently the issue of all-knowing god. You must understand that those approaches change from story to story. BTW if you take a scientific approach there is one golden rule - don't deny what is written. IF you simply deny it all there is nothing to research, you just came to bust religion.

There is also a traditional approach which comes from the idea that everything written in the book is true as it is, but we need to learn to understand it. For example I'm amazed you didn't bring a much more important paradox than the minor almost non-existent issue you brought - How could god create Adam in his own image if it is said that god has no physical appearance ? For a long time people didn't know how to answer this and there was nothing left but to assume he has an image, that was until one famous Bible interpreter , can't remember which, came to the conclusion that he didn't make us in his image in our physical appearance but rather made us similar with an ability he gave us - the ability to think. That is an example of solving paradoxes the traditional way.

Finally about your paradoxes. I don't see a reason why couldn't god make Eva out of Adam's rib - there is nothing that cancels the miracle in the fact he made a human out of a bone ...
Second paradox is a bit more serious. As you said he knew well about the tree of knowledge or wisdom or whatever you want to translate it to, but as I said again their crime wasn't eating from that tree but rather denying it and lying. Again one approach claims that god leaves us the freedom of choice, maybe for the same reason he made us in his own image, we can be great and powerful beings if we really want to - if we will overcome the evils inside us. That reminds me of another issue. I often saw people blaming demons and Satan effecting them and making them do this or that. To let you know that Satan's role is to walk this earth and put you to trials, the choice is always yours and if you chose evil no devil could effect you - it was your pure choice. That is the approach of the bible for the issue.

And who are you to understand god’s ways, we are and will never be able to truly see the world and it’s effects, how we live in this giant room like ants never knowing our headings, what happens on the other side of the world. We will never know what would happen this or that way, we can only accept what the world tosses at us and make the right choices. It is my belief that god does not interfere with our decisions and who we are only depends on us, why would he teach us to think if he is deciding for us anyway ? I'm not a religious man but I believe in God's existence and so does every single one of you , avenger and joykler. Tell me who created the universe ? The answer for this will be your own god.

[fr0stbyte124]

I would take the "who are you to understand God's ways" argument to its logical conclusion. If there were something like a god in the universe, it would most likely be something so alien and unfathomable that we would not recognize it even if we were staring it in the face. For a truly omnipotent being to even understand a human's thought process would involve scaling down its own consciousness to an unimaginably small level. In fact, I would be honestly surprised if it even acknowledged us as conscious individuals, as opposed to unusually complex chemical reactions.

Religious texts always portray a god with a human thought process and human morality and human priorities, aside from the occasional capriciousness with natural disasters. There's never any talk of how humanity would change in the coming thousands of years, and you would think that while God was listing off all the things His chosen people could eat and make their clothes out of and how to arrange their animal sacrifices, he could have mentioned the existence of microbes and the importance of sanitation so that millions wouldn't be wiped out every time a plague passed through. I'm not buying it. Even if there was something which could be considered a deity responsible for existence, those documents aren't its words.

[Iv121]

Hey what you read in the bible actually talks about sanitation - You should wash your hands before eating and take a bath every so often. While people of that time couldn't explain this indeed it worked and actually saved their butts during the black plague just to be murdered by the locals who blamed it on them . It's like giving nuclear power to cave people, you need to wait for humans to develop up to a certain point before we can get some pieces of information or we will bring our own doom on us. Finally as I said from our current understanding of the bible texts we think similarly to god, although our morals and customs are our own creations. That is why we were also given the laws in this book like some sort of a compromise between god's understanding of morals and ours, setting very specific boundaries from the basics such as not to murder or rape to the more complex issues such as the way to treat the lower ranks of the society like the poor people or slaves.

[MrTargareyan]

Hey what you read in the bible actually talks about sanitation - You should wash your hands before eating and take a bath every so often. While people of that time couldn't explain this indeed it worked and actually saved their butts during the black plague just to be murdered by the locals who blamed it on them . It's like giving nuclear power to cave people, you need to wait for humans to develop up to a certain point before we can get some pieces of information or we will bring our own doom on us. Finally as I said from our current understanding of the bible texts we think similarly to god, although our morals and customs are our own creations. That is why we were also given the laws in this book like some sort of a compromise between god's understanding of morals and ours, setting very specific boundaries from the basics such as not to murder or rape to the more complex issues such as the way to treat the lower ranks of the society like the poor people or slaves.

I think the smell of being covered in excrament would be an incentive to wash even in the time when the bible was written. In any case, even if the bible talks about sanitation; the bible was written by humans, it is a religious belief that it was written through the humans by god. If you ignore this assumption (which is based on ?) then that information is just a logical discovery amongst a book of what I would call dogma which has little basis in reality but may be true. It is impossible t prove either way. Just like it is impossible to disprove the fact that there are giant space dragons living inside the sun. Also, sorry about this coming accord ASIC I want to slaughter all religions, I am actually open to the idea of faith, I'm just not convinced by it.

[Professor Fenway]

I'm going for a compromise here. Science, at its current level, cannot explain many phenomena and so religion takes over there, such as the meaning of life and how we came to be. As science advances, we will grow to an advancement of understanding where nearly every phenomenon can be explained, yet religion will still hold because the theories will be possibly wrong. It is of my opinion that religion is, in a way, based off of science. Once we get to an extremely advanced level of technology, there will be little or no difference between us and what we view as a god.

This is just me throwing out ideas, but what if we were a sort of 'experiment', where an extremely advanced civilization set off our universe in order to understand their own. They helped set off our evolution to understand their own. Through doing this, they become more all-knowing and all-powerful. They may have introduced the concept of religion, based on themselves, to see how it evolved in their own culture, since they couldn't know whether it was true.

It would be a cycle, and every-time, the new civilization would view the former as 'gods' since they might of created everything. That would be a rational definition of a god.

(NOTE- The views expressed above are not necessarily the views of the person presenting them.)