Subyng posted:

GAINING WEIGHT answered this perfectly. Harmfully affecting others is not inevitable if you're religious. Certainly religion has been the catalyst for a lot of good. But the underlying issue is that the motivation behind a harmful act and a beneficial act in this context is the same: religious dogma.

BrandorKP posted:

Complicating matters is that dogma is a reaction to and rejection of harmful distortions of religious belief that can then itself become a harmful distortion of religious belief. When something is affirmed positively usually it's because the alternatives were being rejected.

Subyng posted:

I don't think there's anything wrong with holding illogical beliefs as long as it doesn't affect others around you. However, unless you live in seclusion, your beliefs will end up influencing your actions in a way that will affect someone else.

Minus1Minus1 posted:

I always appreciate your contributions to threads like this. Can I trouble you for some reading recommendations? I'm always curious about what kind of stuff is on your shelf.

Hope the OP doesn't mind the little derail.

Crowsbeak posted:

Ah was wondering how long till the Atheist asked "Why don't you believe in Thor"? Well I believe in the God of All Creation. Who is the prime mover, who is not constrained by the universe. Those others are.

splifyphus posted:

So far your main objection to religion seems to be that it's somehow inherently illogical or irrational. You're positing a singular, normative definition of rationality, and it's utterly enclosing the horizon of your world.

quote:

All systems of knowledge have unproveable assumptions at their base. Symbolic, representational systems are always a pale shadow of the actuality of the universe, and likely will never be able to mirror it fully. There are many different kinds of logic, and there are many different kinds of rationality. '1+1=2' is hardly a given, nor is it somehow a 'fundamental feature of the universe'. We actually don't know how math relates to the world, and the proofs for simple number theory arithmetic get more and more complex and desperate every year. At best, simple arithmetic is a useful human practice with no ontological implications, and the exact ontological status of the mathematical disciplines in general is still up for grabs.

Personally, I don't think that a modern 'secular' 'scientific' worldview is any less irrational than that of a fundamentalist. Limiting your epistemology to a strict empiricism or positivism is a great way totally miss that there are entire dimensions of our existence that can't be accounted for empirically without barbaric amounts of reductionism. It's also a great way to cut yourself off from history and a much wider realm of human meaning.

quote:

I don't think 'rationality' is a thing that humans do well or even at all, and using 'rationality' as some kind of normative epistemological device is a great way to let other people do your thinking for you.

quote:

All human knowledge is always socially constructed and fundamentally historically limited. The ratio of what we know, absolutely, definitively, to the vast expanse of the mysterious unknown really hasn't changed much at all throughout our entire history as a species.

If you're willing to accept a pluralistic account of rationality, I think you'll find that there's more to learn from a single page of a religious text about the actual concrete lived experience of human-being-in-the-world than there is from the combined efforts of every scientist ever. Whether the earth goes around the sun or vice-versa and whether you believe one or the other has basically no effect on your ability to live a meaningful, satisfying, joyful human existence. No many how many phenomena you can explain scientifically, all you'll ever do is push all the small miracles back into the greatest miracle of all - that there is something rather than nothing. No matter how many fundamental laws you posit, you'll never make headway against the infinite regress of where are the laws that govern these laws; where do the laws come from, why are there laws in the first place?

When you read the bible or the quran or the pali canon or the upanishads or whatever there are a few explanations for what you're doing: you're definitely accessing the combined metaphysical and ethical creativity of our entire species history, and you're possibly communicating with people who lived their lives in drastically altered states of consciousness, and you might even be reading accounts of communication with fundamentally alien intelligences. The only situation where this isn't an insanely educational use of time is one where you're determined to maintain the stupid enlightenment fiction of scientific rationality vs religious superstition.

If you decide to actually live your life in accordance with one of these religious schemes, you're doing something else entirely - connecting your life with a vast cultural stream and guaranteeing yourself a real human community that has already demonstrated it can and will last for millennia. You don't 'believe' in God like it's some kind of binary circuit you can subordinate to Aristotelian non-contradiction, you literally build a complex relationship with something vastly bigger than yourself, something that cannot ever be contained within or defined by any symbolic system. You discover/create both yourself and God through the process.

And from this perspective, arguing about abstract binary understandings of 'belief' or 'existence' is what is irrational. Religion is something you do with your entire being, not a checklist of metaphysical postulates you bring to debate club.

SedanChair posted:

Ok then, pick another creator god and tell us why you don't believe in them. Or, if you have the good faith in you, understand the motivation behind the question "why don't you believe in Thor" as "why don't you believe in cosmologies other than the one you happen to have been raised in and socialized to believe."

Subyng posted:

God did this and said that? There is none. It's existence depends totally on the passage of ideas from one person to the next. Rational thought on the other hand, can be performed independently. As with science, you perform rational thought everyday. You understand cause and effect. You have an intuitive understanding of basic mathematics. Etc. Without these things, you would simply be responding to physical stimulus like a fish or a plant. The ability to reason and logic is what separates us from the rest of the organisms on this Earth. It is a fundamentally human trait. And if you believe that God created us and the universe, then God endowed humans with the unique ability of reason and logic. Ironically, to not embrace that fundamental aspect of our nature is about as anti-God as you can be.

Subyng posted:

Embracing science, reason, and logic does not mean living your life to the exclusion of everything else.

Noam Chomsky posted:

lol @ people in this thread mistaking their subconscious, inner monologue, and/or a hallucination for God.

y'all need to learn some basic psychology and/or neuroscience

Crowsbeak posted:

Well thats simple. The Trinity is the true realization of the prime mover. Also I was reading early Christian texts for the reason I came to believe in the Trinity not anything written in the Episcopal church.

Also to the athiest suggesting that

1. Actually there is this thing called convergent evolution.
2. Being that a religious person believes God is, has , and always will be there they would not be surprised to see what they see as the truth return.
3. You know one can use the same argument about philosophy. Should we get rid of Philosophy?


Yeah most relgious people don't believe you don't need to understand science or reason to fallow religion. Most of us see those as part of the divine order.

Subyng posted:

Not sure if you're trolling because this entire post is a non sequiter.

BrandorKP posted:

Origen

He likes Origen. Origen is heavily influenced by Neoplatonism and in a direct ideological conflict with stoicism (origen wrote the Contra Celsum). Sedan your question is a non sequitor.

A god like Thor isn't a fundamental essential reality. It's like asking have you considered these alternate cosmologies based on puppies? The question is making a category error.

DoctorWhat posted:

What I don't understand is why people make the leap from a faith in a higher power (which I can very much understand) to trusting that a specific text represents that higher power's will accurately.

Crowsbeak posted:

Annual Prophet posted:

Probably most people go in the other direction, though: they start with a particular text, experience the higher power (i.e., have some sort of religious experience, sense of added meaning or calm, etc.) by means of it, and conclude that it must be on the right track. Combine that with monotheism (only one of these texts can be correct, and it looks like mine is, so the others must be wrong), and a propensity to conformity of belief among groups, and it seems like a fairly natural outcome (which obviously is not to say it's a correct outcome).

If by accurate you are thinking of something more than the view that a particular faith is correct relative to others, for example literalism or fundamentalism, then, while that probably results from some of the same causes, it's much harder to understand, given the clearly metaphorical nature of many religious texts, factual inconsistencies, differences between religious and scientific / historical texts, etc. Without looking up the statistics, I'd also guess it's fairly uncommon (in percentage terms; I'm sure in absolute numbers there are a hell of a lot of fundamentalists).

Noam Chomsky posted:

lol @ the neckbeard defense

"anyone who laughs at my delusional misunderstanding of misfiring neurons must be an edgy neckbeard who creates epic maymays for posting on /r/atheism" - a religious person

being religious is all right. however, when you claim to be religious because you had a vision of the virgin mary one time you should write that off as broken brain instead of deciding that, yes, catholicism is the true way because my hosed up monkey brain made me think of a lady's face one time.

OwlFancier posted:

It is a bit weird the number of people reporting what I personally write off as hallucinations as divine inspiration.

Crowsbeak posted:

Well if it's the shoe fits. I do love that we've once again turned into the typical r/atheist circle jerk. "All you theists are delusional. We are superior".

Noam Chomsky posted:

i don't think i'm superior to religious people. i just think i'm aware of, in a rudimentary way, how our brains work and that our brains are capable of tricking us into believing that everything we're seeing and hearing is real, even if it isn't.

if someone's hallucination, to them, is a religious experience, and is absolutely real to them, and i'm supposed to take it as real as well, and accept it, then why don't i also have to accept the hallucinations of every schizophrenic as being real or the hallucinations of a senile old man in a nursing home?

you can't say: "my subjective experience is real and factual!" and then claim i have to take you seriously because you're putting a religion stamp on it.

vintagepurple posted:

dear neckbeard atheists invading the god thread to pwn sheeple:

omg i'm completely convinced, show me more tenth grade logic puzzes that PASTORS HATE

thanks, vp

ps praise fsm lol @ religions

OwlFancier posted:

Yes but it is incredibly unlikely that some things are real.

It's surely harder to rewrite your entire cosmology and understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe than to say "Huh, that was weird, not sure what happened there but hopefully it doesn't happen again."

Tatum Girlparts posted:

Ah there's the internet religious discussion I was waiting to pop up. I think we hit all the high notes, only religious because you were raised that way, religion is just stupid monkey brains ascribing divine origin to hormone shifts, religious people are hallucinating crazies. Yea, think we got em all, alrighty we can pack it in. Noam, my dude, wanna send us off with one final smug comment about how easy it is to be religious that's an always smooth blend of pity and superiority to pretend your choices somehow inherently have more meaning in a chaotic world?

Tatum Girlparts posted:

Ah there's the internet religious discussion I was waiting to pop up. I think we hit all the high notes, only religious because you were raised that way, religion is just stupid monkey brains ascribing divine origin to hormone shifts, religious people are hallucinating crazies. Yea, think we got em all, alrighty we can pack it in. Noam, my dude, wanna send us off with one final smug comment about how easy it is to be religious that's an always smooth blend of pity and superiority to pretend your choices somehow inherently have more meaning in a chaotic world?

Crowsbeak posted:

Uh oh. Now the atheists are going to rant about how they shouldn't have to be nice to delusional people. I also love how we're debating a guy who named him self for an apologist of the Khmer Rouge .

Crowsbeak posted:

Uh oh. Now the atheists are going to rant about how they shouldn't have to be nice to delusional people. I also love how we're debating a guy who named him self for an apologist of the Khmer Rouge .

quote:

In support of their assertion, Chomsky and Herman criticized Barron and Paul's Murder in a Gentle Land book for ignoring the U.S. government's role in creating the situation, saying, "When they speak of 'the murder of a gentle land,' they are not referring to B-52 attacks on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous ground sweeps by American troops or forces organized and supplied by the United States, in a land that had been largely removed from the conflict prior to the American attack". They give several examples to show that Barron and Paul's "scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny," and they conclude that, "It is a fair generalization that the larger the number of deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge, and the more the U.S. role is set aside, the larger the audience that will be reached. The Barron-Paul volume is a third-rate propaganda tract, but its exclusive focus on Communist terror assures it a huge audience."