An open letter to religious people

[Anon.]

Quoting Haunted from 12:13, 22nd Aug 2008

Quite right, apologies. Bizarre belief then?

I was going to try and play Devil's (or at least Scarlet Woman's) advocate and argue how contraception could be seen as "intrinsically immoral" - but I really can't!

[Frank]

Rob raises a fine point there. People really do just dislike the 'idea' of somethings. It's certainly not inherent in the idea that it's unappealing (almost anything can be appealing when enough marketing-money is applied). But people will be obstreporous. We get all sorts of mad ideas and aren't happy about letting them go.

Whether it's some obscure or even divine belief or just tapping the tops of cans before we open them, some ideas are hard to shake.

Indeed, there's (apparently) evidence to support the idea that "Even when you explain to a large sample of people that 'Idea X is actually incorrect' a significant percentage of them will likely go away and, when later quizzed, say they actually learned from this activity that 'Idea X is actually correct'!".

Which is: human memory is a bit shoddy and can barely be trusted when it's dealing with a well established and supported truth, let alone something with lesser support!

Still, that's no reason to neglect this sort of discussion!

[hr]

"There is only ever one truth. Things are always black or white, there's no such thing as a shade of grey. If you think that something is a shade of grey it simply means that you don't fully understand the situation. The truth is narrow and the path of the pursuit of truth is similarly narrow."
Also, some years later:
"here we are arguing about a few uppity troublemakers with a bee in their bonnet and a conspiracy theory."

[Frank]

Double post, but what the hell!

Quoting LonelyPilgrim from 14:45, 20th Aug 2008

Quoting Haunted from 13:42, 20th Aug 2008
Why is something being "unnatural" a bad thing exactly?

Because it's stuffed full of hormones and pesticides and mankind is evil and the government was behind 9/11 and meat is murder and all sex is rape and THE FLORIDE IN THE WATER IS KILLING YOUR BRAIN!!!!!

Sorry, I've just spent a bit over a week surrounded by militant vegan hippie feminist conspiracy theorists.

Wow, my sympathy in this situation is undending. Feminists might be tiresome to some folks, but their philosophy can't always be neglected out of hand. The rest, however, are much more trying and much less securely grounded in reasonable people. My sympathy, you have it!

(Amusingly I had a few months with a militant nationalist ghost-hunting vegetarian fitness freak. Perhaps one of the most illogical people I've ever met...)

[hr]

"There is only ever one truth. Things are always black or white, there's no such thing as a shade of grey. If you think that something is a shade of grey it simply means that you don't fully understand the situation. The truth is narrow and the path of the pursuit of truth is similarly narrow."
Also, some years later:
"here we are arguing about a few uppity troublemakers with a bee in their bonnet and a conspiracy theory."

[Delts]

I found this very interesting. A fair bit of that is hard to argue against as well imo.

http://www.thinkatheist.com/notes/Jesus ... se_Messiah



[hr]

Quotes: For when you can think of nothing to say yourself.

[Andy Monkey B]

For those who are interested, there's a program on BBC 2 this wednesday at 9pm called 'Got on Trial'. It's about a group of Jews in the Nazi concentration camps who create a court room and put God on trial. Simple really. Sounds good

[Humphrey]

Quoting Delts from 23:01, 1st Sep 2008
I found this very interesting. A fair bit of that is hard to argue against as well imo.

http://www.thinkatheist.com/notes/Jesus ... se_Messiah

Well, I doubt there are any biblical scholars here but I can point you to tektonics where you will at least get the opposing view.

ttp://www.tektonics.org/

Although, word of warning, I think the guy who writes all these is insane. No-one could possibly write that amount of apologetics and keep their marbles.

[hr]

http://humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

[james-crittenden-cavendis]

I must say that I think the OP's mode of attack is rather suspect. The OP seems to believe that religious, those who follow a religion, have complete faith in that which they believe. The OP seems to believe that peopl blindly believe. Belief and faith are assets which are built up and tested over time. I'm afraid I wasn't born believing in God, I wasn't predisposed to belief in anything. After a judicious study of justifiable reality I decided that whether or not God exists, it is best to live as if he does. Now, I contend that very few people believe in an old man with a beard who is up above us somewhere. Rather, that which we call God is a consortium of ideas all grouped together un one metaphorical entity. These things include Morality, Societal Values, History (yes, even history if you take a moment and think), the undefined, coincidence, life, death, and perhaps most importantly Love. To even suggest that all of us who adhere to a certain religion do so because we place all our faith in someone in the sky is not only ludicrous, it is downright insulting. Does the OP really think that more than three forths of the world could be that thoughtless to not consider what they choose to believe. Simplified to the extreem, just as those who are religious cannot proove there is a god, those who are atheist cannot prove there isn't. Therefore, the OP may go on being an agnostic who would like to be a Atheist, and I shall go on being an agnostic who would like to be a Roman Catholic. But please, OP, do not claim a higher knowledge, as your original post does; to claim that you are somehow above the ignorance of your fellow man, because wouldn't that just be doing what you seem to deplore. Wouldn't that just be enforcing a dogmatic belief on others just like Christianity and Islam, and so many other countless religions have done in the past.
I shall remain yours truly,
James Crittenden-Cavendish

[Delts]

James Crittenden-Cavendish, at the end you disprove your whole point. The whole idea about scientific thought is that it is not dogmatic. Dogma is one of the biggest faults of religion in that it stops advancement.

[hr]

Quotes: For when you can think of nothing to say yourself.

[Anon.]

Quoting Delts from 23:01, 1st Sep 2008
I found this very interesting. A fair bit of that is hard to argue against as well imo.

http://www.thinkatheist.com/notes/Jesus ... se_Messiah

Much of that is wilfully misunderstanding various verses, though there are some good points. It also looks like the author's just used one translation (which are usually inaccurate) without going back to the original Greek and seeing what it says there - though whether the original Greek can be regarded as accurate either is a whole other matter...

Anyway, Christians rather unfairly claim that only they get to use the Bible as evidence and people who unsportingly attempt to argue one bit of the Bible against the other are like the devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew IV.vii) - "the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose", as Shakespeare puts it (The Merchant of Venice, I.iii.99). Basically, it's all right to back up your arguments from the Bible if you're Christian, but if you argue the other way using the same evidence then you're still wrong. Lovely.

Quotes: For when you can think of nothing to say yourself.

Sorry to be a pedant but actually "quote" is a verb. You mean "Quotations".

[Delts]

Well what does the translation matter if it is used by a church. All translation are/were proclaimed to be right.

Also, you aren't sorry to be pedantic, otherwise you wouldn't have said anything.

[hr]

Yes, this bit is not meant to be taken seriously. BOOBS!

[Diesel]

'I decided that whether or not God exists, it is best to live as if he does.'

Hedging ones bets? I wonder how much God would appreciate that. Belief for ones own self (all be it metaphysical) is a rather pitiful thing, although I'm sure that it's one that is shared by many.

[Haunted]

Quoting james-crittenden-cavendish from 09:13, 3rd Sep 2008
After a judicious study of justifiable reality I decided that whether or not God exists, it is best to live as if he does.

Which god?
Pascals Wager ftl

oh it even gets better

Simplified to the extreem, just as those who are religious cannot proove there is a god, those who are atheist cannot prove there isn't.

Disprove the flying spagetti monster. Do it now. If you cannot then you must do the following
A. Allow Pasta bishops in the house of lords to make policy
B. Allow pasta based faith schools to allow noodly parents an enviroment to bring up children in their belief system and teach the tenets of being a good meatball.
C. Allow tax exemption for organisations devoted to worshipping the great giver of delicious pastas based miracles.
D. Admit that inviting a pasta bishop on talk shows when issues about morality are being discussed is a good idea and to laugh at that is to have NO RESPECT
E. Respect the belief in the beer volcanoes.
F. Understand that to ridicule any of these ideas is disrespectful and insulting and makes you subhuman.
[hr]

Now with 100% more corn

[Delts]

I used the Pastafarian view when having discussion with a christian flatmate last year. He asked me whether I really believed and was incredulous to my insistence that I did, claiming that it was a joke. The hypocrisy never dawned on him.

[hr]

Yes, this bit is not meant to be taken seriously. BOOBS!

[Andy Monkey B]

Quoting Delts from 14:08, 3rd Sep 2008
Well what does the translation matter if it is used by a church. All translation are/were proclaimed to be right.

Eh? By whom? And whoever they were, they were frankly proclaiming the impossible. two things which disagree with each other cannot possibly both be correct.

Quoting Haunted from 16:02, 3rd Sep 2008
If you cannot then you must do the following
A. Allow Pasta bishops in the house of lords to make policy
B. Allow pasta based faith schools to allow noodly parents an enviroment to bring up children in their belief system and teach the tenets of being a good meatball.
C. Allow tax exemption for organisations devoted to worshipping the great giver of delicious pastas based miracles.
D. Admit that inviting a pasta bishop on talk shows when issues about morality are being discussed is a good idea and to laugh at that is to have NO RESPECT
E. Respect the belief in the beer volcanoes.
F. Understand that to ridicule any of these ideas is disrespectful and insulting and makes you subhuman.

No can do, for I am a bigot. Get lost

[james-crittenden-cavendis]

Dear All,

I shall answer as best I can, in reverse order, those comments which appear to be addressed to me.

Firstly,
I cannot disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster, nor can I prove its existence, nor can I deplore those who believe in said monster, because for all I know, this monster could I do think that is a bit ridiculous. The Lords Temporal and Spiritual were formed based on a number of Hereditary Positions which were created due to their historical and societal significance to our great Kingdom. To suggest that the adherents (if there are any serious ones) to the Flying Spaghetti Monster faith have had so great an impact is to negate all that the Catholic and latter Anglican church have done for our island nation. If, by some outstanding circumstance, a great part of Britain were adherents to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, then it would be very important to have Bishops of said religion in the Upper House, to represent that portion of the populous.

Secondly,
As to whether God minds hedging bets. Well, it is said that God forgives us all our ills and also that God judges us based on our conscience, not the effect of our belief. Furthermore, as an atheist, which I presume diedel is, I shant be judged by God, because in your conception of things, God wouldn't exist.

Finally: I will address the message directly after my original one,

I do not disprove my point, nor do I prove anything, I do however, believe I disprove you though. I conceed the point that the purpose of science, or rather the scientific method, as it is laid out by Renus Cartesius in Discourse on Method, is proposed to end dogmatic thought. Science, however, requires proof. Religion only requires faith. It is therefore, impossible for you to formulate a scientific argument against religion without proof, because, as yourself say, science is not in the business of enforcing and imposing dogma. An argument against religion that is not founded in that which has concrete proof is dogmatic and, in it self, a sort of religion. Therefore, one would not be remissed when they say Atheism is a religion whose doctrines and dogmas include, amongst others, 1)the non-existence of God, and 2) a clear lack of understanding of the scientific method.

Yours truly,
James

[munchingfoo]

Whilst it is impossible to disprove the (non-)existance of a deity, you cannot apply the same logic to a Religion.

If a religion believes in an event, for example "God created the heavens and the earth and made man in his own image", and we can disprove that event, by using evolution as evidence, then that religion is false. We can then infer that the deity they worship is a false deity, since a deity should be infallible, and indeed is claimed so by many religions, and it is his/her/its religion.

Whilst it is impossible to follow a religion and not believe in a deity, it is possible to believe in a deity and not belong to a religion. It would help your case if you did not use the two terms interchangeably.

Atheism does not have those attributes you list. Atheism is a lack of belief in something, a deity. Just in the same way that one would not say that non-belief in a flying celestial teacup is a belief system, you cannot say the same about Atheism.

What you describe are those that seek to prove god does not exist using science, and whilst they may be Atheists, they do not represent Atheism.

Atheists is a proper super set of those who are atheists and believe they can prove there is no deity. This is a fact because I am an atheist and I do not believe it is possible to disprove the existance of a deity. qed

I can see why you believe in the supernatural. It's like a big comfort blanket for life. Anything you don't understand, you can sweep under the supernatural carpet. This is fine. I have no issue with this, and I wish you wel in it. However, I would expect the same back in return. Not just from you, but from every other believer in the supernatural. I would request that none of your supernatural beliefs affect me or anyone else who choses for them not to affect them. This would require the removal of Religious officials from all areas of government, the removal of tax free status for religions (except for charity specific parts), and the banning of all supernatural teachings and propoganda in state funded organisations. (Schools, BBC etc.)

[hr]

"The entirety of these definitions lie outside the gamut of the sRGB color space — such a pure color cannot be represented using RGB primaries. The color swatch to the right is a desaturated approximation, created by taking the centroid of the standard definition and moving it towards the D65 white point, until it meets the sRGB gamut triangle."

[Humphrey]

Quoting munchingfoo from 03:07, 4th Sep 2008
If a religion believes in an event, for example "God created the heavens and the earth and made man in his own image", and we can disprove that event, by using evolution as evidence, then that religion is false.

Poor old Genesis seems to always take a bit of a battering in these types of threads but it is really an allegorical polemic against polytheism. That’s not to say it can be discounted because it does contain a series of interesting concepts which have found their expression in western culture.

I suppose the first part of that statement where God creates the heavens might be taken as a scientific statement, but this hasn’t actually been disproved as you state. Evolution shows that under the right conditions (i.e. a universe with the right set of physical constants) complex life forms can emerge from a common ancestor by the interaction of natural processes. It has nothing to say about ultimate causation or where these bio-phillic laws of nature have come from. When the universe was regarded as eternal, as it was in the early 20th century, these could simply be taken as brute facts but we now know this isn't the case.

I think it is wrong to see the concept of ‘the image of God’ as a scientific statement. Rather it is a concept that provided a powerful basis of unique human distinctiveness and dignity which generates for each individual moral claims on his or her fellows. Since evolution by natural selection has produced rather odd beings who have capacity for reason, free decision making and dominion over nature, this part of the passage is not unduly threatened, as Dawkins says ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’ He also suggested in his last TV program that although our acts of altruism and our sense of right and wrong are ‘mistakes’ created by anomalies in the evolutionary process, by-products of a so called ‘lust to be good’, they are worth sticking with.

In its biblical context the idea of the image of God, the ‘Imago Dei’ cannot refer to the physical nature of human bodies since we all look different and are divided into two sexes. It was been taken to refer to humanity’s rational structure - its capacity for deliberation and free decision-making and its dominion over the rest of nature. If you like, it is a value statement about the nature of humanity which finds its principle articulation in the life and teachings of ‘the Cosmic Zombie’. As Bertrand Russell said
‘As a result of Christian dogma, the distinction between moral and other merits has become much sharper now than it was in Greek times. It is a merit in a man to be a great poet or composer but not a moral merit; we do not consider him more virtuous for possessing such attitudes or more likely to go to heaven. Kant maintained that every human being is an end in himself and this may be taken as an expression of the view introduced by Christianity.’

This concept fed into the idea of natural rights which finds its most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’. One of the most influential exponents of this idea was John Locke who saturated his writings with Christian references and was heavily influenced by Richard Hooker, the Anglican theologian. However, the idea of natural roots did not even begin with the religious dissent of the 17th century. In fact historians such as Tierney have traced these ideals all the way back to Rufinus and Ricardus, to Huguccio and Alanus, and to their "obscure glosses" of the twelfth century. These writers based their ideals on the concept of the Imago Dei and the belief that people, as creatures of nature and God, should live their lives and organize their society on the basis of rules and precepts laid down by nature or God. This was the principle which emerged in Medieval canon law and the late scholastics before becoming a full blown political concept in the 18th century. It found perhaps its ultimate expression in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which its author wrote was ‘basically the Judeo Christian tradition without the tommyrot’ (although one also detects traces of the Buddhist tradition in the opening clauses). The Iranians accordingly refuse to ratify it because they see it as "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law.


[hr]

http://humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

[Haunted]

Quoting james-crittenden-cavendish from 01:35, 4th Sep 2008
Dear All,

I shall answer as best I can, in reverse order, those comments which appear to be addressed to me.

You missed the part about Pascals Wager being shit again.

You cannot just say "I believe in god because I stand more to gain and risk very little as opposed to believing the opposite" because THERE IS MORE THAN ONE GOD.

E.g. "I believe in The Great Bumba because I stand more to gain and risk very little as opposed to believing the opposite."

You may wish to elaborate on the arbitrary process for selecting one possible god out of the many thousands. Baal would be quite upset to find out you've been worshipping a false god.

[hr]

Now with 100% more corn

[Andy Monkey B]

Quoting munchingfoo from 03:07, 4th Sep 2008the removal of tax free status for religions (except for charity specific parts)

(almost) every church is entirely financed on charitable giving, it does not sell anything. therefore its all charity.

And to be frank, yeah i suppose I agree that having officials in government purely because of their religious beliefs is a bit silly. although the existence of the House of Lords is equally silly. the only thing to do would be to do away with both and have an elected house of Lords I suppose.

The disagreement would come with how people of faith would want to be represented in government, however putting representation on the shoulders of one individual is a fairly poor way of doing it. the best way as i see it would be for the religious community to decide things within themselves and present their concerns to the government as a body. The onus would be on the government to decide what the fairest way to deal with the concerns of the religious community.

[Delts]

Or even better we could just ignore concerns born out of religious superstitions and govern the country with facts.

But wait, that would be silly. Yeah, lets make country wide decisions based on a 1,700 year oldish book.

[hr]

Yes, this bit is not meant to be taken seriously. BOOBS!