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Religion IS crazy!

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I fear that it's you who is scary Pavilion103,
The world is finding it hard to further itself faced with this level of blindly held ignorance. Unfortunately there is no shortage of it globallyf and the worrying factor is the vast majority of it has its birth in religous movements of one description or another. At the extreme end are the fanatics who would put a bomb under any disenting voice and deny women the right to education. But the difference between them and the so called enlightened end of the spectrum is not the basis of belief, it's only the degree of hatred they are willing to support it with.
Remember the Catholic Spanish Inquisition. Not really so long ago, when we had the Grand Inquisitor determining what we ould all think regardless of fact, ie based on myth. I suppose today we consider Catholic enlightened, but does that mean the myth has been substituted by evidence based fact. Regretably not.
You see this problem has been around the thousands of years and it seems you wold like it to continue.
That is what is scary
 
Thanks SD, will check it out.

FX, the thing about religions is that you have to be prepared to dig really, really deeply to find any glimmer of truth. If 99% of modern religion is useless rubbish, you have to get to the 1% that is gold. You haven't done that yet. It took me 10 years. I can now discern with great accuracy what's what. The greatest men throughout history knew what was going on when it came to the real root of religion. For example, Einstein, da Vinci and Plato were all deeply religious in their own way, but you're probably a tad smarter than those guys.

If you watch the nightly news and think that religion is about what goes on at the Vatican, your local church or a typical Zen Monastery, you haven't dug anywhere near deep enough. It's nothing like that.
 

Actually I did dig deeply over many years and dug a huge hole at that. However, the gold I found (to use your metaphor) was fools gold. Your sarcastic insult aside, only a very small fraction of the scientific community today believe in a sky God of any description. The real "root" of religion is a desperate search for meaning, purpose and eternal existence that manifests itself in the creation of fantastic mythological stories and expressions that are not based on sound reasoning or verifiable evidence, just wishful thinking.

There is merit to contemplation, meditation and the desire to be a better human being but I do not consider this to be a religious pursuit but rather a path to a happier more fulfilling existence on terra firma. I agree, there is a glimmer of truth in religious texts but nothing that is not of human origin.
 
FxTrader said:
I agree, there is a glimmer of truth in religious texts but nothing that is not of human origin.
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In the same way that current scientific models are simply our way of abstractly defining reality, religions served that purpose and as such I find provide more insight about who we are than necessarily what is outside of our minds. Morality is my current topic of interest and while I find it very easy to dismiss virtually all religions from a moral authority perspective, I do find the historical trajectory and the role they were perceived as having played useful to gain insight into how we divine and determine right and wrong.

Or in other words, it seems obvious to us now that slavery was morally wrong yet it is hard to derive an effective model, experiment, or theory to help demonstrate that in the same way gravity developed. Yet it seems ridiculously simple within the ethic of reciprocity, so why so long for that awareness to take hold on a wider civilisation scale? Religion seems to have a natural or inherent key for "coercing" people to do things in this context, albeit one that is also ridiculously easy to manipulate.

I find religions to be superstitious nonsense, yet there is an effectiveness to them that I find worth learning about.
 
Good post. Especially the last sentence. Nice one.
 
Babies' herpes linked to circumcision practice



http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/07/health/new-york-neonatal-herpes

 
Great post Pavilion.

NO, THOU SHALT NOT KILL is a part of religion, and so is LOVE THY MOTHER AND FATHER, but you want to throw that in the bin for the future generations
 
Is there another thread about creation, evolution, etc.? If not I am happy to discuss opinions about that here but I thought I would check first.
 
Tink said:
Great post Pavilion.

NO, THOU SHALT NOT KILL is a part of religion, and so is LOVE THY MOTHER AND FATHER, but you want to throw that in the bin for the future generations
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The Bible also says ‘an eye for an eye’, and it contains many stories that condone and glorify killing people, slavery, and general barbarity towards humans.
 
Some Dude said:
Is there another thread about creation, evolution, etc.? If not I am happy to discuss opinions about that here but I thought I would check first.
Click to expand...

Yes there is, but I can't recall its name. It was quite active a year or two ago.
 
Tink said:
Great post Pavilion.

NO, THOU SHALT NOT KILL is a part of religion, and so is LOVE THY MOTHER AND FATHER, but you want to throw that in the bin for the future generations
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And herein lies the problem with religion.

It can be nit-picked to suit whomever you are, and can be interpreted whichever way you want, to suit you.


Lets take a look at the Koran


The Koran




 
The ten commandments have stood strong through the years
Dont blame religion.

Who is breaking it down?

Some Dude -- Is there a God
Beauty in Religion
and a few other religion threads, had alot of indepth about science and religion.

Sadly seems alot have left ..
 
bunyip said:
The Bible also says ‘an eye for an eye’, and it contains many stories that condone and glorify killing people, slavery, and general barbarity towards humans.
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Golly, all should check out Deuteronomy and be shocked by the violence. No loving there. How can any modern person read that and still connect with traditional religion?
 
Religion is a belief system, and our beliefs tend to be similar to what our parents believed and taught us. Not always, but frequently that’s the case.

If you were born to aboriginal parents in Central Australia a couple of hundred years ago, you’d believe in rainbow serpents and bunyips and all sorts of fantastic and mythical creatures. Just as almost every religion believes in fantastic and mythical creatures.
Religions have worked out that if you make something sound appealing, lots of people are going to believe in it even if it’s not supported by evidence. Spruikers use the same basic principle to sell dodgy investment schemes – tell people what they want to hear, that you can help them to become wealthy, and they’ll follow you in droves. Storm Financial is a good example.
I grew up in Christian family, just as my parents did. I and my parents before me were subjected to weekly religious instruction classes from our earliest school days, we were taken to church and Sunday school every Sunday without fail.
We had religious instruction in school for half an hour every Friday. And we learnt things that sounded fantastically good to us.

I learnt that Jonah lived in a whale because it was God’s will that he be punished for some misdemeanor. I can’t remember what he did wrong, or how long he lived the whale, and I never questioned how he could survive inside a that big fish without air or tucker or women. I just knew that he did - both the bible and the minister of our church told me so.

Noah built the ark because God told him to. Following God’s instructions to the letter, he captured a male and a female of every species of living creature on earth, transported them to his boat, and kept them alive through a flood that lasted forty days and forty nights. Every creature on earth was drowned. But no problem, Noah had replacement breeding stock in the form of one male and one female of every species, so the world was repopulated with living things.

What a fantastic story – it awed me and appealed to me so much that I believed every word of it without reservation. I didn’t question how Noah managed in just a couple of years to build a boat that must have been bigger than the largest ships of today, if it was to house all these millions of animals and other living creatures. I never questioned how he managed to go out and run down a pair of wild rhinos or grizzly bears without getting ripped apart or gored to death, let alone transport them to his ship and get them aboard, or prevent them from wreckong the boat once he got them there. I reckon old Noah must have been quite a guy.
And his wife must have been an intrepid woman of immense fortitude with an enormous capacity for work. I mean, imagine how busy she would have been gathering all that hay to feed thousands of large grass eating animals. And I imagine she was a dawn to dark woman when it came to the daily feeding routine.
I’ve hand-fed more than a thousand cattle every day during a drought, and I can tell you it’s a bloody big job. So I can only marvel at Mrs. Noah’s prodigious work capacity in being able to feed many thousands of animals on board her husbands boat.
I can only assume that Noah and his missus were non-smokers, otherwise they would have been blown to smithereens the first time they lit a fag in the midst of all that methane gas expelled from all those grass eating animals.

I am of course being facetious to make a point – that the nonsense that’s rammed down our throats about religion is the sort of stuff that no reasonable adult would believe if they heard it for the first time. But tell it to them as children, and repeat it over and over again in stories and bible classes and Sunday school and suchlike, and kids come to believe it and accept it for the rest of their lives.
Just as they accept that God is your friend and your guardian and your champion who, providing you give him your unswerving loyalty and admiration, will protect you and your family, keep you safe from ills, heal you if you’re unwell, send you rain when you need it, and stand by your side in times of adversity to ensure you prevail over your enemies.
When I learnt as a small boy that God was such a great bloke who was willing to go and and bat for me in every aspect of my life if I believed in him, I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. I mean, who wouldn’t want a pal like that?

As I grew up and started thinking more and more for myself instead of believing everything I was told, it became increasingly plain that I’d been conned by all this God business.
It almost beggars belief that adults who are intelligent, thinking people in just about every aspect of their lives, can still go on believing the religious fallacies that are taught to us as children.
 
Assumption - because someone was told something by their parents it is less valid.

3 sets of parents
1. Tells their kid 1+1 = 2
2. 1 + 1 = 3
3. 1 + 1 = 4

1. Oh you just believe 1+1 = 2 because you're parents tons you. Haha you can't think for yourself.


The only sensible thing is to question the validity of the belief system. Not to judge whether its from parents or not. Because some parents WILL be right.

I know something like Christianity is an interesting case. Started in Middle, then became most prominent in Europe, then South America. Now it is becoming (if it isn't already) most prominent in Asia and a country like China (communist background).
So to say this was just passed down and believes from parents is inaccurate. This is a fact.

And don't be so arrogant to say "oh these countries believe because the white man came in and told them and everyone just bowed down and believed the white man"
No... Different people with a completely different background have been exposed to it and reasoned that it makes the most sense.

Such a silly ignorant assumption: most across the world have just believed because their parents did. The above proves that that simply is not true at all.
 
It also boggles the mind to think that sensible intelligent adults could believe in evolution.

A kid can tell you that something can't come from nothing. How ridiculous.

Yeh, something evolved from pond slime and somehow programmed itself to develop over time into a human. Yep, I'm sold!

Natural selection of course ( losing genetic information). But macro evolution (the complete opposite of gaining genetic information) = no evidence.

Isn't science supposed to be something that is observable and repeatable? Evolution is a philosophy which even Darwin said would be in serious question if the cell was found to be irreducible complex like it is today. In this day and age Darwin's THEORY would not have got off the ground.

Are you people INSANE!

I hope you don't trade like you reason about this stuff!!!
 
pavilion103 said:
Yeh, something evolved from pond slime and somehow programmed itself to develop over time into a human. Yep, I'm sold!
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It's a bit more believeable than thinking a snake could talk and some dead Palestinian walked on water. At one point religion supported the idea that the Earth was the centre of the universe. To disagree was to be called a heretic. Who was proven right?

*shrug*

No one's views will be changed in this thread. Not that it matters. Education is the slow death of religion.

The end.
 
pavilion103 said:
It also boggles the mind to think that sensible intelligent adults could believe in evolution.

A kid can tell you that something can't come from nothing. How ridiculous.
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What does evolution have to do with something coming from nothing?
 

If you've ever seen a monkey skeleton next to a human skeleton (and brain and nervous system and muscular system), you might change your mind because they are almost identical apart form size. I'd say evolution is a highly likely theory.

Your other point about "something can't come from nothing" - I feel like everything came from nothing, which was the Big Bang. But for me this doesn't negate what true religion is all about. The Void, the Abyss, the Nothingness , as the Source of Everything, is what some people have historically called God. God can be realized only by complete and utter destruction of the 'self'. The 'self' is not the body, but the process by which the mind identifies with the body. It is the socially programmed idea that 'I' exists.... ego in other words. Each of us believes we inhabit this body (the one typing or reading this message), but this identity, this ownership, is nothing more than a thought....ie. illusory. A good place for a skeptic to start would be to read Jill Bolte Taylor's account "My Stroke of Insight". Not that she experienced enlightenment, but it was sort of heading in that direction. She's a neuro-scientist...and now she understands how science and religion fit together....which they do, perfectly in fact.
 
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