Religion, Science, Scepticism, Philosophy and things metaphysical

[Value Collector]

It's all to do with risk ... do you take the chance of believing those trendy atheist quacks or do you go for proven God endorsed product?

You're juggling with your afterlife here ...:

How worried are you that the any of the Hindu gods are real? or that the Muslims are correct?

If you aren't worried about them, you will see why we aren't worried about your god.

As bellenuit said, Pascals wager is nonsense, any logical person can see the holes in it straight away.


Do you remember what the year 1895 was like, no you don't you weren't born yet, there is no evidence to suggest 2095 will be any different, as mark twain said, you were dead for billions of years before you were born, and didn't suffer the slightest inconvenience, when you die you will just go back to non-existing.

 

[Tisme]

Do you really think that these are the only two alternatives? One or the other? Pascall's wager has been debunked so many times before that I won't repeat the arguments again.

I think it pays to have a bet each way just incase bell, I just hope if HE does exist HE has a sense of humour

 

[Tisme]

How worried are you that the any of the Hindu gods are real? or that the Muslims are correct?

If you aren't worried about them, you will see why we aren't worried about your god.

As bellenuit said, Pascals wager is nonsense, any logical person can see the holes in it straight away.


Do you remember what the year 1895 was like, no you don't you weren't born yet, there is no evidence to suggest 2095 will be any different, as mark twain said, you were dead for billions of years before you were born, and didn't suffer the slightest inconvenience, when you die you will just go back to non-existing.

Yeah but this thing is bigger than any of us VC. I don't know if we have the technology to counter attack if the big guy does decide enough is enough. I guess we could always send in Richard Dawkins to negotiate or better still convince God that HE doesn't exist.

Obviously the Holy grail is the keys to God's front door or a bunch of grapes. It's pretty obvious the Hindus and the Muslims get a fail as does the Catholic Church, which kinda leaves the Jews who don't appear to be in any rush forgoing their gold and influence and quite happy to wait until judgement day knowing they have a preliminary pass as the chosen ones. I'm keenly looking for some Jew in my gene pool and was pleased the recent blood moon didn't trigger the predicted end of days before I could complete my investigations.

 

[Value Collector]

Yeah but this thing is bigger than any of us VC. I don't know if we have the technology to counter attack if the big guy does decide enough is enough. I guess we could always send in Richard Dawkins to negotiate or better still convince God that HE doesn't exist.

Obviously the Holy grail is the keys to God's front door or a bunch of grapes. It's pretty obvious the Hindus and the Muslims get a fail as does the Catholic Church, which kinda leaves the Jews who don't appear to be in any rush forgoing their gold and influence and quite happy to wait until judgement day knowing they have a preliminary pass as the chosen ones. I'm keenly looking for some Jew in my gene pool and was pleased the recent blood moon didn't trigger the predicted end of days before I could complete my investigations.

But which God are you scared of, and aren't you worried you might be worshipping the wrong one?

I mean surely a God is going to be more angry at someone who spent their life worshipping a false god than some one who was genuinely unconvinced any existed.

Here is what makes me feel comfortable being an atheist.

Any god would know exactly the evidence I need to be convinced, the fact fact that I remain unconvinced means he either doesn't care what I believe or doesn't exist. Either way I am safe.

When it comes to religions, they are all based on the idea of getting me to give up some freedoms in this life, for the chance of another life after I die, this stinks of hucksterism, and when we look at the world as it exists, we don't see the things we should see if their claims were try, So I think it's better to just not believe, be a good person, and not harm our fellow travelers.

 

[SirRumpole]

When it comes to religions, they are all based on the idea of getting me to give up some freedoms in this life, for the chance of another life after I die, this stinks of hucksterism, and when we look at the world as it exists, we don't see the things we should see if their claims were try, So I think it's better to just not believe, be a good person, and not harm our fellow travelers.

And let the hucksters keep huckstering especially if they are members of minority groups.

 

[sydboy007]

And let the hucksters keep huckstering especially if they are members of minority groups.

Problem is many of those being huckstered will get angry at you if you try to show what's happening. Plenty in the USA will say they don't care if what they believe in isn't true, they want to believe because.....

Richard Dawkins says to not attack the person, but attack the idiotic ides they have. Personally, I think getting religious people to understand what atheism really is, that it's not a religion, that one can still have belief in god if they accept the theory of evolution, they are good chinks in the religious armour.

because God sending himself to sacrifice himself to himself to save us from himself is a bit much for any logical person.

Satan - because without a scapegoat you might have to take personal responsibility for your own actions.

God - can create everything man can't, but nothing that man can.

Many religious people claim reason is the greatest threat to religion.

 

[Value Collector]

And let the hucksters keep huckstering especially if they are members of minority groups.

Well I am not in favour of shutting down churches by force, That won't work. I would rather the religions slowly die of as their members turn away from superstitions in favour of rational thought, and they realise the benefits of living a secular atheistic life.

Do you have think clamping down on religious freedom would work?

 

[SirRumpole]

Do you have think clamping down on religious freedom would work?

Not by law, except in the cases where there may be a threat to society, eg face covering.

But I would like to see more politicians publicly but politely challenge religious fundamentals and say how they determine the decisions they come to.

I'd like o see the media challenge politicians on their fundamental beliefs and how they influence decisions just so we can see their rationale.

The problem is of course that politicians don't want to upset large voting blocs, so nothing much will change.

 

[Tink]

As I have said, I don't care what people believe, but I do like people to acknowledge the contributions that were made by Christianity to this country, via our laws and our lives, with our Christian principles.
The sacrifices that were made by the ancestors of this country.
It is called being grateful, something people have forgotten.
As you have stated yourself, VC, that it is there.

I have already said, belief systems come in many forms, and you can get extremists in all.

The Greens and their Communist agenda are disgraceful.
A new set of extremists trying to force us how to think, brainwashing the children with lies to suit their own agenda.

Brave New World by Huxley -- and 1984 by Orwell -- come to mind.

Education, yes, where the most robust discussions were fought out, in the Christian Universities.
......and where parents are lining up to enrol their children in schools with a long waiting list, that are structured and orderly.

We won't even talk about the public education system now.
https://www.aussiestockforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25851
Ask Brendan O'Neill what he thinks of it....and PC.

--------------

I posted this a while back, if you want to talk about reason and science.
As has been mentioned many times -- Science has never been about disproving God.

About the least fashionable thing one can do these days is utter a kind word about the Catholic Church. The idea that the church has been an obstacle to human progress has been elevated to the level of something everybody thinks he knows. But to the contrary, it is to the Catholic Church more than to any other institution that we owe so many of the treasures of Western civilization. Knowingly or not, scholars operated for two centuries under an Enlightenment prejudice that assumes all progress to come from religious skeptics, and that whatever the church touches is backward, superstitious, even barbaric.

Since the mid-20th century, this unscholarly prejudice has thankfully begun to melt away, and professors of a variety of religious backgrounds, or none at all, increasingly acknowledge the church's contributions.

Nowhere has the revision of what we thought we knew been more dramatic than in the study of the history of science. We all remember what we learned in fourth grade: While scientists were bravely trying to uncover truths about the universe and improve our quality of life, stupid churchmen who hated reason and simply wanted the faithful to shut up and obey placed a ceaseless stream of obstacles in their path.

That was where the conventional wisdom stood just over a century ago, with the publication of Andrew Dickson White's book, "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom," in 1896. And that's where most Americans (and Europeans, for that matter) believe it still stands.

But there is scarcely a historian of science in America who would endorse this comic-book version of events today. To the contrary, modern historians of science freely acknowledge the church's contributions ”” both theoretical and material ”” to the Scientific Revolution. It was the church's worldview that insisted the universe was orderly and operated according to certain fixed laws. Only buoyed with that confidence would it have made sense to bother investigating the physical world in the first place, or even to develop the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world). It's likewise a little tricky to claim the church has been an implacable foe of the sciences when so many priests were accomplished scientists.

The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher. Father Roger Boscovich, who has been described as "the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic theory. In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

By the 18th century, writes historian Jonathan Wright, the Jesuits "had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes, and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics, and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula, and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light."

Their achievements likewise included "star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics."

These were the great opponents of human progress?

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Father J.B. Macelwane, who wrote the first seismology textbook in America in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In 17th-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible.

Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America. Beginning in the 19th century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate time keeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments and cartography.

The early church also institutionalized the care of widows, orphans, the sick and the poor in ways unseen in classical Greece or Rome. Even her harshest critics, from the fourth-century emperor Julian the Apostate all the way to Martin Luther and Voltaire, conceded the church's enormous contributions to the relief of human misery.

The spirit of Catholic charity ”” that we help those in need not out of any expectation of reciprocity, but as a pure gift, and that we even help those who might not like us ”” finds no analogue in classical Greece and Rome, but it is this idea of charity that we continue to embrace today.

The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, come to us directly from the medieval world.

By the time of the Reformation, no secular government had chartered more universities than the church. Edward Grant, who has written on medieval science for Cambridge University Press, points out that intellectual life was robust and debate was vigorous at these universities ”” the very opposite of the popular presumption.

It is no surprise that the church should have done so much to foster and protect the nascent university system, since the church, according to historian Lowrie Daly, "was the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge."

Until the mid-20th century, the history of economic thought started, more or less, with the 18th century and Adam Smith. But beginning with Joseph Schumpeter, the great economist and historian of his field, scholars have begun to point instead to the 16th-century Catholic theologians at Spain's University of Salamanca as the originators of modern economics.

And the list goes on.

I can already hear the complaint: What about these awful things the church did that I heard about in school? For one thing, isn't it a little odd that we never heard any of the material I've presented here in school? Doesn't that seem a trifle unfair?

But although an episode like the medieval Inquisition has been dramatically scaled back in scope and cruelty by recent scholarship ”” the University of California at Berkeley, not exactly a bastion of traditional Catholicism, published a book substantially revising popular view ”” it is not my subject here.

My aim is to point out, as I do in my book "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization," how indebted we are, without realizing it, to an institution popular culture teaches us to despise.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/...ic-Church-to-Western-civilization.html?pg=all

 

[SirRumpole]

I have been saying for a long time that Christianity has contributed to the development of our laws and morality, but I'm not sure that it has all that much more to give in the modern world.

While the church interferes in individual rights (like the right to die) of people who may not necessarily share the Church's views, then they risk increasing isolation from the mainstream.

Religion should be a voluntary and personal affair, and decisions that effect society overall should be taken without its influence.

 

[Tisme]

The idea that the church has been an obstacle to human progress has been elevated to the level of something everybody thinks he knows.

The thing about the Catholics writing stuff about the Catholic Church contributions, is that it fails to acknowledge the monopoly on schooling and politics it had in Europe for like forever before Protestantism emerged. If you were a scholar you probably had to be a cleric too...and the only organisation with the means to provide room, board, time and resource to invent stuff was the Catholic Church and its revenue streams.

Most of the stuff the Catholic Church says it invented is supposedly re inventions of Chinese and Arab stuff.


Things ramped up after the restraints were lifted during reformations, especially in non Catholic England,Wales and Scotland and now we have Iphones.

 

[Tink]

That is fine, what I was trying to point out was the orderly design.

It was the church's worldview that insisted the universe was orderly and operated according to certain fixed laws.

Only buoyed with that confidence would it have made sense to bother investigating the physical world in the first place, or even to develop the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world).

 

[Tisme]

That is fine, what I was trying to point out was the orderly design.

It was the church's worldview that insisted the universe was orderly and operated according to certain fixed laws.

Only buoyed with that confidence would it have made sense to bother investigating the physical world in the first place, or even to develop the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world).

You know I have no problem at all with people plying their religions Tink and I understand that you might get a bit gravitas at the constant assault on your church by people like me (which is rather wasteful of energy ), but what I'm trying to point out is that the Catholic Church and its various incarnations of the Roman and Holy Roman Empire were political war machines that did indeed hold back innovation, often brutally, up until the emergence of the Protestants and the reformations, wherein the rush was on to keep the flock.

There isn't a lot going for Catholic (and Muslim) rule when you compare the the wealth and living conditions of those countries that are and aren't....of course we could say that the bloodlines that threw off the yolks of repressive religion have a natural advantage.(of course rabid Gay countries like Ireland went a bit too far with their new independence from the Church )

Despite enormous pressures and constant threat of Catholic inspired wars and Catholic fifth columnists, England managed to give us the industrial revolution, parliaments, law and self determination that served as the nursery for great things like computers and packaged beer.

 

[Value Collector]

Not by law, except in the cases where there may be a threat to society, eg face covering.

.

Agreed, I just want to make sure real threats exist, not imagined threats.

But I would like to see more politicians publicly but politely challenge religious fundamentals and say how they determine the decisions they come to.

I'd like o see the media challenge politicians on their fundamental beliefs and how they influence decisions just so we can see their rationale.

The problem is of course that politicians don't want to upset large voting blocs, so nothing much will change

Totally agree, and that's part of the reason non believers have to stop sitting back feigning respect, because I think the voting blocs that they fear would be upset are a lot smaller than they think.

Every time a religious reason gets given, it needs to be questioned as to what is the secular reasoning, if it can't be justified in a secular way, its invalid.

 

[Value Collector]

As I have said, I don't care what people believe, but I do like people to acknowledge the contributions that were made by Christianity to this country, via our laws and our lives, with our Christian principles.
The sacrifices that were made by the ancestors of this country.
It is called being grateful, something people have forgotten.
As you have stated yourself, VC, that it is there.

The point you miss tink, is that the great things you attribute to Christianity, are secular ideas that just happen to have been done by Christians, pretty much everyone was religious when you go back a few hundred years you can't credit the religion they had for all their achievements.

Otherwise you may as well credit democracy to the Greek Gods. Its strange I have never heard you ask me to respect Zeus, Apollo or Athena for the things they have contributed to society.

 

[Value Collector]

Only buoyed with that confidence would it have made sense to bother investigating the physical world in the first place, or even to develop the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world). [/I]

people have been investigating the physical world since pre history, your catholic centric view of history is laughable.

Do you understand that great thinkers were making great discoveries long before the catholic church?

and as pointed out other non Christian societies were making scientific discoveries.

When Aristarchus discovered the earth was round and that it orbited the sun and that the moon orbited us, the catholic church wasn't going to be around for another thousand years.

Aristarchus of Samos (/ˌærəˈstɑrkəs/; Greek: Ἀρίσταρχος Aristarkhos; c. 310 – c. 230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe with the Earth revolving around it (see Solar system). He was influenced by Philolaus of Croton, but he identified the "central fire" with the Sun, and put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun.[1] As Anaxagoras before him, he also suspected that the stars were just other bodies like the sun. His astronomical ideas were often rejected in favor of the geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy

And he worked all that out without the catholic churches support, its funny though, that discovery would have put him on death row in the catholic system, as Galileo's discoveries nearly got him killed.

Yeah, tink, the catholic church really instilled scientists with confidence.

 

[sydboy007]

That is fine, what I was trying to point out was the orderly design.

It was the church's worldview that insisted the universe was orderly and operated according to certain fixed laws.

Only buoyed with that confidence would it have made sense to bother investigating the physical world in the first place, or even to develop the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world).

Tink,

are you a bible literalist or do you believe most of the stories are metaphors ie do you subscribe to the Ken Ham creationist world view of God creating the world literally in 6 days and that the earth is roughly 6000 years old?



i thoroughly recommend doing some reading about the evolution of morality and how it got humans to where they are now.

 

[Tink]

It doesn't matter what I am, Syd.

It is called Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Conscience, which is slowly being closed down in this country, and in the West in general.
....and it doesn't have to come from a Christian, even though we seem to be the most persecuted.

We have a lot of Champions of Freedom of Speech calling out, saying the same.

I thought we lived in Australia, not North Korea, where they have stopped a pro-lifer come in to talk.

 

[Tisme]

Tink,

are you a bible literalist or do you believe most of the stories are metaphors ie do you subscribe to the Ken Ham creationist world view of God creating the world literally in 6 days and that the earth is roughly 6000 years old?

.

Do you know anyone who is 6000 years old to prove the earth is 6k less seven days old?

Why are you guys attacking Tink? I would have thought the hiding you've been getting from Rumpole would have subdued your desires to pick fights. :

 

[SirRumpole]

Do you know anyone who is 6000 years old to prove the earth is 6k less seven days old?

Why are you guys attacking Tink? I would have thought the hiding you've been getting from Rumpole would have subdued your desires to pick fights. :

Low hanging fruit